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A lot of people have been complaining about how little info Bethesda has provided about how things work in Fallout 4.
This page lists little known facts ("LKF") which even experienced players may not be aware of.
Some people will scoff at an item and say "I knew that!" Right. These are "little known", not "unknown".
Contents:
- Length of the Well Rested bonus: Most people know that when you sleep in a bed which you own or build, you get a Well Rested bonus of 10% to any XP you earn, so you should always take a 1-hour nap (or longer, if you wish; the length doesn't matter) before doing crafting or building a settlement, both of which generate a lot of XP. But the LKF is that the effect lasts 6 hours (F4 time, of course), so nap every six hours if you are doing a long building session.
A lot of commenters online are saying the effect lasts 8 hours, but some are also saying you have to sleep for 8 hours to get it, but that is apparently just in Survival Mode.
Also, in earlier Fallouts, if you came across a bed while exploring which you could sleep in, but you did not "own" the bed, sleeping in it would repair your health, but not give the XP bonus; only a bed in your home base or in a room you rented would provide the XP bonus. An exception in F4 is that all beds in settlements which you build do give the bonus.
- Fast Travel takes lots of F4 time: (despite the misleading name) It takes about 6 hours in F4 time to "Fast Travel" from Sanctuary to Diamond City (e.g.: you leave at 3 p.m. and arrive at 9 p.m.), but it takes over 7 hours to travel back!? Either way, it doesn't help to sleep before traveling when a trip is six hours or more because the XP bonus effect of sleeping will have worn off before you can do anything to earn XP. So it helps to have an owned bed in or near Diamond City.
- Purifiers do not do anything that basic Water Pumps can't do, but Purifiers (along with their required generators, which pumps don't need) cost more to make. See Building for an analysis.
- Likewise, a bunch of basic turrets does as much damage as the costliest Missile Turret, it just takes more of them, but the total cost (in terms of scarce components needed) to reach, say, 100 Defense points with basic turrets is much less than 100 points from Missile Turrets (and their required generators).
- Walls around settlements do not increase Defense points (and thus don't increase Happiness), and they are useless because attackers can and do spawn inside the walls. Not only that, but settlers tend to run outside the walls to fight whenever something attacks. If you really want to help them, equip the settlers with missile launchers or other powerful weapons. You only need to give them 1 piece of ammo and they spawn what they need.
- Most "luxury" items you Build don't increase Happiness: Players put a lot of things into their settlements trying to increase Happiness, but most of them don't. For example, the cheapest sleeping bag is just as good in creating Happiness as the costliest bed in F4. Things that help: high (around 100) Defense points, beds with roofs overhead, things to keep settlers occupied (tending to crops, stores, crafting benches, etc.), and of course at least 1 bed, 1 unit of food and of water per settler, and oddly enough, your presence in the settlement.
- Shared inventory from one settlement doesn't show in other settlements' workbenches. When you establish a supply line between multiple settlements, you only see the shared supplies when in the Building mode when you go to build an item and it shows the supplies available. If you look at a settlement's inventory in a workbench, you will only see that settlement's inventory, not the shared supplies available.
- Aids and Mods are shared. I played through the entire game convinced that the only inventory class which could be shared was Junk, thus something like food and water could not be shared because they are Aids. The source of confusion for this is that shared food and water don't show up in a linked settlement's workbench, but then as just stated above, nothing shared from another settlement shows up until you try to use it to build OR CRAFT something.
But say that you want to make Vegetable Starch (which is Adhesive) at a new settlement but don't have corn and/or mutfruit and/or tatos in either your Pip-Boy inventory or the new settlement's Cooking Station inventory. If one (or more) of the settlements sharing with the new one does have those items, they will show up when you go to make the Vegetable Starch (or whatever).
So Aids and Mods can be shared in addition to Junk. Again, you won't see them in other settlements' workbenches, but they will be there when you Craft something. Unfortunately, you cannot share items which you have Stored in the Build mode. For example, if you Store a turret instead of Scrapping it in one settlement, it can only be reused in the same settlement.
I don't consider the following "little known," but a lot of people have asked if there is some advantage or need to scrap the Junk in the workbench's inventory by taking it from inventory, dropping it on the ground, and scrapping it. The answer is no. If, say, steel is needed, a steel item in Junk will be automatically scrapped to get it.
That being said, one mod that I use is Portable Junk Scrapper. This makes it easier to see the actual components you have available.
- Sending multiple Provisioners from the same settlement reduces settlers available to tend crops and stores in that settlement. This should be obvious, but seems to be ignored in online videos and posts, one of which actually stated that ALL Provisioners should be sent from the same settlement.
But say that you have sent 6 people from Sanctuary to other settlements, plus at least half of the original 4 settlers are useless, you now have 8+ people shown as residents of Sanctuary who can't be assigned to tend crops, stores, etc. New settlement routes should be daisy-chained, not sent from the same place.
- Dismissing Dogmeat to Sanctuary (or any other particular settlement) may not be possible. Companions count as residents of the settlement to which you dismiss them, so if Sanctuary is your home base and it has reached its maximum already and you want to dismiss Dogmeat back there and haven't done so previously, you can't.
If you can and DO dismiss Dogmeat to Sanctuary, that's one more non-working "resident" to account for. The same limit applies to sending other Companions, but at least when you do send them to a settlement, they can be put to work there. If you come across the Vault-Tec guy (who signed you up for Vault 111) and send him back to Sanctuary, he cannot be put to work.
- A Two Shot legendary affix doesn't double a weapon's damage. It only adds the base damage of the gun into an additional projectile. For example: a Two Shot sniper rifle would only do 158 + 37 (base damage of a hunting rifle) for a total of 195, and at longer ranges the second bullet may not hit because it has reduced accuracy. The Instigating legendary affix does do double damage and is far more reliable because all the damage comes from a single projectile instead of two; however, trying to obtain a particular instigating weapon can be extremely difficult (even using loot locking) and only possible at high levels.
- It does no good to have more than 1 store of any one type in the same settlement. For example, if you have two General stores and get all of the cash one has by selling it excess gear you have picked up, then if you immediately go to the 2nd store, it will also be out of cash, even if you checked beforehand and it had its full allotment of cash.
Likewise, if you buy all of one type of Junk from one General store, then the second General store will also be out of the same junk. With this being the case, it would seem that two stores of the same type cannot sell any more in total than just one store could, yet it cost quite a bit in both caps and supplies to create each store.
- You can Fast Travel from inside some buildings in F4 which is something you could not do in earlier Fallouts. I first noticed that I could fast travel from inside a house I had built for myself in Sanctuary and thought it was because it wasn't an already existing building. But it turns out that there are other places you can fast travel from while inside, such as the Railroad HQ. This should have been more obvious to me than it was because when you fast travel to Railroad HQ, you appear inside it.
There is a mod that purports to let you fast travel from inside of any building, cave, etc., and it usually works, but there are exceptions. When it works, it sure beats working your was out.
- Power Armor removes SPECIAL bonuses from gear worn under it. Say that your Charisma is 6 and you put on a suit with +2 charisma, a hat with +1, and a pair of glasses with +1. Look at Stats in your Pip-Boy and your charisma will be 10. Now put on Power Armor and Stats shows charisma as being back down to 6.
This info seems to be better known now then when the above was written, but now power armor also removes the damage resistances of gear worn beneath it, including the Hazmat suit. That means that if you wear power armor over a Hazmat suit when you go to the Glowing Sea, you don't get the protection of the Hazmat suit. Likewise, if you always wear power armor, there is no point in spending time and money to get Ballistic Weave since such gear will lose its protection when worn under power armor. It's possible that it may have always been this way, but I checked it at one time and would swear that it used to be additive. Whatever the case, it doesn't do it now.
- Little known ways of earning XP in your daily life: Everyone knows (or should) that sleeping gives and XP bonus for a time, but how many walkthrough videos do you see where the character takes a nap before building a settlement, repairing power armor, or doing crafting? I've never seen a one.
Picking up loot also earns XP, which I've never seen nor heard mentioned on Youtube. Since F4 doesn't show how much you earn for things like looting or killing small things like radroaches, there is no way to know how much you earn (the only way I even became aware that looting was earning XP was that more than once I have leveled up while in the middle of looting), but even if it is very small, it is not insignificant because of the high volume of items which you will be looting, especially early in the game, so take the nap first if you can.
When possible, take a nap and change into your INT-increasing gear before turning in missions. This can give you a significant amount of extra XP, even without the nap.
- Fusion Cores are ammo. This, in itself, is no big deal, but because they are classified as ammo, if you get the Scrounger perks which gives you much more found ammo, you will find more fusion cores.
- Buddy the (beer) Robot improves other drinks too. Send him to one of your settlements to keep him. Then you can place other drinks such as Quantum and regular Nuka Cola inside him to make them ice cold for a 50% increase in the amount of HP received.
- Reduce found Power Armor weight to 0 for carrying it.
If you find power armor when you are already wearing some, you can take the components out of the frame to carry home, but it normally weighs a lot. If you attack the power armor enough to reduce its "health" to zero, its weight also becomes zero. Then you can either take it to a vendor and sell it as-is, or repair it when you get back home and put it into a spare frame.to display.
- The map's pointer can be misleading. If you bring up the PipBoy's map to see where you are, you might assume you are at the tip of the map's pointer, which would make the most sense. In fact, if you place a map marker, it will be placed at that point, but that is not where you actually are. Your actual position is about 1/3rd of the way down the pointer from the tip. You can verify this by noting where the tip is, then facing the opposite direction without otherwise moving and noting the pointer tip's new location.
One example of how this can throw you off is if you are looking for the hubflower locations marked on the (A-K,1-5) map. If you put the pointer tip where the map marker is supposed to be, you will be off a little and the bushes can sometimes be hard to see even when they are nearby.
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