Fallout New Vegas

Gameplay and Strategy Discussion (184 comments)

  1. naugrim04
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    How do you survive in DUST? Post discussions of tactics and strategy here.
    1. mikeboydus
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      I used some helpful mods to assist in survival, nothing too extreme.

      Here's a list of some helpful survival suggestions:

      Homemade Gas Energy Cell Charger by Keleigh3000
      http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/52579/?

      Helios Jr Portable Solar Energy Cell Charger by Keleigh3000
      http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/51411/?

      Med-Tek Port-a-Doc - A Portable Infirmary by Keleigh3000
      http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/50942/?

      NCRA Field Reloading Kits by Keleigh3000
      http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/50834/?

      Super Tool Kit by Snap-Off by Keleigh3000
      http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/46085/?

      Med-Tek Trauma Kit - A Medical Mod for Crippled and Injured Body Parts by EdisLeado
      http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/54895/?

      Craft-O-Matic Suite - Portable Workbench - Reloading Bench - Cooking Tools by EdisLeado
      http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/50430/?

      US pup tent by Ajax120
      http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/43116/?

      NPCs Travel by skyorange
      http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/54107/?
      This one is especially useful. It adds some travelling merchants and doctors. Make sure to go into MCM though and change the travelers to allied or they will try to kill you.

    2. deleted20031744
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      I use godmode...
    3. naugrim04
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      That's lame, but technically a very effective survival method.
    4. nobitanio
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      @Dmoon135
      LOL
      good point...and for losing the WHOLE point of the mod too.
    5. EpicDonutGuy
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      JNF Portable Camping Equipment has helped me a ton.
      (http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/35151/?)

      Effective lore-friendly not overpowered camping kit that lets you take what you need from the pack and keep it with you.
      Personally I only take the sniper nest, tent, sandbags, bed, and campfire but that's just me.

      (http://www.nexusmods.com/newvegas/mods/57028/?0
      This shotgun that spawns in Doc's house has saved me a couple of times. Kind of cheating, I know, but I got little to no ammunition for it when I picked it up, and I didn't take the mods either. I figure it's pretty well deserved considering the hell I went through to reach Goodsprings.
    6. danuis
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      No mods but dust, I just do the same as any other hardcore game. Sneak across the wasteland; eat and drink in solitude, drop everything I don't need - and I mean everything I don't need - irradiated food; irradiated drink, weapons that I can't use to repair others, drugs I don't need, etc. I feel that too many people just hoard stuff. I'll see how far I can get but it's working so far.
    7. DjSkee
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      I raid camps with my band of hired mercenaries, always keep 5-6 men. Equip them all the best armor and weapons I find in my travels. Fallen comrades replaced by other mercs I meet along the way.

      R.I.P. Settler 1&2, Local, mercenary 1&2 and last but not least, NCR Deserter he was the best.... )';
    8. henyo10
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      @DjSkee

      How do you recruit a party?
    9. User_20822974
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      I turn off Hardcore mode.
    10. snackercakes
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      Mods. Lots and lots of other mods. Including Pn, Fook and convergence for the 2 plus eve, wme and wmx and cp for those and several more

      If i knew how to spoiler tag id post my load order its at 102 i believe. lol
    11. golieth
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      First I did keep all the goodies from the various pre-sale versions, so I had the grenade launcher and canteen, etc. to start with. I didn't use hardcore mode, since that kind of management is far too disruptive for me. If you do, then your biggest issue will be getting enough water, I think.
      I started off going far left past the little lake and took out the guys at the shack. that provided a lot of equipment that I needed later.

      Knowing that ammo would be rare, I initially kept my hand to hand combat as high as my guns. Most of the survivors are weak and not too armored so the bladed cleaver was very serviceable. I would never use guns if I was opposed by a single or pair of hand to hand fighters. I loved to find tribals because their looted spears are one hit decapitation wonders. Guns are for groups of opponents.

      Used the tunneler mod to make tunnelers non-aggressive after a certain number of kills. Killing them just becomes tedious after a while.

      Best way to fight with guns is to attack and get around a corner. Shoot when they round the corner. 95% head shot almost always.

      Preferred the marksman carbine and the 10mm handgun since I found lots of ammo for it.

      Used Ranger armor but it is hard to find more to repair it.

      Stay away from radioactive areas. Drink lots of beer. Only good thing about tunnelers is they carry cave fungus. Don't want to think about where I pried that off their bodies.

      If you find a bed, use it. better than getting rads from eating or drinking. Don't be afraid to fall back to a bed. Lots of times I used that bed as base and explored around from it.

      best place to find ammo and equipment is on other surivors. Since they all want to kill you, no guilt.

      I used the early morning perk and would wait 18 hours to get the bonus's back. Most perks have a minus to offset the plus. Especially important since you will probably be using the backpack that eats agility.

      Probably should be breaking down the shot gun shells so I can re-load other rounds.

      Finally, I did add a custom companion, Willow. She doesn't provide any benefits since cooking and trade is pretty rare, but she has the same laser spotting ability that all the npc's have regardless of light, smoke, or cover. So lots of times I got a heads up of an attack long before I would have seen it otherwise. Also her banter is pleasant.

      So as far as mods: kept the bonus equipment from my normal FNV and dlc set up. Tunneler fear mod. No owned mod. Custom Companion. That's pretty much it. Keep thinking about adding a bedroll so I can sleep anywhere.


    12. golieth
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      I also used the perk that makes you immune to drug addiction. I've never used more drugs. I think I'm near the end and I'm only about level 3 so that 30 level cap isn't a problem.
    13. ir0nf1st924
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      One strategy that has worked for me is to use the Brotherhood Outcast trait (I can't remember what mod it's from, a quick Google search will give you the answer). It gives you a full set of t45d outcast armor and a laser rifle right from the beginning. With PN and a mod called Technology Overhaul, you're basically a walking tank. I also use the mod Powered Power Armor, which makes t45d need recharging. Enclave armor and t51b run on inexhaustible nuclear energy. Just use ItemBrowser to give yourself a ceramic ultracapacitor to give your armor a full charge, then, for gameplay reasons, drop the armor when you deplete the energy. That should give you a good start.
    14. Keeping my head low and avoiding towns (I know I sacrified on the loot,but the risk of dying and losing sanity wasn't worth it,but I got a Brush Gun with a weapon mod on a survivor,so I was set),sneaked into Camp Golf,got the key,fought ghouls in Freeside,went trought Vegas,found a key to the Monorail,went to McCarran,fought ghouls and NCR there,went to the Vertibird,got to Sierra Madre,fought with the Ghosts and finally escaped to LA
    15. golieth
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      Oh, its level 10. Well that's a problem if you want more that 2 skills at max. If I had a choice now, I'd pick guns and lockpicking. stealth never seemed to make a diffrence. same for repair. I'd use feats to tag them but otherwise I think I pretty much put my improvements into stat rises. Most feats have been changed to give both pluses and minuses.
    16. golieth
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      Most enemies have little to no armor (ghouls surprisingly have pretty good armor) so even low caliber weapons are effective

      It is best to attack the ghouls at a distance as they are usually very radioactive.

      I've finished the game and ended up being quite happy that I took perk that gave me a +2 to all my stats in the morning, made me immune to drug addition, and capped my level at 10. I definitely didn't use enough drugs.

      Taking the perk that allows you to copy skill books at workbenches (turns damaged books into blank books that you use with wonderglue to make copies of the skill books in your inventory. Then you only need to get your effective lockpicking skill up to 90 to beat those 100 lockpicking tasks.

      The outside of skill books, the only thing that I found worth making at workbenches was weapon repair kits. The hardest part to find was duct tape so if you do, hold onto any duct tape you can find. Hammers seemed to be the second most difficult to find.

      Tunnelers carry cave fungus in their inventory which both heals and reduced rads.

      I carried far too many weapons. Preferred was the marksman carbine, the makeshift sniper rifle, and the 10 mm pistol. the tribal throwing spears (melee 25) were a very useful method of conserving ammo and usually decapitate.

      I always tried to fall back to a bed and rest when injured instead of using food that caused rads or spent stimpacks.

      Make sure you take enough agility. The largest backpack (carry up to about 110 lbs) has a -3 agl modifier

      If you are grinding for levels and you don't have hardcore mode on, you should use melee weapons as they don't use ammo. and fall back to a bed as soon as you get hurt. That maximizes your exp to weapon damage. Just a guess but in the early game try nipton for frequent spawns. It has lots of houses with beds and I found lots of baddies respawning.
    17. Paralyzer
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      Stealth and a bunch of weapons. I keep a 12ga, a 20ga shotgun along with an AK-74, a .44 and a .357 revolver. Also a homemade crossbow.
      Also went to Hoover Dam and got the Stealth Suit. It took a LOT of time to sneak past the NCR soldiers. DIdn't help that I had no knowledge of the suit's exact location.
    18. Mandrick02
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      I got the courier companion with me, we both got a large backpack but still limited in capacity: I have 10 strength for 105 lbs capacity +25 lbs from the Wasteland looter... The Courier got a T-45B power armour I got from two dead BoS within a centaur crater. My game is pretty balanced because I've installed a save restriction mod that only allow me to save while sitting on a chair and only out of combat. Understone is my main place, I just found the Dust player home, I also got the key to the Land of Mo-Tel room. I got a lot of purified water by giving 10 scrap metal to an npc at understone. But the carrying capacity is what matter the most because you don't really how much you should take before leaving to explore, relatively you don't know much you could get from outside. We are doing pretty good, dying here and there, my courier has gotten pretty weak right now because he got easily butchered in melee, it's either the enemies or either us to die during fight. I'm using a makeshift rifle or a makeshift assault rifle followed by the makeshift talent perk allowing me to deal more damages with all makeshift weapons. If I complete this playthrough, I will try one without Understone and dust player home, only me and the world of Dust, I can imagine how it will be to sleep somewhere nowhere on the map during exploration, limited by carrying capacity with makeshift weapon or tribal weaponry like tomahawk and throwing spear (these are pretty effective though, at least when you manage to hit your target in the head and I use vats for that).

      Sometimes my game crash and with nvac it's specified that the crash come from a syntax error on the Form ID of Arcade Gannon and Boone. Still didn't find an answer. The crash happen a lot whenever I'm in the sewer and I die, it crashes when I want to load a save at this moment.

      Here is kind of my modlist, I took inspiration from it: https://loadorderlibrary.com/lists/dust
    19. laclongquan
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      The most major strategy would be: identify nest of cannibals, and build bases of operation  around them
      1. Cannibals can be killed without worry about karma, a major consideration. I have quite simply abandoned farming hunters and survivors because you just dont know when you get punished with karma loss. 
      2. Cannibals general centralized into nests which can do wonder for planning and collecting loots back to safe base.
      For example:

      • Sloan aka Quarryville can be main farming target for Shack7, Jean Sky Diving shack. This base also can be one to launch ops into Primm though a bit far.
      • Primm and Nipton can be farmed from Prospectors Den
      • Mojave Outpost can be farmed from Nipton Road General Store.
      etc...
    20. FalloutLuveree
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      You can hire mercs?
    21. laclongquan
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      They used the mods that allow hiring Courier or other possible NPCs.
  2. EnterTheNoid
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    How can I sort out rads when Im almost at 1000 and around the freeside/strip ? I cant move at all without getting killed by rads and I have no booze and ive only ever found 3 radaways so far.
    1. EnterTheNoid
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      I dont wanna have to use consoles too give myself some radaways because i feel like its unfair but its honestly looking like the only option
    2. Mandrick02
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      Lol how did you end up in such situation?
    3. laclongquan
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      My guess is he letting too many ghouls get a hit in. Ghoul hit radiatedly, so even if it doesnt hurt, you still pay for it with rad-reducing supplies.

      Strategy for Vault 34 and Freeside:
      - Rad resistance all the way up.You think you going to explore this area in one go? You might need to today physican first (+med) then use several dose of radx, for 1200s upward. Experimental RadX for this once, if you can spare healing supplies to heal HP loss.
      - Radaway at the ready. 10+ at the very least. Also dont heal at 200+, but start at 400+, with today physician first to +med. That way you dont overspending radaway, since you are going to need every last dose of that.
      - In some particular circumstance (lacking radx), I even wear (advanced) rad suit.
      - DONT let ghouls into melee range. If you are not good enough to sniping down a bunch of them at a street-length range, you will pay for it with rad-reducing supplies.
  3. Owlet78
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    Is the detonator a random drop like the C4-s, or does it have a fixed location? I've found a broken detonator in a destoryed camp in Lake Mead, but I don't think that's the proper one.
    1. naugrim04
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      It may have one or two fixed locations. If it is present it's very rare. The broken detonator is, as its name suggests, not functional.
    2. Ethreon
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      I found two so far, and left one where it was since I don't care to leave NV.
    3. Mandrick02
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      Recently I was into lake mead canyon to go recruit the Courier and I found this detonator, I picked it, read a letter at the feet of a chair just close by and suddenly big boom, everything exploded and I could read on the sand just before the explosion f*#@ NCR drawn with the weapons of the dead NCR.
  4. Derpityderp16
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    How to get out of what's left of the Mojave wasteland alive, sane, and addicted to a hand full of drinks and maybe a few chems.

    1: max out swift learner as soon as possible so you can get as much XP as possible
    2: collect all the hammers since Hammer+crafting kit=throwing spearsThrowing spears+alive bad guy body part=loot
    3: get to goodspring for lots of food, i usually leave goodspings with roughly 40 pounds of dog meat!
    4: BEER! get as much beer and wine as possible since they decrease thirst unlike the other drinks
    5: get to the vegas area,getting there threw goodspring area has tunnelers and tribals and the way threw the novac area is full of ghouls and ncr with big guns and power armor(pick your way of death m8 )
    6: get to camp golf: strip key and rad free water pool
    7: get 100 lock pick to get into inner area of freeside
    8: get a scoped rifle( marksmen carbine is best)
    9: get into freeside and get to stip witha s little rads as possible with lots of stims of healing powder
    10: run into gomorrah and kill all the cloud people
    11: get to tops threw back alley
    12; get to the elevators and get in the hatch to the vault 21
    13: get to sign making place threw deep under ground part of vault 21 by going threw elevator shaft
    14: go outside and raid the ncr embassy for guns, ammo, lore if you want it, and monorail key(important)
    15: go threw the gate and RUN FOR THE MONORAIL STATION AND HOPE YOU DON'T DIE FROM RADS, GHOULS, OR FROM A POT SHOT FROM AN NCR MP OR CLOUD PERSON
    16: take monorail to camp mccarran
    17: go to the airfeild and take the vertabird
    18: after you get your s*** together run for the square and loot the corpse that isn't a skeleton
    19: run back in the direction you came from and loot for a locked sewer grate
    20: run threw sewer since the ghost don't run this is the easiest part if you don't get crippeled form the gas bombs
    21: run right to the long tunnel to a small intersection and turn right twice into another hallway
    22: run to ladder
    23: look up into the clear blue sky for the first time in your play threw and take a moment to realize that you beat this mod with the hardest ending (in my opinion)
    1. Mandrick02
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      Can you do this with save restrictions mod that only allows you to save while sitting on a chair? Lol I'm sadistic.
  5. Mandrick02
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    So I got the courier as a companion, I kill NCR and cannibals mostly, and I take all the stuff back to understone and keep it in dresser. That's how I play, I explore, discover, loot, go back to understone and then again... The courier is pretty helpful to distract enemies and very good at shooting but he wastes a lot of ammo so I only give him few when I really need him to help kill enemies. I also have to take care of him by not letting him die because as fast as he can kill, as fast as he can die too and I can remember all the time he got butchered by enemies so I had to load a save back. About saves, I use save restrictions mod that disallow me to save during combat by only allowing me to save when I'm sat on a chair.... Yeah pretty hardcore, now I can feel the tension to lose everything I got by getting killed by a random guy out of nowhere with assault rifle... I found a Wasteland looter armour which gives me +25 lbs and large backpack +35... Can't play without both of them... The courier also wear a large backpack and T-45b Power armour... I'm using makeshift rifle with the makeshift talent perk that increases damage with all makeshift weapons. I cleaned camp gold this way it was pretty easy and hard at the same time but got skills lol (I was sniping them from the lake, close to a chair so I could save anytime lol)... Very good experience.
  6. Bob69Joe
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    Yo, why's all the npcs keep taking out their weapons and putting them away, like three times exactly, before they attack?
    _
    Actually, I see tribals doing it, but maybe it's a melee thing.
    1. Xenmas021
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      Hey, I'm over a year late, but the tribals are neutral and are telling you to keep your distance. Killing neutral NPC's like that (even if they aggro you first) reduces your sanity. Still, watch out for unique tribals (like the Tribal Chieftain) because they will immediately aggro you and they also make nearby tribals aggro you. It's best to take those priority tribals out from a distance.
    2. laclongquan
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      More like warning for us to holster weapons and get away. After 5 or 6 anim like that they will attack. If weapons out, even quicker.

      Example is the ncr vs tribals north of goodsprings.  if they some how kill all the ncr, the most likely survivor is the one on the cliff. That one hesitate long enough that pc can run past that site out of his range
  7. Merman1895
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    Hi all, I'm loving the mod so far but do you know if the unarmed special attacks are available and how to get them? Thanks.
  8. Asubarnipal
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    A
  9. RogerCarmack
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    It seems like I've come across some kind of a bug :o I've been playing the game for a couple days now, and out of nowhere my alcohol started GIVING me radiation instead of removing it. No idea how this happened
  10. mrwhitemc
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    Hey, I just bootcamped windows onto my iMac so I can play New Vegas again with Dust as I've NEVER played it, and as I love the franchise and this game in particular I thought id be a fool to miss out on this experience. I played through about 7 hours last night before realising that I had a bug at the start...
    See, it says you're supposed to start in a Fort with multiple exits to multiple starting points, with a quest telling you to escape the Mojave.
    Every time I start a new game, I end up in a safehouse with a grenade launcher and a quest called 'an old loop' telling me to investigate the happy trials signal.
    I realise that this is the start in an old version of the mod, minus the quest I have.. I imagine the quest is something later down the line, almost like my game has skipped a few bits.. I have the gog version of the game, not many mods installed just these..

    Better New Vegas
    More Perks
    EVE ALL DLC
    Ammo crafting schematics
    Dynamic hardcore w sleep
    NPCs travel
    Understone
    Dust 2.0
    Dust Courier Companion
    Tunnler nerf (yeah b1t*h about it, I hate them already)
    More perks update

    In that order, if ive butchered the load order, my bad, I have only modded Xbox and PS4 versions of Fallout 4 in the past.
    Love the mod so far, just don't want to keep getting into it if I'm missing something yano.

    Thanks (: