Game Day: 10 Beginner Tips for Fallout 4

1. Hold down TAB to turn on a flashlight. It's the color of your PIP-Boy text, so make your PIP-Boy bright white in the settings to get the brightest flashlight.


2. I only have 4 must-have game mods right now: Better Item Sorting and Better Weapon / Armor Sorting (which add some prefix / suffix logic to the atrocious inventory pages), Better Map with Visible Roads (to increase the overland map usefulness from 20% to about 24%), and No Dot Dot Dot (which stops truncating item names in the UI and shrinks the font so you can see the whole name at once). I use the Nexus Mod Manager (also used in Skyrim) to download and keep them updated.


3. If you need a scrap component to craft something, you can use the "Tag for Search" feature. This will make a little magnifying glass icon appear next to anything in the world with that component. I tend to keep copper, oil, screws, gears, and circuitry tagged all of the time.


4. Tapping your action key will skip through the long typing introduction on Hacking terminals.


5. When trying to get walls and floors to line up in Settlement Building mode, scrolling the mouse wheel will move the item further or closer to you.


6. You can equip your followers and settlers with items by trading with them. An extra option will appear for equipping vs. just carrying.


7. The Armorer and Gun Nut perks aren't critical, even if you want to improve your gear. Instead, find armor in the wild that has the right mods and remove them at your Workshop. Then, you can re-attach them to your own gear without needing the perks.


8. The Local Leader perk is really only worth it if you are obsessed with settlement building. If you don't mind having just one settlement, put those extra Charisma points elsewhere -- settlements are fun but get tedious within the limitations of the system, and the game's dialogue options aren't good enough to warrant a high Charisma value.


9. Here is a printable checklist of collectible magazines and bobbleheads I modified from other Internet sources to eliminate spoilers. While I don't actively use it to seek out collectibles, I do like to double-check the list after I've cleared a location to make sure I don't have to come back later. Some items require progress in main story quests, so if you haven't found the items yet, check if there's a non-functioning elevator or door that suggests that you need to return later during a quest.


10. Here is my current build, set up for a more shoot-y experience. I travel without companions, sneak around sniping things with a legendary hunting rifle that has a fast reload rate, and then use my plasma-infused 10mm with VATS for up-close combat.