Fallout New Vegas: Getting Started & General TipsThis walk-through assumes you have the DLCs and also that you have played FONV before. If not, in 2022 Amazon is selling the set (Ultimate Edition) for under $20. Starting a game:FONV was released in 2010. It was one of my all-time favorite games. But eventually I burned myself out on it and didn’t play it for several years. When I got an Xbox X in 2022 and found that I could put all my old XBox-360 games on it, I got interested in playing them again, including this one. When I got into it, I discovered that I had forgotten all the best strategies that had once been second nature to me. Fortunately, I had written all these how-to pages which helped me get going again. The primary purpose of these documents is to get the best start possible, which means getting your level and caps up quickly. The walkthrough provided here goes through doing the McCarren missions and the New Vegas missions. After that, you have to decide how you want to play the game. These docs are aimed at giving you information you may not otherwise find in Youtube videos and are for the benefit of people wanting to play a Normal game. In my opinion, Hardcore is not that hard, it is just an unpleasant nuisance, so the walkthrough in these docs is not for playing Hardcore. Here we go --
For example, one very popular walkthrough on Youtube starts by making Strength and Intelligence both 7. However, in GS, there is absolutely no reason to have Strength higher than 4 and then if you wish, raise it up for the rest of the game when you leave GS. On the other hand, in our walkthrough, the goal is to level up as much as possible before leaving GS and one part of accomplishing that is to raise Intelligence to the max. So take the 3 points we saved by lowering Strength from 7 to 4 and use it to raise Intelligence from 7 to 10. If you follow the Walkthrough, you should be at level 3 when you leave GS and should reach level 4 before entering Lonesome Road. Before doing the missions around Novac (except Boone's), The Walkthrough will get you equipped with gear like a Sniper Rifle and a Missile Launcher, three implants, and over 30000 caps. (See Level 13 Specs for pictures. If you somehow came straight to this page without going through the FONV Index page, I suggest going to the Index and reading various docs before starting the walkthrough. Karma (supposedly) has no effect on game play. In one game, I was stealing absolutely everything and by level 4, noticed that my Karma was something like Evil Incarnate. So I started another game and stole only important things (e.g.: Skill books and magazines) and things I really needed, and I got a Very Good karma, but if it mattered at all, I could not detect it. On the other hand, loot is so plentiful that not stealing marked items (those with red captions) didn’t seem to hurt my cash position. Either way, you soon have more than you can spend and more loot than you can find buyers for. You can even kill characters without it affecting gameplay most of the time, although doing so may turn a faction against you. And other characters may even attack you, so save first. 2022 Karma Update: I have always gone to Sloan shortly after leaving Goodsprings because some skill books are laying around, even though you have to steal them. In fact, steal a skill book that is in the barracks and you will be caught by an old man who is almost always in there. So I would just kill him first, as well as a guy in the building with the work benches. Since nobody was around at the time, there was actually no way for anyone to know that I did it. But in 2022, I was roaming a few hours after that and was approached by a group of NCR soldiers saying that they knew what I had done and that I had 3 days to make things right or they would come get me. I said okay and forgot about it until I got to Novac and tried to do a mission for Boone and to get him to be my companion. He said that any enemy of the NCR was an enemy of his and refused to even talk to me. I soon realized that a lot of other missions that I normally do are dependent on working with the NCR, so the game was basically ruined for me now. So I reloaded the game on my way to Sloan and didn’t kill anyone. It turned out that the old man who caught me trying to steal a skill book just put it in his pocket and I was able to pickpocket it from him with no trouble. The best approach is to click and carry the book somewhere behind him, drop it, and when he kneels back down, pick it up. The important thing is to save first. Aug.2025 Update: I got tired of the old man catching me when he had his back turned to me, so I tried this work-around: I walk up to the book, hit A (on Xbox) to take it and immediately bring up the backpack and click on the book to use it. The old man can't take it back because it's gone. Plan ahead when allocating level-up points. Of course, to do so, you have to know how many points are going to be needed in specific Skills. These are highlighted in the play-through checklist as well as on the Skill Requirements page. For example, Doc has a broken submachine gun in his house. It is the most important weapon you can get early in the game and unlike all other types of weapons, you will be using it for a long time. Yet many Youtube gurus do not get Repair up to 25 in their setup and thus can’t repair and take the weapon. You could come back later for it after leveling up, but then you will not have it for Sunny's Tutorial. Important Junk to Keep: You'll need 2 Sensors (and other more common parts) to repair ED-E in Primm. If you do the Lonesome Road detour (below), you’ll find plenty. Aside from repairing ED-E, I almost always pick them up to sell because they have a pretty good value-to-weight ratio. Duct tape, scrap electronics, scrap metal, Wonderglue, and wrenches should not be left behind, discarded, or sold. These are used to build Weapon Repair Kits. The WRK parts are cheap and while duct tape is not super abundant, you can find enough laying around and from merchants to make a few dozen WRKs. This will be a lot more than you personally need to improve the condition (and damage and value) of your weapons throughout the game, but you can use them to upgrade found weapons which have a low found value to a value of up to thousands of dollars before selling them. If you follow this walkthrough and go to Lonesome Road and get the add-on for ED-E that lets him repair weapons up to 100%, then you don't really need WRKs. See Repairing Weapons for more info. At level 22, you can get the perk Voracious Reader that lets you convert old books into Skill magazines. It doesn't cost anything to pick up books as you go and store them somewhere, such as in your room in Novac. In the Walkthrough on this site, I had accumulated 200 books by level 13 before doing any of the missions in Novac except Boone's. 200 books can be converted into 100 Skill magazines but that requires 100 Wonderglues. It's going to be hard to get that many. By level 13, I had about 50, but I hadn't been to Repconn yet which has maybe a dozen or two, so it may be possible to get 100 total by level 22. If that is your goal, you can't make any Weapon Repair Kits which also require Wonderglue. That really isn't much of a loss since it's better to use ED-E to repair weapons without needing any supplies. The Courier's Stash loads you up with weapons, armor, Weapon Repair Kits, ammo, and more. If you find that it makes the game too easy, you can go into the Xbox's Settings menu and remove the Courier's Cache from the hard drive. The grenade rifle in the Courier's Stash is particularly useful when fighting Legion troops because even with it plus ED-E and Boone, it can be hard to survive the Legion's random 4-man attacks. But if you survive, you get a lot of high-dollar loot from them and I usually farm them to build up funds. Saving Starting Points: When you start a new game, you can press a button to skip the long intro and go straight to Doc Mitchell’s helping you set your appearance and starting stats, but a better way is to save at points from which you may want to start future games without having to jump through all of Doc's hoops. 1. The first chance you get to save at Doc's is before using the “Vigor Testing” machine to set your SPECIAL points. Before activating the machine, walk around the house and loot everything you can. (You can’t get the free meds from the chemistry set nor repair and take the submachine gun yet since you have not gotten the required Skills yet.) Start by finding the shelves with two first aid boxes and an ammo box on it. While most of the items are the same every time you start the game from scratch, some will vary. I recently started a new game and the first aid boxes and ammo box were empty. I quit and restarted and the next time they had loot in them. That's why you should check them first. It is a little difficult to loot completely at this point because you will not have a Pip-Boy yet and thus, no light. You can go back through the house after you get the Pip-Boy and make sure you didn’t miss anything. I played a couple of dozen times before noticing the hat on the hat rack in the hall. The point of saving after looting and before doing the Vigor Tester is that you can then load that save and change your SPECIALs and not have to go through the chore of looting again. 2. Save again after setting SPECIALs, just before you sit on the sofa. Starting with this save lets you change Tag Skills or Traits without having to go through the SPECIALs (or looting) again when you want to keep the previous SPECIALs. 3. Save as soon as you can after choosing Tag Skills and before Doc asks you about your family history which leads to selecting Traits. This lets you start with the selected SPECIALs and Skills and change Traits without having to go through all the other stuff. When Doc heads for the front door and you are still in your undies, stop him to get your clothes and your Pip-Boy. Talk to Doc again to get up to 60 XP for doing Speech checks. To get the prompt for the first one, your Medical must be 20-29. If it is 30+, you will not get that speech check, but you can still get the next two. If you are under 30 and pass the first check, read the Physicians Today that you looted in order to get your Medical to 30+ for the next two speech checks. I used to always use the Early Riser and Four-Eyes traits because they had the least negative side effects. Since Four-Eyes does not raise your SPECIALs the way Good Natured and Skilled do, I could pass the first check and get that extra 30 XP. But eventually I decided that the trade-off of that versus the extra increase in SPECIALs was not worth it, so now I use Early Bird and Good Natured and don't get the first 30 XP. Next, repair the machine gun and take it, then use the chemistry table to create some chems. Next head to the front door and save before going out. Then in the future, if you want to play a new game using the same specs, you can reload this save. The reason for saving before going out is that going out the door may cause FONV to generate some settings and if you save after that, you may always get the same settings. Finally, go straight to Chet and see if he has the Varmint Rifle scope. If so, save after getting it because it can often be difficult to get. If you have the Courier's Stash, you will have enough stuff to trade for it, but be sure to keep the grenade launcher. If you are lucky enough to get the Scope right away, save so that you can start at that point. See the Goodsprings Looting Guide and the FONV Walkthrough. See the Goodsprings XP page for a list of most of the XP you can get in Goodsprings.
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