Hi everyone, as explained in the title i want to create a guide to help beginners and intermediate players find their way in the world of fallout, the guide is still very much a work in progress but i wanted to just get the first chapter out there for now and see what people think.

If you have any questions regarding the game dont hesitate to ask in the comment section below and please leave a like if the guide helped you out because it helps get more people to take a look.

This chapter is all about you and just how S.P.E.C.I.A.L you are. At the start of the game you're gonna get to allocate your stat points but you should really have a look at the perk chart before you make any decisions because the perks available to you are going to be shaping what your character can and can't do in the long run. You can look up the perks on the fallout wiki and decide what suits the character you want to create but im going to provide a sort of skeleton build i believe any good character should be built on.

Strength: 3
Perception: 3
Endurance: 1
Charisma: 6 (this is very dependant on whether you want to mess around with settlements or not, i recommend putting a 6 in charisma for acces to local leader otherwise you can leave it at 1 i suppose.)
Intelligence: 6
Agility: 1
Luck: 2

Now for the explanation:

Strength: I put 3 points in strength for armorer because being able to mod your own armor is just mandatory in my opinion, using whatever you find on raiders simply wont do.

Perception: Next is 3 in Perception for acces to locksmith, i realize locksmith is a lvl 4 perk but you get acces to the perception bobblehead within the first half hour of the game if you just follow the main quest so you can consider it a 4.

Charisma: Charisma as explained above is sensitive, settlements are very useful for crafting adhesive from farms and other shenanigans like stores near your home base so you dont have to travel every time you want to sell something and having local leader at 2 also allows you to create workbenches in all your settlements so you dont have to stay at sanctuary just because it has 1 of each from the getgo as well as connecting all your settlements up with supply lines(pro tip: sanctuary is a totally passable first homebase, just move all the workbenches scattered around to the house with the settlement workbench and you have a makeshift crafting area).

Intelligence: Intelligence is at 6 because it just has terrific perks: gun nut for modding your own weapons which is mandatory, hacker for getting into those harder terminals for even more sweet loot, scrapper is useful for breaking down weapons and armor into pesky to find components like fiber optics and science for the more high-tech mods like the recon scope and any laser/plasma weapon upgrades.

Agility: The score you put in Agility all depends on what kind of character you want. If youre gonna use full-auto weapons bump it to 2 or if youre playing stealth bump it to 7 for sneak, mister sandman and ninja for example.

Luck: Last but not least is Luck, 2 points are needed here for the scrounger perk because this is hands down the single best perk in the game, get it at level 2 and every time its available afterwards, i cannot stress enough how important stockpiling ammo is, because 1) its ammo 2) it has no weight so its basically weightless loot you can sell for extra caps (ignore fortune finder, waste of a perk) and thats honestly all the reason you need to get this perk end of discussion.

So with my build you keep 6 points (7 if you count the book in your old house, shawn's room under the nightstand) to specialize in whatever you want which i think is plenty but if you need more you can honestly just ignore charisma if you dont care about settlements or higher quest rewards and leave it at 1.

Of course this is assuming you want to go the longest amount of time without having to put perk points into upgrading your special stats which you can do to get acces to even more perks in the long run.

In this section i will be going over all the perks so you have a quick reference for whether you should pick up a perk or not

Strength:
Lvl 1. Iron Fist: a niche perk, if youre doing an unarmed build its mandatory otherwise ignore it.
Lvl 2. Big Leagues: same as iron fist, mandatory in a melee build otherwise you can ignore it.
Lvl 3. Armorer: Mandatory in any build, oh you want a more extensive explanation, ok. You simply wont get by with buying and scavenging armor after the early game so being able to improve your own armor is absolutely amazing.
Lvl 4. Blacksmith: Same as Big Leagues, shines in a melee build, but not really anywhere else.
Lvl 5. Heavy Gunner: You wanna be a big gun totin' badass? This is the perk for you, and if you're dead set on using heavy guns its a pretty necessary perk because the heavy weapons in this game are pretty lackluster honestly.
Lvl 6. Strong back: I have a love/hate relationship with this perk, on one hand i absolutely love it because im a pack rat and all of the things this perk offers are great for getting more loot, but on the other hand it takes a pretty heavy investment of 3 extra points into strength beyond armorer and im not willing to pay that most of the time unless im doing a strength build anyway, so you can decide based on what you want.
Lvl 7. Steady aim: Do you love wasting all of your ammo? get this perk! Honestly you should always aim down sights because you miss way less and ammo is very precious, so this is basically a huge waste of a perk unless u just wanna rock out and kill things haphazardly.
Lvl 8. Basher: Eh, its an ok perk if you wanna get up real close to your enemies but if thats your plan you might as well just be using a melee weapon. (this is a decent perk if you do find yourself bashing a lot in a gun build but if you are consistently getting in people's faces in you are clearly doing something wrong)
Lvl 9. Rooted: i'm not 100% about this perk. 50 damage resistance is not something to sneeze at but having to stand still is quite a burden, you will probably avoid a lot more damage simply by backpedaling and dodging behind cover. The increased unarmed damage is honestly just gravy. Personally i would never pick this perk even in a tank/unarmed build but i'll leave it up to user discretion.
Lvl 10. Pain Train: 10/10 i would get this perk just because of the name and picture, but seriously in a high strength build with a lot of power armor usage i would definitely take this perk. Damage and knockdowns just for sprinting into people is awesome.

Perception:
Lvl 1. Pickpocket: The only reason i would ever take this perk is to reverse pickpocket grenades onto people and unequip their weapons and armor, if that strikes your fancy take it.
Lvl 2. Rifleman: straight up bonuses for semi-auto rifles, use rifles a lot? Get this perk, its as simple as that.
Lvl 3. Awareness: From a metagame standpoint this is a waste of a perk, but if you're new to the game this can be useful for figuring out weaknesses and seeing if an enemy is way too high level to take on at this point in the game.
Lvl 4. Locksmith: This perk is amazing, everyone should have it, sweet loot, end of discussion.
Lvl 5. Demolition Expert: This perk is actually pretty good, it gives more damage, bigger explosions, a preview throwing arc for grandes and even lets you craft better explosives with each rank. Use a lot of grenades and mines? Get this perk.
Lvl 6. Night Person: No, purely the fact that you get night vision all the time while sneaking should turn you off this perk. Want to sneak up on people in broad daylight, NOPE, blinded by night vision. Until a mod comes out that fixes this the entire perk sucks. The first rank isnt worth getting either just because you get bonuses for only half the day and they're not even that good.
Lvl 7. Refractor: 50 energy resistance is allright, but its not worth 4 perk points, just go get better armor, next!
Lvl 8. Sniper: This might seem like a great perk but it's not and here's why: 1. You are never going to run out of breath for steadying your rifle trust me, 2. Knocking your target down only makes it harder to hit if it isn't already dead. and 3. Headshots are extremely easy to get with a sniper rifle if you are hidden you dont need to use vats.
Lvl 9. Penetrator: If you use a lot of vats this is a good perk, thats it, otherwise ignore it.
Lvl 10: Use a lot of low damage and low ap cost weapons in vats? Get this perk, otherwise you know the drill.

Endurance:
Lvl 1. Toughness: In most builds this perk is allright, its not bad, its not absolutely amazing, its practical. 50 damage resistance is nothing to sneeze at and at least this time you won't have to stand still to get it. (i'm looking at you Rooted.)
Lvl 2. Lead Belly: Unless you are role playing a bum in the wasteland dont get this waste of a perk. There is enough food out there without rads.
Lvl 3. Lifegiver: Same as Toughness this is just an all around decent perk, get it if you feel you need it.
Lvl 4. Chem resistant: Its decent if you use a lot of chems and bad if you don't and i will explain why. The reason is that even if you spam chems and get addicted its extremely easy to get rid of by just using addictol or going to a doctor, so if you dont mind doing that ignore this perk.
Lvl 5. Aquaboy/Aquagirl: Good for exploring bodies of water and the second rank is great for stealth characters.
Lvl 6. Rad Resistant: 30 Rad resistance honestly wont make much of a difference on its own so this perk is not worth 3 points when you can instead just 1. Take rad-x, 2. Put on a hazmat suit or 3. Put on power armor.
Lvl 7. Adamantium Skeleton: Now that stimpacks heal all your limbs with 1 use this perk is completely obsolete.
Lvl 8. Cannibal: With the abundant amount of food and stimpacks ripe for the picking this perk is just not needed.
Lvl 9. Ghoulish: This perk doesn't even stop you from actually taking radiation damage, why would you ever get this, next!
Lvl 10. Solar Powered: Pretty decent, despite the fact the bonus only lasts half the day its worth it , because it heals not only your hp ,but your rads too ,as well as giving a decent boost to Strength and Endurance.

Charisma:
Lvl 1. Cap Collector: If you really want to get the most bang for your buck when selling your loot, get this perk, but quite honestly thats just gravy. The only reason i see to get this perk is for the bigger shops in your settlements.
Lvl 2. Lady Killer/Black Widow: Decent damage boost and chance to pacify with the Intimidation perk if playing as a woman since most of the enemies are male, as for the persuasion part just put on some charisma boosting clothes and it becomes obsolete.
Lvl 3. Lone wanderer: I love this perk. Hate stupid companions getting in your way? Get this perk! Its benefits are amazing: Take less damage, more carry weight, deal more damage. (Pro tip: dogmeat doesn't count as a companion so you can take him along and still get all the bonuses from having this perk, neat!)
Lvl 4. Attack Dog: Use dogmeat? Get this perk!
Lvl 5. Animal friend: Ignore this and get Wasteland Whisperer instead.
Lvl 6. Local Leader: If you use settlements, this perk is absolutely awesome otherwise ignore it.
Lvl 7. Party Boy/Girl: Like chem resistant this perk is just not neccesary, its boosts are mediocre, and therefore it is a waste of perk points.
Lvl 8. Inspirational: Use companions? Get this perk!
Lvl 9. Wasteland Whisperer: want to roleplay a pacifist? Get this perk, otherwise ignore it and kill everything for more exp.
Lvl 10. Intimidation: See Wasteland Whisperer above ^.

Intelligence:
Lvl 1. V.A.N.S: Unless you have 0 sense of direction and don't even know how to follow your compas don't get this perk.
Lvl 2. Medic: On any difficulty other than survival this perk is trash, but on survival its gold because healing speed is reduced by a lot the last rank of this perk makes life so much easier, get it when you need it.
Lvl 3. Gun nut: Mandatory on any build but melee/unarmed builds period.
Lvl 4. Hacker: Same as Locksmith, this perk is great, sweet loot, get it.
Lvl 5. Scrapper: this perk is useful for getting some materials like screws and fiber optics if you tinker with weapons and armor a lot.
Lvl 6 Science: A must-have perk for getting any of the high tech upgrades like recon scopes, any laser/plasma weapon upgrades and a lot of power armor upgrades.
Lvl 7 Chems: Allows you to craft better chems and extends their duration, if you're all about chems get this perk. (In the case that you are Chem resistant becomes slightly less useless)
Lvl 8. Robotics expert: Decent in a stealth build for screwing around with any protectrons, assaulttrons or sentry bots.
Lvl 9. Nuclear Physicist: Great perk if you plan on using power armor a lot, and the last rank lets you use fusion cores as grenades which is fun.
Lvl 10. Nerd Rage!: If your health is consistently dropping below 20% you're doing something wrong, its a neat perk, but i would ignore it.

Agility:
Lvl 1. Gunslinger: Use a lot of pistols? Get this perk!
Lvl 2. Commando: Use a lot of full-auto weapons? Get this perk!
Lvl 3. Sneak: This is mandatory for any stealth character end of discussion.
Lvl 4. Mister sandman: If you are playing a stealth character, you're gonna be using silencers and this perk makes them even better, get it.
Lvl 5. Action Boy/Girl: Decent perk, i don't usually find i need it, but if you do you can get it.
Lvl 6. Moving Target: I can see this being useful in a melee build since you have to get close to enemies but otherwise not so much.
Lvl 7. Ninja: Pure gold in stealth builds.
Lvl 8. Quick hands: If you find yourself using a lot of heavy weapons/weapons with small ammo clips this perk is pretty handy, otherwise its not.
Lvl 9. Blitz: Awesome in melee builds if you want to use vats, otherwise it sucks.
Lvl 10. Gun fu: Great in a vats build with a low ap cost weapon like the deliverer.

Luck:
Lvl 1. Fortune Finder: there are better perks to get that will net you even more caps, i wipe my ass with this perk, next!
Lvl 2. Scrounger: Hands down the best perk in the entire game, ammo is precious and if you dont use it you can sell it at any time for extra caps, at later ranks you even start finding fusion cores. Get this at level 2 and every time you can afterwards.
Lvl 3. Bloody Mess: Extra damage is always nice.
Lvl 4. Mysterious Stranger: Useful if you use a lot of vats.
Lvl 5. Idiot Savant: Only get this if you want to get experience quickly and have a low intelligence score, neither of which i recommend.
Lvl 6. Better Criticals: Good in a vats/crit build.
Lvl 7. Critical banker: Also good in a vats/crit build.
Lvl 8. Grim Reaper's sprint: Pretty good in a vats/crit build, are you noticing a trend here?
Lvl 9. Four Leaf Clover: Awesome in a vats/crit build.
Lvl 10. Ricochet: The fact it gets better the lower your health is kind of turns me off, but its still a great perk for vats/crit builds when it does happen.

In this part i will be discussing the different weapons so you can decide which of them works best for you.

Pistols:

10mm pistol: The first gun you recieve in vault 111 with a good balance of stopping power, range, rate of fire and ammo capacity, if you want something that's good in all situations this is you go-to gun.

.44 pistol: This revolver has a lot of stopping power if thats what you're looking for in a sidearm, balanced by its limited ammo capacity. If you want a small handcannon in your pocket this is your gun.

Pipe pistol: I dont know why you would ever use this pistol, you get a 10mm at the start which is better in every way quite honestly, unless you didn't take scrounger and are forced to use this since .38 ammo is literally everywhere.

Pipe bolt-action pistol: Really meh, its not great in any aspect, its damage is outshined by the revolver, its rate of fire is abysmall and its ammo capacity is not even better than the revolver.

Pipe Revolver: Something to use until you can get your hands on an actual revolver, but honestly even the 10mm does more damage than this thing.



Rifles:

Assault rifle: The assault and combat rifles are really similar which makes it hard to rate them but i would say use the assault rifle as a full automatic weapon and the combat rifle as a semi-auto for mid-long range as a battle rifle.

Combat rifle: See above ^

Hunting Rifle: The best weapon to mod into a sniper rifle if you need one, does everything you need it to.

Pipe bolt-action rifle: Use this until you can get your hands on a hunting rifle.

Pipe rifle: With the abundance of .38 ammo you can mod it to be automatic and actually have a pretty effective weapon in the early game.

Submachine gun: Unfortunately this gun isnt great, its damage is low and the only thing it has going for it is its huge magazine size, but because of this you're gonna be wasting a whole lot of bullets which isn't what you want to be doing.

Railway Rifle: Its allright i suppose, but the scarcity of the ammo makes it slightly less awesome, otherwise it has great damage though, if you like it use it.

Syringer: Awesome if you like what it does, the damage syringes suck but the other ones are really neat.



Shotguns:

Double-barrel shotgun: Has everything you expect it to, great stopping power and terrible ammo capacity, use this until you get a combat shotgun.

Combat Shotgun: with only 1 other gun in the group this is the best shotgun in the game and its actually really good at what it does: awesome stopping power, nice rate of fire and huge ammo capacity.



Heavy weapons:

Fat man: For when you really really really want something dead what can i say.

Flamer: The damage is pretty lackluster but if you want a steady amount of energy damage in one of your heavy weapons this one fits the bill.

Junk Jet: Got a lot of teddybears? use this to headshot people with them! do you really need to know anything else? If you are not a fun person like me you might prefer to keep your teddybears for crafting.

Minigun: Good for shooting holes in deathclaws, radscorpions and anything else the wasteland wants to throw at you, decent damage and great rate of fire.

Missile launcher: Good for blowing things up at an even greater distance, great damage. You will probably be using this once you run out of mini nukes.

Broadsider: Wanna be a pirate? This is the weapon for you, courtesy of good ol' Ironsides. (basically like a Missile launcher.)



Energy Weapons:

Institute weaponry: The fact that institute weapons are the weakest really really sucks in my opinion because i think they look really cool, but it makes sense since they're the easiest to find and the institute has to mass produce them as well as the fact that they are not a combat focused faction.

Laser weaponry: The next step up after institute weapons, does what it says on the box. Need energy damage? Look no further!

Plasma weaponry: The best energy weapons, what else is there to say.

Laser musket: Combine deadly energy damage with revolutionary style! its damage is pretty good if you upgrade it, use it as a long range sniper and it will serve you well.

Gatling laser: Want a minigun that SHOOTS LASERS? here you go.

Gamma gun: Good against human enemies, terrible against anything else.

Gauss rifle: Absolutely awesome, i love this weapon, it has great damage, great rate of fire and great ammo capacity, if i could use this weapon the entire game i would. The fact you can put a silencer on it is just gravy.

I don't think the grenades, mines and melee weapons need reviewing since they're pretty self explanatory, but if you have any questions about them you can ask in the comment section.

So here's the thing about armor, at the start i was very confused by the fact that, even though i was wearing leather armor, i was still walking around in my undies. Upon further inspection i realized that the armor system works like this, there are 3 types of attire you can put on: armor, outfits and clothes. Clothes can be worn underneath armor and usually provide either a very small boost to defense or a boost to 1 or 2 stats like agility and endurance for example, outfits take up multiple armor slots and cannot have armor on top of them, which is why they are completely useless as anything but cosmetic items and last we have normal armor pieces for your head, chest, arms and legs.

There are 5 different sets, and each piece of armor can come in 3 variants, the variants that you stumble upon are decided by your level and go like this: normal, sturdy and heavy. Each next variant provides superior defenses when compared to an earlier variant and is also heavier.

As for the sets, at the lowest one we have raider armor, this is absolutely terrible, use it if you must but as soon as you find anything else feed it to the nearest mole rat. Next we have Leather armor, which has superior energy defenses compared to Metal armor which has superior ballistic defense. Combat armor has a balanced mix of both resistances and last but not least we have Synth armor which is an upgrade to the leather armor by providing even better resistances to both types of damage as well as boasting the best resistances to energy out of all the armor types.

In this section of the guide i will be noting all the helpful things i know to help you find your way in the Commonwealth wasteland:

- Loot everything, in this game literally everything is useful since it can be broken down, at the start of the game just hoard everything until you are overencumbered.

- Get a companion, they help distract enemies and will play the part of packmule if you ask them to. (They even give you a neat perk if you max out their affection by doing things they like).

- Different weapons for different situations, keep your loadout diverse, a rifle for longer ranges, a shotgun for close ranges and quick enemies like feral ghouls, a melee weapon for those pesky radroaches and bloatflies and if all else fails a trusty pistol. (Make sure to check enemy resistances if you're having trouble with a particular enemy).

- Set up a home base, Sanctuary will do for a good long time, just gather all the crafting benches into one area and you have everything you need. (you can even store all your items in the workbenches and it will use them for crafting).

- Cook your food, it will remove the radiation and give you more health back.

- Carry the right clothes, charisma boosting attire for talking to people and a hazmat suit for radioactive areas.

- Chems are neat, and you can make them even better by combining them, personally i always carry some med-x, jet and psychobuff on me for those extra hard fights.

- Explore in an orderly fashion, the farther south you travel the higher the level of enemies you will encounter, make sure you don't end up facing something you won't be able to take down.

- Always aim down sights when fighting, it will increase your accuracy and make you waste less ammo, also make sure to use cover.

- Adhesive is super valuable for creating mods, and also rare, to get better acces to it plant some corn, mutfruit and tato's to craft adhesive at a campfire.

- Quicksave is your best friend, just start spamming f5 at random intervals so you dont get set back too far by the occasional supermutant suicider.

- The best way to deal with radiation in the early game is popping some rad-x before going into a radioactive area or putting a hazmat suit on, save your radaway for when you have around 300 rads, you can check by bringing up your pipboy and looking at the little meter on the right so you dont waste too much radaway. Once you find some more settlements you will get acces to doctors where you can heal all of your rads for a small amount of caps.

- Having trouble with mines? Hold Q to bring up your vats display, it will allow you to see any mines on the ground in front of you.

- Good early perks to pick up include: armorer (Str 3), Locksmith (Per 4), Medic (Int 2, if you're having a hard time on survival), Gun nut (Int 3), Hacker (Int 4), Scrapper (Int 5), Science! (Int 6) and Scrounger (Luck 2).

- Rename your weapons and armor to have a special prefix like ''#'' or ''-'' for example, since inventory is sorted alphabetically this will allow you to have your equipment at the top of the list at any time. Another possibility is using a space to make the sorting slightly less obvious or using <i>NAME HERE</i> when renaming stuff, they'll be put right at the top of your items + It'll have a cool tilt to the name (Tip courtesy of SlipperyJim72, ZenovPyro and Drag)

- Until you have a good stockpile of resources don't try to fully mod every weapon you find because you simply can't, try to keep it limited to a few to make sure you can get all the best mods for those weapons.

- Always pick up an enemy's dropped gun. Doing so gives you whatever ammo was loaded in their weapon when they died. (Tip courtesy of Drag & Berserker_Woden)

If you have any more tips feel free to leave them in the comment section below and i will add them to the list!

This section will be about setting up your settlements in the most efficient way possible. To be honest i got bored with arranging all my settlements really quickly because right now shops are buggy and its legit impossible to tell apart your settlers so appointing work becomes a huge pain.

Allright so the first thing you want to do is get the local leader perk to at least rank 1, but preferrably 2, and caps collector to rank 2 if you wanna mess about with shops (clinic needs medic rank 2).

The amount of settlers you can have at any given settlement is 10 + your charisma, so the first thing i would do is pick a central location for your network of settlements and start putting supply lines from that 1 settlement to all your other settlements so theyre connected to the same grid meaning you can acces your crafting materials from anywhere, kind of like a spider web you dig?

Next up you want to make sure your resources are allright, that means both water, food and beds have to be equal to your population, and defense has to be equal to food + water (otherwise you risk raider attacks), if you have excess food/water in one settlement and another settlement has a deficit, but theyre connected by a supply line, they will share resources to make up for the shortcoming in the settlement with the deficit.

Now that the situation is stable in all of your settlements you can start actually using them to make a profit, your options include putting up shops (you need free settlers, meaning without jobs, in the same settlement to make a profit because for some reason working settlers don't shop or something, and the bottlecaps will show up in the workbench), but this honestly isn't very lucrative since the caps take a huge long while to build up. The reason i build shops is so i can sell my loot closer to home. Another possibility is planting combinations of mutfruit, corn and tato's to craft a ton of adhesive, or you can build a bunch of water purifiers and collect the purified water to sell for caps.

As i said in the intro this guide is still very much a work in progress, if you have anything you think should be added or changed please tell me in the comments below.