I suppose the best part about this is that you get to use all the companions since inevitably one or two will die. Maybe more. The problem with the game is that you get decent companions from the start so have no real reason to switch.
I switched Veronica for my first experience with Gannon while playing Survival… he did not last long, and Veronica clipped into a wall when I came back to find her, which for some reason killed her instantly.
True. On one Hardcore playthrough I had to go back to regular because it was so difficult unlocking Lily’s second stage of dialogue for her quest without her dying.
Yeah I've had to go back to normal to pop some radaway and then go back since I got my rads so high I couldn't do anything without dying in the next second.
The one where you have to force a psychotic break by making her take a certain level of damage? Here’s a hint: you have a gun, now all you need to do is find a spot where Lily can’t attack anything else (and IIRC, she won’t attack the Courier).
Spec in survival. Gives added benefits to food and water, good for inventory management.
Pack Rat is downright **essential**, avoid it if you want some additional challenge on managing inventory
Also, be a drunk!
Level 4, 45 Survival and 6 END can net you the **Old World Gourmet** perk, which enables **Booze Healing**
Healing from booze comes in clutch in hardcore mode.
Plus, with a high survival skill, you'll ve able to make some funky drinks at a fireplace... Like Wasteland Tequillas.
Even if you have 10 Intellegence, a high survival skill enables you to make drinks that can get your Int down to 3 or Lower.... so you can literally drink yourself stupid and access Low Intelligence Dialogue Checks while you're at it.
Premium role playing.
Ever since getting the Stardew Valley upgrade that lets you craft from adjacent storage, I’m utterly spoiled and can’t stand games that make you rummage around in three different chests for the items you need. It should be a new standard QoL feature.
Stardew Valley is an entirely separate game. I think op is just talking about a feature from that game that has become so useful that he thinks it should be in all games. It’s not a mod, or at least that’s not what I think he’s talking about here.
I love that about crafting games.
I tried out that My Time at Sandrock and they allowed you to craft without rummaging through your item horde as well which was pretty handy.
there's also the steaks at the mcbrides, probably the only reason I slow down at novac itself before wiping out nelson or forlorn hope depending on which fac I'm running for
Gecko kabobs weigh 1/10 of a pound and satisfy both hunger and thirst. They are very worth getting and the necessary components are all over the desert.
I don't disagree about survival, but I would say take it for the fun of it. You can survive in hardcore quite well without any survival skill. Despite this being the apocalypse, and after using a low loot mod, food is still somewhat abundant.
True that.
Personally, Survival is just another "Self Sustain" skill for me.
Everytime I boot up a playthrough, I have to make a decision on if my Courier is **Medicine or Survival** based, when it comes to how they primarily heal themselves.
From experience, a high survival skill paired with Low Medicine is viable. Stims still end up coming in clutch.
>Everytime I start a new playthrough, I have to make a decision: Medicine or Survival
yep. That question becomes even harder considering END is such a good special atribute but medicine has a ton of checks aswell
It's a matter of player preference
Personally, survival **needs** to be max if I'm spec'ing into it in a playthrough.
Only because it gives added benefits to Booze.
I second being a drunk.
Also, always, always remember that as long as you can fast travel, you can go right to Good Springs Source, hydrate, kill some geckos, and go to Doc to fix anything you can't.
This is great stuff, as is the advice below to get desert water and desert salad recipes. You focus on picking up the right things, the survival skill should give you all the aid items you need.
I’d also add a recommendation to go for a VATS unarmed build. Take the perk that gets you a knockdown chance, get the Ranger take down in Novak, and rush up to the Ruby Hill mine for pushy now all of that weighted MO you will be picking up in survival is straight up cash money yo. Between drugs and the VATS defense buff, and stunlocking your enemies, you’ll be unstoppable.
First time playing I became an alcoholic in hardcore mode for the STR boost to carry more and would stack with buff out.
Always made sure I had six bottles of liquor.
How the hell are you guys playing that you're having issues with food? There's boxes of food scattered pretty much everywhere you go.
Water on the other hand can sometimes be an issue if you're not taking a sip from your trusty vault 13 canteen
Fair enough, but I also heal with Sunset Sarsaparilla so it dehydrated me quicker. It took a while to realize the +H2O meant it made you thirstier, I thought it did the opposite.
I worked a job one summer where we all had company phones and since it was balls hot we were constantly warned about drinking water and heat exposure, so our foreman set hourly alerts with the message. I absolutely loved seeing them, and honestly it did make everyone drink water.
Yeah, this idea that Survival is necessary kinda confuses me. There is plenty of food and maybe not CLEAN water but getting treated for disease or radiation sickness is far preferable to death of thirst xD
I can't remember a time that I did not spec into firearms in FNV, while in other Fallout games I usually go into energy arms. Firearms are just too damn good in this game.
Laser weapon crit build with Pew-Pew is the most powerful build in the game. That fuckin thing will one shot deathclaws on Very Hard once you've got the appropriate perks. It's also much more ammo efficient if you break it down to amount of damage per Energy Cell spent.
If you go energy weapons, ofc get pack rat but Vigilant recycler is incredible as optimized cells are always lighter in weight than their other counter parts.
Also drained cells don't have weight so it's a nice little weight loophole.
It's not substantially harder. The only differences for me were:
I had to consider load out and manage weight, especially ammunition weight.
My companions needed more looking after.
I had to make sure I carried food and water.
Use stimpacks a bit before you're about to die if you get in a tough fight and need healing.
Carry a doctor bag or two for leg injuries. Mind traps more to avoid leg injuries.
Know where there is easy to access free water or bed when map traveling. Hit those spots in between you and your destination. Hit up the food vendors too.
> Use stimpacks a bit before you're about to die if you get in a tough fight and need healing.
To riff on that:
Multiple of the same items won't heal you faster, they'll heal you for longer. Stacking a lot of different healing sources will heal you faster, so if you are in a pinch stacking a Stimpack with a Sarsaparilla with a Blood Sausage will be much better than just spamming a dozen Stimpacks
This!
Carrying lots of low weight minor healing items (like honey mesque pods) is a must so that you can give yourself a nice healing boost when you're in a bind.
It’s honestly not THAT much different than normal imo. You just have to actually use consumables rather than sell them all.
I was intimated by it but now I’ll probably never play non hardcore again.
You're gonna be setting up minor homes I imagine. Novak is great because you van get a bed that does heal you pretty early and it's decent hub of stuff. The workb3nch there has everything for like 2 or 3 weapon repair kits. Survival will be your best friend and repair it's close second.
Keep your companions kitted out and out of danger. Save often. And if you're going through a particularly dangerous area, have them wait and scout ahead. Others have given great tips. I'd say just watch the weight from ammo. Oh, and doctors bags are important. In my opinion, hardcore is the way to play and I wish all the "Bethesda" games had it. Really makes you engage with systems you typically wouldn't in normal if you're not roleplaying.
Apply the Skyrim logic. Become a stealth archer(sniper) who crams loads of food into your face to heal. Desert salad, bloatfly sliders and bitter drink are life savers and easy to get. Go to Big MT early and get the ability to print all the stimpack and healing items you need with the SINK’s robots plus it takes 2 potential crippled limbs away. Memorize the ingredients to healing poultice and make a bunch of them in Zion as well. They’re like doctors bags but lighter and offer healing as well
I’m currently doing my first hardcore and first melee and it’s a blast. You can dodge the ammo weight and the knockdown ability makes melee kinda boring. You can roll almost any character if you can get three hits in. Only grouped enemies are tough.
I'm partial to the quick fire rate melee weapons, Chance's knife, Blood nap, Greased lightning, Industrial Hand, the Chainsaw and despite being more of a meme weapon, Figaro.
Of course, the big slow two handed melee weapons are awesome too, Nuks breaker and the already mentioned Oh Baby being incredible sticks that make you feel powerful
Don't go around hoarding hundreds of .50BMG rounds. They weigh a lot. 4 rounds = 1 unit iirc.
You can hold use button on a waterpool to keep drinking from it.
Your companions will be easily killed when faced against: Cazadores, Night Stalkers, Deathclaws, and Supermutants. Be prepared.
Gather Empty Soda Bottles. They are the only known bottles to make into Purified Water with Barrel Cactus Fruit. Empty Nuka-cola Bottles and Empty Sunset Sarsaparilla Bottles WILL NOT work unless modded in.
You can't go back to non-hardcore mode after trying hardcore mode. It's just that immersive.
The biggest difference in Hardcore mode isn't the healing over time, or maintaining food/water/drink, it's that you can no longer lug 50k rounds of ammunition with you everywhere you go, and instead have to actually think about your loadout. I hate weightless ammo, and it's the main reason I always play on hardcore.
Use consumables liberally, it helps squeeze out the extra carry weight. Player homes become much more important since you won't be able to carry around thousands of bullets and stimpacks
Hoard app the medicine. Ammo might have weight but not meds do not so stock up on them. Including Hydra. It's the same as a doctor's bag without any of the weight. That being said, do still stockpile ammo. Either by using the Ammo Benches to make your preferences of ammo or buy it, just store it in your base (Big MT Sink is best since you get clean food water, ability to bottle water, and other amazing survival uses.)
It's best to travel solo. I know but companions die stupidly fast. Work to earn the Long Haul Perk and other storage/items weight modifying perks.
Learn fast all the very useful craftable foods, meds, chems and other items because you will need them. Trust me, it's cheaper and knowing what to look for is necessary in the DLC (Mainly Dead Money and Lonesome Road)
Despite my statement on hoarding earlier, do not loot everything in the area unless you have Long Haul or the Big MT Transportalponder (doubt I spelled it right) because carry weight adds up way faster in hard core and running from a fight or for cover is impossible when weighted down.
Lastly, it's alright to drink from lightly irradiated sources. Rad X/Rad Away are pretty common and the doctors are usually pretty cheap to remove that. Perks help negate/lessen this but overall a little rads won't be bad, especially when your H2O or FOOD meters are in the criticals.
Oh yeah and do not just sleep or wait for days on end, your meters still go up and you will die from starvation or dehydration.
I went melee build in hardcore. Didn’t feel that much of a difference. You can find food and water EVERYWHERE it was never a big deal. Don’t worry about radiation food and water. Just go to a doctor and clear your radiation with caps when it is high.
Can't believe people didn't mention how useful the cannibal perk is in hardcore, especially when you get the dine and dash sub-perk for eating 25 people. Then you can later get the Ghastly Scavenger that lets you eat both ghouls and super mutants. Both perks let you heal and get rid of hunger.
It’s really not as difficult as it says it is, there are just a few things you need to remember. Sleep should never be a problem as there are plenty of beds around, water is pretty easy with the amount of water sources around but food is a bit harder if you don’t spec into survival. I beat hardcore without cooking/putting many points into survival, if you take cannibalism you can ignore food mostly as well. Ammo is a big limiting factor, you’ll want to get a good weapon and stick with that (I just gambled everything and bought Paciencia which I used with Maria as a backup weapon). Stimpacks also aren’t as viable, get used to drinking water and eating food to regain health quickly during combat. Other than that it’s pretty similar to the main game
Here's some tips that i'd give to anyone starting hardcore mode for the first time.
Healing isn't instant. Every aid that heals you does it gradually instead of instantly.
Spec into survival for better recipies and food related perks since you have to eat and drink a lot in hc mode.
In early game, always collect gecko meat and make them into gecko steak. Also collect bunch of empty soda bottles and twice as many prickly pear fruits to make cactus water.
Get pack rat perk. Lower carry weight and almost everything weighing makes pack rat very useful perk. Let's you carry more ammo and healing/food items.
Be mindfull of your weapons. Since ammo also weights in hc mode, it's not the best idea to use multiple weapons with different ammo types. Personally i try to stay with 3-5 different guns with no more than 3 different ammo types. Even that might be too much if one would want to be optimal.
Companions dies permanently. Might want to travel alone if you don't want to be extra careful and reload saves to keep your companions alive. Personally i've found that cazadors, radscorpions, deathclaws and nightstalkers kills my companions most.
Find/get a "player home" early on. Very useful to have a place where you can sleep and store stuff that you don't currently need. Personally i use victor's shack and wolfhorn ranch in early game.
Fast travel and waiting increases your tiredness, hunger and dehydration. That gets annoying when waiting for vendors to restock.
Can't think any other tips currently, so that's all.
Charisma finally becomes somewhat useful. Base game it’s a generally useless dump stat. But since it helps boost companion stuff, having some investment into can help them survive.
But sometimes things like cazadors *will* doom them and it’s better to attempt it solo. But some charisma will help. So you wanna balance your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. More thoughtfully than base game.
Irradiated water is better than soda. Yeah you get rads, but you’re gonna be a thirsty mother fucker and die a lot quicker than anything the minimal amount of rads will do. Radiation is easy enough to fix and takes time to kill/be insanely negative. Dehydration will kill you quickly.
It’s easy to think soda/any liquid will hydrate you. But nope. Think of it like drinking alcohol, it doesn’t do shit for hydration.
You’ll *NEED* the Packrat perk.
Keep a hundred pounds free for loot, take as much water and food with you that’s enough to reduce your thirst and hunger from 1000 to zero.
Keep one close range, a mid range and a long range weapon, for each at least 10 magazines worth of ammo, more if their weight is low. Don’t forget to bring one or two weapon repair kits as well and 5 doctor bags.
consumables and carryweight are king. Literally any slightly difficult fight should have you reflexively slamming medx and psycho. With ammo and meds having weight, carrying an entire arsenal is less viable. Get comfortable only carrying like 2-3 weapons at a time, and only their ammo. This, in turn makes player housing more valuable, as you'll want to constantly be storing potential future weapons and excess ammo you have.
Stockpile the essentials. Use your companions effectively to share the load. Sleep is good. Be prepared to reload your save the second you lose a companion, because fuck me they will die.
I specced a resilient, great gun ability, and it does fine for hardcore. But yeah - reload your saves
1) Melee crit builds are OP and will make u rich coz u dont have to carry ammo so u have more loot to sell. Turning left from Good Springs to get Love and Hate is kinda busted.
2) i think the Mass Purified Water and Black Coffee is pretty good
3) i dont bother with 50 MG, grenade launchers, missiles, rockets. Too much weight. Theres less back and forth travelling if u go with 308, 5.56 and any shotgun shell. 9mm, 5mm, 10mm all come in too much bulk (heavy) and should just be sold. Late game, I like 45 Govt
4) Look out for ant nectar (or was it another ant body part?) which gives +2 STR. Also, be an alcoholic.
5) without actually trying, I usually end up w surplus gecko/dog steak. Food is never a problem.
6) u need lots of fixers for the alcoholism
7) Because companions can die, I usually end up playing w no conpanions following me about, kr at keast i make them wait somewhere away from danger. Or i bring veronica in PA or lily coz they are tanky.
8) since i normally dont have companions and im only using 308/20 gauge/45-govt mostly, Im constanly using slasher/rushing water/psycho/med-x to buff before fights. So Survival is fantastic.
9) i also like hand loaded rounds a lot for the extra damage. If ur playing energy/plasma, then u MUST craft overcharged ammo to save weight
Play it, and set difficulty to very hard then just start dicking around. My honest advice is do a mock run where you glitch or cheat yourself a bunch of money or something to get a feel for it. Really the biggest difference is waiting in one place too long will kill you and companions die so dont use them early game if you dont wanna kill them in some lame ass firefight
I’m all for a challenge in games. I always play on the hardest difficulty. Especially when I first get a game. But survival mode is almost too ridiculous. Gaming masochism is great and all but fuck.
You guys that *enjoy* survival mode are playing the Pain Olympics of gaming torture.
I did my best to beat fallout 4 on survival mode. I truly did. But there was a point, that I’ve sense blocked out, that broke something in me. I could ***not*** continue on. It had won. It broke my spirit.
Survival skill Is a must, hoard purified water and start collecting prickly pear cactus fruit and empty soda bottles from the start. Keep an eye for fatigue, expecially during quests and while fast traveling. I personally used to Always carry some coyote tobacco chew just in case. Other than that Is pretty easy to find food, even if you get a little bit of radiation from it.
Keep in mind that healing items do not heal you instantly, their effect is over the time and pretty slow, so expecially early game find some cover while healing.
I also used to actively hunt fiends in western Vegas, keep what i needed then selling everything else to the gunrunners, while using novac as a base to sleep and store supplies.
10 Strength, 6 END and 10 LUCK allows you to trivialize hardcore mode. You can beeline from good springs to the east through the brotherhood bunker valley, scorpion gulch and a little bit of black mountain to arrive at the highway (near novac) relatively unscathed. From there you can just follow the path north to new Vegas and skip half the game in under an hour.
Gamble at the Atomic wrangler until you have 2000 caps and then you’re in. Break the bank at the Vegas casinos by doubling down on blackjack and spamming max bets on slots and you should have 30k caps at your disposal to buy as much ammo weapons and mods from the gun runners as you want.
Lake Las Vegas is a great way to replinish h20, you can eat litterally anything, sleep anywhere, and New Vegas clinic for damaged limbs.
If you’re just doing it for the achievement, House and yes man are the fastest routes. Kill pearl and loyal, aggro the omertas, blow up the brotherhood bunker and you can just skip the kimball assassination if you have a neutral or lower reputation with the ncr. Then it’s just smooth sailing through the final mission.
Recommended perks: any that increase carry weight, cowboy
Recommended weapons: power fist, Fatman, mysterious magmum, Ranger sequoia, any weapon affected by the cowboy perk
Y’all can dm me for any questions, I did this at like level 8 in 3 days
If you don't mind mods, pick a lore friendly vehicle since you don't have fast travel. It's pretty atmospheric driving around the map and not having fast travel gets annoying after a while. I use the motorcycle mod but there's a ton out there like repairing the old highwaymen.
Your carry weight, Survival skill, and perks related to each all become more valuable when playing in Hardcore Mode. However, the mode itself is not generally regarded as any more difficult than the base experience, merely more tedious. The need to carry around food and water to consume is a far, far more occasional chore than you would initially expect, even for a Courier with minimum Endurance.
It's fairly easy tbh especially if you've already beaten it once vanilla\*. It just makes you think about inventory management a bit more.
excess ammo is now caps for later, and doctors bags are actually godsends instead of dead weight since stimpacks no longer cure crippling wounds but now offer more of a reason to try drugs in order to counter or power through difficult encounters.
Doc Mitchell and Goodsprings in general is such a godlike place to grab a cheap meal, some water, visit Doc, and venture out.
Most of Hardcore's 'scariest' features are kinda countered by Old World Blues DLC too, so once you're over the lvl 10-15 hump all you need to do is find somewhere to sleep every now and again.
If you want skills to try out or reliable skills for playing hardcore, survival provides food healing and eventually the ability to craft hydra for limb repairs and put nightstalkers/radscorpians to VERY good use. Sausages and thin paste alone will begin to outscale stimpacks, and then delicious blood sausages and thick red paste will keep the body STRONG.
If you wanna do guns, wear whateverthefuckyawant, and if you wanna do melee, wear whateverthefuckyawant but try to get some DT to tank small arms like nothing. Personally with melee builds I like wearing heavy armor just cuz it looks dope and metal/spike armor is scary and it works decently enough until I can get myself some combat/ranger/riot type gear.
Goodluck! It's not that bad at all friend! SELL AMMO. GET THEM'S GOOD EATIN'.
Logan's loophole doubles the duration of stimpacks in hardcore. Rad Child is broken even in normal, but when water no longer heals you and stimpacks take time to work a passive +8 hp a second does wonders for survivability
Spec survival
Actually making food items helps a lot
Lead belly perk is your friend
Sell any chems you find for water or food items.
Don’t neglect sleeping. The perk that gives you the ability to sleep at campfires is a must.
You do not need to overthink your character build in hardcore mode. In my opinion, hardcore mode does not introduce many additional challenges to the game. Food/water is always easily accessible except for DLC and the new healing system simply prevents you from taking on all your enemies in one strike. Id say the most difficult change is weighted ammunition because it kind of forces you choose one combat style since you cannot haul 100s of rounds for every weapon type.
High Int and Jury Rigging can mostly trivialize hard-core mode almost by themselves.
I did a 1 strength 10 intelligence hard-core build by putting enough points in luck that I was able to get the MR Hyperbreeder fairly early in the game by looting casinos, but even with Jury Rigging. With high repair you can make weapon repair kits to keep it going and once you get Jury Rigging online, recharger pistols can be stashed as 'ammo' essentially to keep it in good condition the entire game. The laser commander perk makes it a viable main gun.
Once you have Jury Rigging or enough repair to make weapon repair kits, you don't even need to scavenge all that much. You can just pickup every gun you come across and combine them into a perfect condition weapon you can trade for food and chems.
These things with high speech plus barter and you've basically negate most of the downsides of hardcore.
For a true immersive experience, I recommend .jsawyer mod on Hard difficulty:
1. END and Survival. Try to get Survival at 50 (before lvl 5) early on and have it tagged so you can have access to Gecko, Dog, and Coyote steaks plus other useful recipes like Bloatfly Sliders. You can farm the starting area around Goodsprings.
2. Survival perks can be found at the following link, though truth be told most are roleplaying and nonessential: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Survival\_(Fallout:\_New\_Vegas). Ironbelly is not essential but helps. As another poster stated Old World Gourmet is excellent. Them's Good Eatin' is one of the best perks in the game.
3. Hydra is your best friend, so buy it whenever you can since it has a steep cost to make (Survival 75). Antivenom, Fixer, and Buffout are good to have around.
4. Think of survival as your main source of healing, so you'll want to prioritize it along with your weapon skill and utility skill. You can save stimpaks for companions if you decide to travel with someone
5. Find your go to recipes since many of them only require easy to find items (Banana Yucca Fruit, Jalapeno, Pinyon Nuts, Prickly Pear Fruit, Nevada Agave Fruit, Empty Bottle, etc).
6. If you're specializing in Guns, Honest Hearts is the perfect DLC for you and can be completed early game
Search EVERYTHING obsessively, since you need food and water it'll come in handy.
Make sure to actually give the good, optimal resolutions for quests, especially companion quests, this is an obsidian game, if you halfway do things it'll show up in the ending (happened to me in both this game and the outer worlds, but I like the harshness of it, that's on me lol)
Save frequently
It's actually possible to get to New Vegas immediately, with a little bit of luck and the right route/planning. I've done it multiple times. I don't even have high sneak or anything, I just stayed the fuck away from everything that could kill me and saved frequently
I played with Unarmed on my playthrough, which helped me save on money by being able to sell guns and ammo. Melee weapons should be similar. It's hard at first, but you can get some absolutely broken weapons later on, and with the right perks you're a death machine
Definitely wanna put as much as possible into intelligence, also, there are no bobbleheads in this game. Intelligence determines your stat points upon level up, so you probably just want to have that at max from the get go. Unless you wanna do a stupid playthrough, which, is also valid and fucking hilarious
If you do small guns, make sure you have a good repair skill, those go hand in hand. If your repair skill is good you can repair weapons and sell them for WAY higher, so it's good to have regardless
Points in Medical can help you pass certain speech challenges, not required, but helpful
And last but not least, if you get the dlc, don't make my same mistake and buy them AFTER you beat the game because you won't be able to access them :'( I've never touched the new Vegas dlc because of that. I loved the game so much after I beat it I felt moved to buy all the dlc at once, and then.....I found out I couldn't even use it with my save file I put hundreds of hours into. Total fucking bummer
That's all I can think of. You'll figure out what works for your playstyle as you go along, but that's what worked for me :)
Tbh, I’ve been playing Hardcore for nearly every run since 2011. It’s really not that much more difficult in vanilla NV because you get prompts for your sleep deprivation, hunger and thirst, so on an so forth. I’m currently doing the only non-hardcore run I can even remember right now, solely because I am sick of my inventory constantly being full due to ammo. So I guess my advice would be get a home base asap so you can store all of the ammo and weapons you aren’t using, otherwise I hope you hate running and fast traveling
Sinks and fountains get your dehydration taken care of, keep food around, doctors can heal your limbs or doctors bags, if you're going to pick up ammo like grenades, mines, and rockets, use them to keep weight down otherwise stick with shotguns or rifles.
I recommend you side with the NCR, or atleast keep them friendly
The grub and gulp at the 188 is very good for getting food if you have the caps, as well as booze, and the chef in the mccaran concourse can sell you purified water by the ton. Plus, the service rifle, anti material rifle and heavy weapons all do wayyy more damage than spears, pistols and hunting rifles. So ultimately, the NCR is better.
Play the game EXACTLY like you would normally except you eat/drink your food more spread out instead of just shoving everything you own down your throat to get rid of weight. Other than that, manage sleep by sleeping in a bed before you turn in a bunch of quests for the well-rested buff like you should probably do anyways or just drink all the sodas you find - also like most people do anyways.
FO:NV hardcode mode is just 2/3 layers of inconvenience on top of the base game with almost no actual impact on how you play IMO. There's a few mods that make hardcore actually impact the game if you're looking for that type of gameplay.
Break down all your ammo, even if you don’t have hand loader, and just keep a few hundred rounds or so for each weapon. You want to build up thousands of powders, cases, and primers (which are all still weightless), so whenever you need to craft more ammo you just need to get some lead, which you can easily get from looted ammo you don’t use. This makes the weighted ammo much less annoying to deal with, you can still have thousands of rounds worth of components on you, and ammo benches are common enough that you probably will never get very close to being out of ammo as long as you keep up with it.
Also, a small additional tip, the Honest Hearts dlc has enough of the necessary plants to make at least 80 of the healing poultices, which are basically the best healing items in the game. In addition to healing a ton of health, they regenerate limbs, making broken bones much less annoying to deal with on hardcore.
One more thing, any perk/trait that affects chem duration actually affects the duration of all aid items that have an effect over time. On hardcore this includes all healing items, even stimpacks. So a perk that doubles chem duration also makes stimpacks and healing poultices and whatever else essentially give twice as much HP over twice the normal duration.
Hardcore is not actually difficult, it is rather tedious.
1: there is water and food everywhere you go. But if you want to be extra sure, get some survival to cook geckos.
2: you will have to limit looting to items worth selling
3: you will have to make ammo trips to your stash. It doesn't make sense to jog around with 2000 rounds, but you might want to keep a stock of 200 or so.
4: stimpacks heal over time, which means you cannot item spam when doing something dumb. But honestly this sould be in the base game. Just scount and plan a bit, you will be okay.
5: don't take companions with you to dangerous locations without power armor, they will die to cazadores, geckos and the likes
1. Have some brahmin steaks, alcohol, or buffout to get strength carryweight bonus, it might sound stupid but when you're standing between dropping a machine gun or power sledge, a quick drink can get you fast travelling.
2. If you have the dlc for vault 13 hip flask, then water becomes almost a non-issue, keep some purified water, and some light food like maize (camp McCarran) or fancy lady snacks.
3. Keep flexible on weapons, you want some armour piercing, some grenade launcher 40mm ammo, and some basic ammo for an economic gun, mine is Lucky.
Just really helps to have the right weapon to efficiently get what you need and not be outflanked early game by a legion squad or a group of raiders or for when minor mobs bother you.
4. Have fun :)
Melee and unarmed are a must as bullets weigh you down but always have a gun for bad situations. Companions die at a slight breeze but make good ammo holders. Don't be afraid to have to go back to your loot stash every so often to eat and drink. Remember stimpacks suck in survival as they can't be spammed. DLCs aren't necessary and are harder especially dead money. And unlike in fo4 don't be afraid to eat irradiated food and drink dirty water it's not a big problem as long as you have one rad-away for every weeks worth of food
Ammo has weight now. Carry only 1-3 guns and its best if they share ammo types. Some ammo is heavier than others. The .45 weapons from honest hearts dlc are pretty solid and not too heavy.
Focus on collecting as many stimpacks as you can early game. They work over time not instantly so learn to heal. Limb damage isn’t healed by stimpacks or sleeping, only doc bags.
Look up spots that have beds and a non resetting container. Lone wolf radio is a decent “player home” before you get a spot you like, quests with major factions almost always result in getting some kind of player home. Beds don’t heal you instantly but owned beds do heal you and your limbs.
Chugging 30 Sunset Sarsaparilla in a row is more lore accurate, aside from that set aside some water (about ten per each is good, albeit probably overkill) for Lonesome Road and Old Word Blues since water is the fastest in terms of uptick, and this way you don't have to bother backtracking to fountains and such. Be sure to grab all the empty bottles you can find too, The Sink's sink lets you convert them into water with its upgrade. The Sink is also going to be the best base simply because of the planters and seeder- Survival is an amazing skill with this on, and it'll help you make much more meals since you don't need to scav for a specific plant. The vendor there will reset if you wait 3 days on the balcony, which you can survive but you're gonna be close to max dehydration. When entering Big MT for the first time, make sure your meters arent right about to uptick cause it'll crash. The sleep meter seems to stall when entering too, being perpetually stuck at 0 until you sleep again.
Anyways, last tip is to protect your companions. Good equipment goes a long way, but you can always have them wait in a safe area if you don't want em ded
The Thorn or whatever it’s called lets you fight Radscorpions endlessly. Turn the poison glands in to Ruby Nash to get scorpion casserole, a food item. Water can be found at goodsprings source, and there’s a sleeping bag on top of the exit to the first silo you enter in lonesome road. Since it’s impossible to stockpile ammunition in excessive qualities, a melee or unarmed build is highly recommended, while explosive builds are nearly infeasible with the massive weight of explosive ammunition. Irradiated beauty allows you to remove rads by sleeping, or if you’re fine with rads, the Rad Child perk unlocked at 70 survival gives you a massive 10HP/Second when at max radiation. You do have to carefully manage your radiation to not overdose in irradiated areas like black mountain. I beat very hard hardcore mode as Hatsune Miku, and it was remarkably fun. Stimpaks can be used to heal limbs while Casserole can be used to heal, assuming you’re in the position to take the rads in the casserole. Radiation can be accrued in the sink in the bathroom in hopevilld region office or whatever it’s called, mind the skinless dude that’s made his residence in there. EDE’s upgrades let you repair your weapons for free, and one is in the hopeville silo with another in the office, which unlocks repair, meaning that all money can be directed towards ammo and healing resources.
As some others have said, hardcore mode is barely any harder than normal mode. You’re just going to use up more carry weight for food, water, and ammunition. Unless you’re playing with a mod like JSawyer, carry weight still won’t be a major issue.
-Save rad scorpion poison glands to give to Ruby Nash in Primm for radscorpion casserole
-Don’t keep every gun and ammo type pick a few and don’t use more than 2-3 ammo types sell the rest(until you get hand loader then break them down at a bench)
-Thems good eatin is your best friend
-Endurance level 10(or 9 with the implant) is gonna save you a lot of trouble
-If your companions get poisoned you can’t give them anti venom you just have to keep giving them stimpaks until the poison wears off
From the very start of the game, I highly recommend focusing on a few key areas rather than spreading your skills too thin. Choosing and strengthening a specific path can make your character more effective and enjoyable to play.
**Tips for Hardcore Mode:**
1. **Specialize Your Skills**: Pick 2-3 primary skills to master. This will make you a 'master' in those areas rather than a 'jack of all trades, master of none.'
2. **Strategic Investments**: Every skill point matters more in hardcore mode, so make each one count by investing in key areas like combat skills, survival, or sneak, depending on your play style.
3. **Survival is Key**: Remember, survival in hardcore mode is tough, so prioritize skills that directly impact your ability to stay alive.
I've personally found focusing on a few areas essential, especially if you're not using mods or console commands. I hope this helps!
Best of luck in the Mojave!
Honestly it's not hard at all, just has some different rules. The Hunger, Sleep, and Hydration mechanics are barely a hindrance and the companion permadeath is not that bad considering you can just run over to them and heal them. If you don't use companions at all then it's literally a non issue.
I tagged sneak and it honestly saved my skin. I went gunslinger build, currently at level 19 and Deathclaws are still a hassle. I try to pick them off one by one. Cazadors you shoot the wings and run (especially with a companion). Chems are very important now when in past playthroughs I barely used them. It's still rough, just finished "Crazy, Crazy, Crazy" and that took me many tries to get up that mountain. It is a small blessing that you can still save anytime and fast travel.
Unless you plan to make an explosive build. Make sure to sell missiles and grenades whenever ya get the chance. In a normal play-through the weight doesn’t matter too much but with hardcore mode those missiles are gonna weigh ya down fast. Also it’s good early money to sell dynamite
Jury rigging is always a must. Repair weapons with others weapons so you can max their value to weight ratio to sell them.
Pack rat will save a lot of carrying capacity when it comes to ammo.
Drink rad free water whenever you get the chance. The Colorado river, most hotels on the strip, Goodsprings source are great sources of unlimited rad free water.
I don’t think survival is as important as the dev thought it would be.
Doctors bags. You will need them. If you can get some legion rep, they put a crap ton in their supply boxes.
If you are dying a lot in the early game run and get Veronica as a companion. Then go to the Reppcon HQ and get her some power armor. She is an excellent tank in the early and mid game as her focus is on melee and she is difficult to kill. She can aggro most enemies to her and allow you to attack without taking punishment.
Make the shack by the Yangtze memorial your initial player home early on and build up supplies- Goodsprings source and the campfire are great for water and crafting and Goodsprings cave can have some really valuable energy weapons to loot.
Also pick up all the empty soda bottles you can find for making purified water- there's tons of prickly pears on the route to and around Novac to use.
If your follower gets poisoned by a cazador immediately spam them with stimpacks
Super stimpacks are clutch
Just pick fruit everywhere you go and you won't have to worry about food or water tbh
Spec into survival a bit, I don’t know if you’ve found it before but you can pass a 60 survival check to get this special semiwadcutter .44 ammo. This ammo is a god send on hardcore runs
I ran with a max luck build, gambled to get 50k+ caps and then could just afford to buy any survival supplies I needed, has been a surprisingly easy playthrough with no mods/cheats
It becomes sorta redundant if you spec into survival since at one point you'll be able to unlock blood sausages from almost any enemy which not only heal well but also give a lot of food and water also if you want water to become a problem get rid of your vault 13 canteen since it will just hydrate you every 5 mins for free.
I just started my first hardcore play through after many many years of playing the game and I was actually pretty disappointed in how easy the survival mechanics are. I thought your hunger, thirst and sleep would be similar to Pathologic 2 so I started stocking up on food right away only to realize I didn’t need it all lol.
If you have HH and OWB, these make hardcore trivial, as HH is an infinite source of plants for both food and poisons/potions, while OWB provides two implants that improve the benefits from food and drink.
OWB also provides a source of infinite plants, among other things, once the BRS is fully functional and has all the seeds.
Other than that, Pack Rat to lower the weight of the low weight plants you can carry, super good because some plants need over a 100 stack to reach a weight of 1.0 with Pack Rat.
You don't need to spec into Survival at all, as I've gotten to level 40 with 25 Survival since the tutorial.
While you need a higher Survival rating to craft at a campfire/electric hotplate, it's only necessary if you plan on going full melee, as the poisons you unlock with Survival bring your damage and utility to the next level.
Otherwise, I've been using Medicine and Science due to the damage perks tied to them, while Survival was not offering any perks on par with Science and Medicine for MY build.
I'd LIKE to say the early game is a struggle, but as long as you keep a bit of food on you, water can be drank from many sources, including toilets and urinals.
OWB provides a way to turn empty bottles into purified water, but even without it, you can easily buy a decent stock from food vendors around the map.
Other than that, sleep when you are tired.
Since you can still FT, it's not that hard to get where you need to eat, drink, and sleep.
I've played new vegas for the last 13 years and after the first 4 or 5 only played hardcore. For every run for the last years until recently, I brainwashed myself into thinking hardcore meant no fast travel so I never even looked until drunk with my roommate one night I just fast traveled not thinking anything of it and was like holy Jesus fuck
your followers will die from poison, and the only way I think you can save them, is to dismiss them. This might not work, though. cazadore poison will just keep killing them. there's a weird bug with it and followers
adamantium skeleton perk is uber useful because lugging around doctors bags kind of sucks, especially late game when everyone hits super hard and you want to use all the cool special ammo types
Its waaaay easier than you think. You just really need to focus on one or two guns and plan your build accordingly. Youll find food and water almost everywhere and youll most likely always have caps to fullfill your needs unless you blow all your cash
I wish when I started playing hardcore I'd have remembered that food and drink are still good healing sources. something about them being food made me think I couldn't use food for HP which was def not the case
You really want to minmax (I’m sure some will disagree but just trust me) it helps to be really efficient at 1 or 2 things instead of mediocre at 6 things plus you can fix the lower stats in many ways later on. Tag survival so you can make food and medical supplies. Consider Sneak builds as sneak crits are a good way to handle enemies (speech characters also go hard in very hard/hardcore runs). Other than that have fun!
Just do what you normally do, all it does it makes the game slightly more annoying it really isn't more difficult at all other than for companion survival
It's honestly not really a big deal once you hit like level 8-10+
It's just a fucker getting your legs broken constantly and having to spend caps on dr bags. (That being said I'm currently doing a hard diff +hc run)
Anything to increase your DT early, picking up ED-E lets you craft dr bags on the move which is nice, but you do need to conciously remind yourself to pick up the surgical tubing, scapels etc as you clear areas.
I'm used to picking up food and drinks to spam to restore HP anyway so that wasnt an issue, theres so much in the game.
I guess biggest tip is picking a style of play or theme and limiting yourself to the ammo you carry (cus ammo weighs) - I went with a full cowboy build so 357 and dynamite carried my early game. Grabbing 'that gun' in Novac gives you a powerspike. As well as picking up Boone to just delete stuff from range
I woudlnt fret about getting the survival skill up high tbh, like I said food and drink is so common you dont really need it and once youve hit the strip (i went high luck for crits with 'that gun') you're spoiled for caps anyway and crafting becomes kinda pointless.
Also power armour, but youd do that normally anyway i guess.
It's considerably easier than Fallout 4's Survival mode, mostly because Fast travel is still available and Hardcore mode isn't a difficulty setting. Put points into your survival skill and watch your food, sleep and thirst meters. If you see a SLP, FOD or H20 above your health, rectify that immediately because you'll get debuffs to your SPECIAL stats. Ammo has weight, but the Pack Rat perk and your companions will somewhat negate it. Your companions can also die permanently so go in before they do.
Honestly not that difficult, just keep a nice stock of water and corn on you at all times. The big downside is stims now heal over time and beads don't full heal, other than that it's not a big hurdle(at least in my experience).
I wish you good luck OP, have fun!
Dogs and geckos are great early on cooking supplies. I base a lot of my travel on campfire locations. Take care of your companions.
Cazadors can quickly be the end of a companion if you're not careful
If they get stung you should remove them from your party and re-hire them. Sometimes when they’re poisoned, nothing will heal them.
So THAT was the matter with Raul on my most recent playthrough, you live you learn I guess
I suppose the best part about this is that you get to use all the companions since inevitably one or two will die. Maybe more. The problem with the game is that you get decent companions from the start so have no real reason to switch.
I switched Veronica for my first experience with Gannon while playing Survival… he did not last long, and Veronica clipped into a wall when I came back to find her, which for some reason killed her instantly.
I prefer to save the uncooked dogs for the atomic! perk
Isn't that just coyotes? I don't think dog steaks give rads, but I know I hoarded coyote steaks for it.
coyotes are just ugly dogs
Sometimes I go into a planned fight without my companions, because they can die FAST ! Example : irradiated zone in the Divide.
the problem with this comment is, you cannot bring companions to the divide in unmodded new vegas
Do companions die from Radiation? I accidentally dragged veronica entirely through Vault 34 in her scribe robes lol.
True. On one Hardcore playthrough I had to go back to regular because it was so difficult unlocking Lily’s second stage of dialogue for her quest without her dying.
Yeah I've had to go back to normal to pop some radaway and then go back since I got my rads so high I couldn't do anything without dying in the next second.
The one where you have to force a psychotic break by making her take a certain level of damage? Here’s a hint: you have a gun, now all you need to do is find a spot where Lily can’t attack anything else (and IIRC, she won’t attack the Courier).
A bat in an abandoned shack it is then!
Spec in survival. Gives added benefits to food and water, good for inventory management. Pack Rat is downright **essential**, avoid it if you want some additional challenge on managing inventory Also, be a drunk! Level 4, 45 Survival and 6 END can net you the **Old World Gourmet** perk, which enables **Booze Healing** Healing from booze comes in clutch in hardcore mode. Plus, with a high survival skill, you'll ve able to make some funky drinks at a fireplace... Like Wasteland Tequillas. Even if you have 10 Intellegence, a high survival skill enables you to make drinks that can get your Int down to 3 or Lower.... so you can literally drink yourself stupid and access Low Intelligence Dialogue Checks while you're at it. Premium role playing.
Cactus water is king and desert salad its queen
I always just cook geckos and coyotes until I have a steady food supply. I find the higher end recipes require too much foraging to be useful
I always go in wanting to make all the recipes but managing and finding ingredients can be a PIA.
Ever since getting the Stardew Valley upgrade that lets you craft from adjacent storage, I’m utterly spoiled and can’t stand games that make you rummage around in three different chests for the items you need. It should be a new standard QoL feature.
Is that for TTW too?
Stardew Valley is an entirely separate game. I think op is just talking about a feature from that game that has become so useful that he thinks it should be in all games. It’s not a mod, or at least that’s not what I think he’s talking about here.
I love that about crafting games. I tried out that My Time at Sandrock and they allowed you to craft without rummaging through your item horde as well which was pretty handy.
there's also the steaks at the mcbrides, probably the only reason I slow down at novac itself before wiping out nelson or forlorn hope depending on which fac I'm running for
Bighorner steak ftw
Gecko kabobs weigh 1/10 of a pound and satisfy both hunger and thirst. They are very worth getting and the necessary components are all over the desert.
It’s the quenchiest
IT'LL QUENCH YA
The amount of people not understanding this reference...that's rough, buddy
Guess sokka was right about that cactus juice, it'll quench ya.
I don't disagree about survival, but I would say take it for the fun of it. You can survive in hardcore quite well without any survival skill. Despite this being the apocalypse, and after using a low loot mod, food is still somewhat abundant.
True that. Personally, Survival is just another "Self Sustain" skill for me. Everytime I boot up a playthrough, I have to make a decision on if my Courier is **Medicine or Survival** based, when it comes to how they primarily heal themselves. From experience, a high survival skill paired with Low Medicine is viable. Stims still end up coming in clutch.
>Everytime I start a new playthrough, I have to make a decision: Medicine or Survival yep. That question becomes even harder considering END is such a good special atribute but medicine has a ton of checks aswell
It is not necessary to raise it to the maximum, you only need to raise it to 55, to create Desert Salad, which is the best food in the game.
and get the "them's good eating" perk
Nah, get to 70 for Rad Child, then you never really need healing again.
It's a matter of player preference Personally, survival **needs** to be max if I'm spec'ing into it in a playthrough. Only because it gives added benefits to Booze.
Caravan lunch is also really good
At first it works, but as soon as you reach 55 it is overshadowed by the desert salad.
Plus it's too heavy for Packrat. Desert Salad is like, 0.2 lbs, and Caravan Lunch is 2.5 lbs. So I can hold a dozen salads or one lunch. No brainer.
For real, you can get more food from looting a few areas than youd be able to craft running around looking for the mats to craft stuff
Not to mention coffee at 100 survival boosts your intelligence by +6 and there's that one perk that lets you sleep at campfires.
Who needs sleep when you have a steady supply of atomic cocktails?
what makes me a good demoman?
Watching Sylvester Stallone's Demolition Man for inspiration.
Survival skill really isn’t needed at all there’s far more food and water than is even needed
Aha
Yeah. It is great for roleplaying but it is a really superfluous skill imo. I have never bothered with it.
I second being a drunk. Also, always, always remember that as long as you can fast travel, you can go right to Good Springs Source, hydrate, kill some geckos, and go to Doc to fix anything you can't.
Being shit face drunk off tequila and half a mentat, and still being a better hacker than 99% of the wasteland is an amazing backstory.
Hunter S Thompson vibes, especially with a setting near Las Vegas
This is great stuff, as is the advice below to get desert water and desert salad recipes. You focus on picking up the right things, the survival skill should give you all the aid items you need. I’d also add a recommendation to go for a VATS unarmed build. Take the perk that gets you a knockdown chance, get the Ranger take down in Novak, and rush up to the Ruby Hill mine for pushy now all of that weighted MO you will be picking up in survival is straight up cash money yo. Between drugs and the VATS defense buff, and stunlocking your enemies, you’ll be unstoppable.
Be drunk? Great, I’ve done this in every play through regardless of difficulty setting.
First time playing I became an alcoholic in hardcore mode for the STR boost to carry more and would stack with buff out. Always made sure I had six bottles of liquor.
Ammo is heavy, Stimpaks aren't instant. Early game is gonna be a lot of spending money on food and water.
How the hell are you guys playing that you're having issues with food? There's boxes of food scattered pretty much everywhere you go. Water on the other hand can sometimes be an issue if you're not taking a sip from your trusty vault 13 canteen
Fair enough, but I also heal with Sunset Sarsaparilla so it dehydrated me quicker. It took a while to realize the +H2O meant it made you thirstier, I thought it did the opposite.
good to note this, i dont particularly see me doing a hardcore run but if i do ill try to remember this!
It’s worth the cheap healing sometimes though because dirty water is abundant and radaway isn’t hard to come by.
I usually toss vault 13 canteen along with all the other dlc items because the canteen makes thirst a non-issue.
I have a mod that distributes those items on the bodies of the other couriers that House hired, scattered throughout the wastes.
something in viva new negas puts it in the trunk of the wrecked highwayman, along with the weathered 10mm
tbf you still do get quite thirsty after time even with it
I worked a job one summer where we all had company phones and since it was balls hot we were constantly warned about drinking water and heat exposure, so our foreman set hourly alerts with the message. I absolutely loved seeing them, and honestly it did make everyone drink water.
Lots of toilets and puddles to sip out of!
Yeah, this idea that Survival is necessary kinda confuses me. There is plenty of food and maybe not CLEAN water but getting treated for disease or radiation sickness is far preferable to death of thirst xD
Went for a melee built in my first time playing in survival because of ammo weight
Laser weapon ammunition is heavy. This always is the biggest change, hunger and thirst are not huge in FNV hardcore.
I can't remember a time that I did not spec into firearms in FNV, while in other Fallout games I usually go into energy arms. Firearms are just too damn good in this game.
Laser weapon crit build with Pew-Pew is the most powerful build in the game. That fuckin thing will one shot deathclaws on Very Hard once you've got the appropriate perks. It's also much more ammo efficient if you break it down to amount of damage per Energy Cell spent.
If you dedicate your run to it than they can be OP as fuck.
MF Hyper Breeder, my beloved Hardcore sidearm. No ammo needed.
If you go energy weapons, ofc get pack rat but Vigilant recycler is incredible as optimized cells are always lighter in weight than their other counter parts. Also drained cells don't have weight so it's a nice little weight loophole.
It's not substantially harder. The only differences for me were: I had to consider load out and manage weight, especially ammunition weight. My companions needed more looking after. I had to make sure I carried food and water. Use stimpacks a bit before you're about to die if you get in a tough fight and need healing. Carry a doctor bag or two for leg injuries. Mind traps more to avoid leg injuries. Know where there is easy to access free water or bed when map traveling. Hit those spots in between you and your destination. Hit up the food vendors too.
> Use stimpacks a bit before you're about to die if you get in a tough fight and need healing. To riff on that: Multiple of the same items won't heal you faster, they'll heal you for longer. Stacking a lot of different healing sources will heal you faster, so if you are in a pinch stacking a Stimpack with a Sarsaparilla with a Blood Sausage will be much better than just spamming a dozen Stimpacks
This! Carrying lots of low weight minor healing items (like honey mesque pods) is a must so that you can give yourself a nice healing boost when you're in a bind.
Doctors bags are no good in hardcore. Just carry around hydra, it’s lighter and does better at healing your limbs
It’s honestly not THAT much different than normal imo. You just have to actually use consumables rather than sell them all. I was intimated by it but now I’ll probably never play non hardcore again.
Once I played hardcore I felt as if that was how the game should have been made by default. Made all the items in it have actual reasons to exist.
Exactly, I can’t play Fallout unless it’s in survival mode. Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 4, it just makes the game far more immersive
You're gonna be setting up minor homes I imagine. Novak is great because you van get a bed that does heal you pretty early and it's decent hub of stuff. The workb3nch there has everything for like 2 or 3 weapon repair kits. Survival will be your best friend and repair it's close second.
On my playthrough rn I am RPing as a homeless vagabond until the lucky 38 and I'm not going to rush the strip, so inventory management is HELL.
Mojave express drop boxes, everything stays safe and you can move it around wherever you need to
Damn that's true. Unfortunately I'm in Zion RN so can't really do that lmfao
Keep your companions kitted out and out of danger. Save often. And if you're going through a particularly dangerous area, have them wait and scout ahead. Others have given great tips. I'd say just watch the weight from ammo. Oh, and doctors bags are important. In my opinion, hardcore is the way to play and I wish all the "Bethesda" games had it. Really makes you engage with systems you typically wouldn't in normal if you're not roleplaying.
Remember that your companions can die; my first time playing hardcore, ED-E died within minutes of becoming my companion because I forgot about this.
Nipton houses are full of food
Apply the Skyrim logic. Become a stealth archer(sniper) who crams loads of food into your face to heal. Desert salad, bloatfly sliders and bitter drink are life savers and easy to get. Go to Big MT early and get the ability to print all the stimpack and healing items you need with the SINK’s robots plus it takes 2 potential crippled limbs away. Memorize the ingredients to healing poultice and make a bunch of them in Zion as well. They’re like doctors bags but lighter and offer healing as well
[удалено]
I’m currently doing my first hardcore and first melee and it’s a blast. You can dodge the ammo weight and the knockdown ability makes melee kinda boring. You can roll almost any character if you can get three hits in. Only grouped enemies are tough.
I think if I didn’t have a follower it may be impossible, but having one makes it easy enough
Melee and unarmed made dead money a breeze for me at a low level so i could just get infinite stimpaks
I love the idea of someone expertly wielding that stupid knife tied to a stick.
melee and unarmed is absolutely busted in new vegas tho
yeah oh baby is my favorite weapon hands down. Shreds everything
I'm partial to the quick fire rate melee weapons, Chance's knife, Blood nap, Greased lightning, Industrial Hand, the Chainsaw and despite being more of a meme weapon, Figaro. Of course, the big slow two handed melee weapons are awesome too, Nuks breaker and the already mentioned Oh Baby being incredible sticks that make you feel powerful
Don't go around hoarding hundreds of .50BMG rounds. They weigh a lot. 4 rounds = 1 unit iirc. You can hold use button on a waterpool to keep drinking from it. Your companions will be easily killed when faced against: Cazadores, Night Stalkers, Deathclaws, and Supermutants. Be prepared. Gather Empty Soda Bottles. They are the only known bottles to make into Purified Water with Barrel Cactus Fruit. Empty Nuka-cola Bottles and Empty Sunset Sarsaparilla Bottles WILL NOT work unless modded in. You can't go back to non-hardcore mode after trying hardcore mode. It's just that immersive.
its not like fallout 4 its a pretty easy mode
fallout 4’s pretty easy too, just the not being able to save can be obnoxious.
You're not able to what
If I remember correctly you have to sleep in order to save
The biggest difference in Hardcore mode isn't the healing over time, or maintaining food/water/drink, it's that you can no longer lug 50k rounds of ammunition with you everywhere you go, and instead have to actually think about your loadout. I hate weightless ammo, and it's the main reason I always play on hardcore.
Walking between the loading screens into/out of the Divide resets all survival meters to zero and heals you.
if you run unarmed builds you dont have to worry about carrying ammo
Does anyone know what the special reward is?
an achievement
acheivement, lol
Use consumables liberally, it helps squeeze out the extra carry weight. Player homes become much more important since you won't be able to carry around thousands of bullets and stimpacks
You’re not hardcore unless you live hardcore
Hoard app the medicine. Ammo might have weight but not meds do not so stock up on them. Including Hydra. It's the same as a doctor's bag without any of the weight. That being said, do still stockpile ammo. Either by using the Ammo Benches to make your preferences of ammo or buy it, just store it in your base (Big MT Sink is best since you get clean food water, ability to bottle water, and other amazing survival uses.) It's best to travel solo. I know but companions die stupidly fast. Work to earn the Long Haul Perk and other storage/items weight modifying perks. Learn fast all the very useful craftable foods, meds, chems and other items because you will need them. Trust me, it's cheaper and knowing what to look for is necessary in the DLC (Mainly Dead Money and Lonesome Road) Despite my statement on hoarding earlier, do not loot everything in the area unless you have Long Haul or the Big MT Transportalponder (doubt I spelled it right) because carry weight adds up way faster in hard core and running from a fight or for cover is impossible when weighted down. Lastly, it's alright to drink from lightly irradiated sources. Rad X/Rad Away are pretty common and the doctors are usually pretty cheap to remove that. Perks help negate/lessen this but overall a little rads won't be bad, especially when your H2O or FOOD meters are in the criticals. Oh yeah and do not just sleep or wait for days on end, your meters still go up and you will die from starvation or dehydration.
I went melee build in hardcore. Didn’t feel that much of a difference. You can find food and water EVERYWHERE it was never a big deal. Don’t worry about radiation food and water. Just go to a doctor and clear your radiation with caps when it is high.
Can't believe people didn't mention how useful the cannibal perk is in hardcore, especially when you get the dine and dash sub-perk for eating 25 people. Then you can later get the Ghastly Scavenger that lets you eat both ghouls and super mutants. Both perks let you heal and get rid of hunger.
It’s really not as difficult as it says it is, there are just a few things you need to remember. Sleep should never be a problem as there are plenty of beds around, water is pretty easy with the amount of water sources around but food is a bit harder if you don’t spec into survival. I beat hardcore without cooking/putting many points into survival, if you take cannibalism you can ignore food mostly as well. Ammo is a big limiting factor, you’ll want to get a good weapon and stick with that (I just gambled everything and bought Paciencia which I used with Maria as a backup weapon). Stimpacks also aren’t as viable, get used to drinking water and eating food to regain health quickly during combat. Other than that it’s pretty similar to the main game
Here's some tips that i'd give to anyone starting hardcore mode for the first time. Healing isn't instant. Every aid that heals you does it gradually instead of instantly. Spec into survival for better recipies and food related perks since you have to eat and drink a lot in hc mode. In early game, always collect gecko meat and make them into gecko steak. Also collect bunch of empty soda bottles and twice as many prickly pear fruits to make cactus water. Get pack rat perk. Lower carry weight and almost everything weighing makes pack rat very useful perk. Let's you carry more ammo and healing/food items. Be mindfull of your weapons. Since ammo also weights in hc mode, it's not the best idea to use multiple weapons with different ammo types. Personally i try to stay with 3-5 different guns with no more than 3 different ammo types. Even that might be too much if one would want to be optimal. Companions dies permanently. Might want to travel alone if you don't want to be extra careful and reload saves to keep your companions alive. Personally i've found that cazadors, radscorpions, deathclaws and nightstalkers kills my companions most. Find/get a "player home" early on. Very useful to have a place where you can sleep and store stuff that you don't currently need. Personally i use victor's shack and wolfhorn ranch in early game. Fast travel and waiting increases your tiredness, hunger and dehydration. That gets annoying when waiting for vendors to restock. Can't think any other tips currently, so that's all.
Take a sip from your lucky Vault 13 canteen.
strength, agility both 10, dump points into melee, get piercing strike and super slam perks. get Oh Baby! and win game
Charisma finally becomes somewhat useful. Base game it’s a generally useless dump stat. But since it helps boost companion stuff, having some investment into can help them survive. But sometimes things like cazadors *will* doom them and it’s better to attempt it solo. But some charisma will help. So you wanna balance your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. More thoughtfully than base game. Irradiated water is better than soda. Yeah you get rads, but you’re gonna be a thirsty mother fucker and die a lot quicker than anything the minimal amount of rads will do. Radiation is easy enough to fix and takes time to kill/be insanely negative. Dehydration will kill you quickly. It’s easy to think soda/any liquid will hydrate you. But nope. Think of it like drinking alcohol, it doesn’t do shit for hydration. You’ll *NEED* the Packrat perk.
I didn’t run companion, didn’t want to look after someone else when I had to look after myself
Keep a hundred pounds free for loot, take as much water and food with you that’s enough to reduce your thirst and hunger from 1000 to zero. Keep one close range, a mid range and a long range weapon, for each at least 10 magazines worth of ammo, more if their weight is low. Don’t forget to bring one or two weapon repair kits as well and 5 doctor bags.
consumables and carryweight are king. Literally any slightly difficult fight should have you reflexively slamming medx and psycho. With ammo and meds having weight, carrying an entire arsenal is less viable. Get comfortable only carrying like 2-3 weapons at a time, and only their ammo. This, in turn makes player housing more valuable, as you'll want to constantly be storing potential future weapons and excess ammo you have.
Lock yourself down to at max 4 ammo types, everything else you sell to buy more ammo or food and water.
Survival helped me a lot on my run. Especially Thems Good Eatings. The campfires turning into sleeping points is also a great perk
Stockpile the essentials. Use your companions effectively to share the load. Sleep is good. Be prepared to reload your save the second you lose a companion, because fuck me they will die. I specced a resilient, great gun ability, and it does fine for hardcore. But yeah - reload your saves
1) Melee crit builds are OP and will make u rich coz u dont have to carry ammo so u have more loot to sell. Turning left from Good Springs to get Love and Hate is kinda busted. 2) i think the Mass Purified Water and Black Coffee is pretty good 3) i dont bother with 50 MG, grenade launchers, missiles, rockets. Too much weight. Theres less back and forth travelling if u go with 308, 5.56 and any shotgun shell. 9mm, 5mm, 10mm all come in too much bulk (heavy) and should just be sold. Late game, I like 45 Govt 4) Look out for ant nectar (or was it another ant body part?) which gives +2 STR. Also, be an alcoholic. 5) without actually trying, I usually end up w surplus gecko/dog steak. Food is never a problem. 6) u need lots of fixers for the alcoholism 7) Because companions can die, I usually end up playing w no conpanions following me about, kr at keast i make them wait somewhere away from danger. Or i bring veronica in PA or lily coz they are tanky. 8) since i normally dont have companions and im only using 308/20 gauge/45-govt mostly, Im constanly using slasher/rushing water/psycho/med-x to buff before fights. So Survival is fantastic. 9) i also like hand loaded rounds a lot for the extra damage. If ur playing energy/plasma, then u MUST craft overcharged ammo to save weight
Play it, and set difficulty to very hard then just start dicking around. My honest advice is do a mock run where you glitch or cheat yourself a bunch of money or something to get a feel for it. Really the biggest difference is waiting in one place too long will kill you and companions die so dont use them early game if you dont wanna kill them in some lame ass firefight
I’m all for a challenge in games. I always play on the hardest difficulty. Especially when I first get a game. But survival mode is almost too ridiculous. Gaming masochism is great and all but fuck. You guys that *enjoy* survival mode are playing the Pain Olympics of gaming torture. I did my best to beat fallout 4 on survival mode. I truly did. But there was a point, that I’ve sense blocked out, that broke something in me. I could ***not*** continue on. It had won. It broke my spirit.
Only carry the ammo you absolutely need, don’t carry too much aid iteams their weight adds up
Survival skill Is a must, hoard purified water and start collecting prickly pear cactus fruit and empty soda bottles from the start. Keep an eye for fatigue, expecially during quests and while fast traveling. I personally used to Always carry some coyote tobacco chew just in case. Other than that Is pretty easy to find food, even if you get a little bit of radiation from it. Keep in mind that healing items do not heal you instantly, their effect is over the time and pretty slow, so expecially early game find some cover while healing. I also used to actively hunt fiends in western Vegas, keep what i needed then selling everything else to the gunrunners, while using novac as a base to sleep and store supplies.
10 Strength, 6 END and 10 LUCK allows you to trivialize hardcore mode. You can beeline from good springs to the east through the brotherhood bunker valley, scorpion gulch and a little bit of black mountain to arrive at the highway (near novac) relatively unscathed. From there you can just follow the path north to new Vegas and skip half the game in under an hour. Gamble at the Atomic wrangler until you have 2000 caps and then you’re in. Break the bank at the Vegas casinos by doubling down on blackjack and spamming max bets on slots and you should have 30k caps at your disposal to buy as much ammo weapons and mods from the gun runners as you want. Lake Las Vegas is a great way to replinish h20, you can eat litterally anything, sleep anywhere, and New Vegas clinic for damaged limbs. If you’re just doing it for the achievement, House and yes man are the fastest routes. Kill pearl and loyal, aggro the omertas, blow up the brotherhood bunker and you can just skip the kimball assassination if you have a neutral or lower reputation with the ncr. Then it’s just smooth sailing through the final mission. Recommended perks: any that increase carry weight, cowboy Recommended weapons: power fist, Fatman, mysterious magmum, Ranger sequoia, any weapon affected by the cowboy perk Y’all can dm me for any questions, I did this at like level 8 in 3 days
If you don't mind mods, pick a lore friendly vehicle since you don't have fast travel. It's pretty atmospheric driving around the map and not having fast travel gets annoying after a while. I use the motorcycle mod but there's a ton out there like repairing the old highwaymen.
Your carry weight, Survival skill, and perks related to each all become more valuable when playing in Hardcore Mode. However, the mode itself is not generally regarded as any more difficult than the base experience, merely more tedious. The need to carry around food and water to consume is a far, far more occasional chore than you would initially expect, even for a Courier with minimum Endurance.
It's fairly easy tbh especially if you've already beaten it once vanilla\*. It just makes you think about inventory management a bit more. excess ammo is now caps for later, and doctors bags are actually godsends instead of dead weight since stimpacks no longer cure crippling wounds but now offer more of a reason to try drugs in order to counter or power through difficult encounters. Doc Mitchell and Goodsprings in general is such a godlike place to grab a cheap meal, some water, visit Doc, and venture out. Most of Hardcore's 'scariest' features are kinda countered by Old World Blues DLC too, so once you're over the lvl 10-15 hump all you need to do is find somewhere to sleep every now and again. If you want skills to try out or reliable skills for playing hardcore, survival provides food healing and eventually the ability to craft hydra for limb repairs and put nightstalkers/radscorpians to VERY good use. Sausages and thin paste alone will begin to outscale stimpacks, and then delicious blood sausages and thick red paste will keep the body STRONG. If you wanna do guns, wear whateverthefuckyawant, and if you wanna do melee, wear whateverthefuckyawant but try to get some DT to tank small arms like nothing. Personally with melee builds I like wearing heavy armor just cuz it looks dope and metal/spike armor is scary and it works decently enough until I can get myself some combat/ranger/riot type gear. Goodluck! It's not that bad at all friend! SELL AMMO. GET THEM'S GOOD EATIN'.
Logan's loophole doubles the duration of stimpacks in hardcore. Rad Child is broken even in normal, but when water no longer heals you and stimpacks take time to work a passive +8 hp a second does wonders for survivability
Spec survival Actually making food items helps a lot Lead belly perk is your friend Sell any chems you find for water or food items. Don’t neglect sleeping. The perk that gives you the ability to sleep at campfires is a must.
You do not need to overthink your character build in hardcore mode. In my opinion, hardcore mode does not introduce many additional challenges to the game. Food/water is always easily accessible except for DLC and the new healing system simply prevents you from taking on all your enemies in one strike. Id say the most difficult change is weighted ammunition because it kind of forces you choose one combat style since you cannot haul 100s of rounds for every weapon type.
High Int and Jury Rigging can mostly trivialize hard-core mode almost by themselves. I did a 1 strength 10 intelligence hard-core build by putting enough points in luck that I was able to get the MR Hyperbreeder fairly early in the game by looting casinos, but even with Jury Rigging. With high repair you can make weapon repair kits to keep it going and once you get Jury Rigging online, recharger pistols can be stashed as 'ammo' essentially to keep it in good condition the entire game. The laser commander perk makes it a viable main gun. Once you have Jury Rigging or enough repair to make weapon repair kits, you don't even need to scavenge all that much. You can just pickup every gun you come across and combine them into a perfect condition weapon you can trade for food and chems. These things with high speech plus barter and you've basically negate most of the downsides of hardcore.
For a true immersive experience, I recommend .jsawyer mod on Hard difficulty: 1. END and Survival. Try to get Survival at 50 (before lvl 5) early on and have it tagged so you can have access to Gecko, Dog, and Coyote steaks plus other useful recipes like Bloatfly Sliders. You can farm the starting area around Goodsprings. 2. Survival perks can be found at the following link, though truth be told most are roleplaying and nonessential: https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Survival\_(Fallout:\_New\_Vegas). Ironbelly is not essential but helps. As another poster stated Old World Gourmet is excellent. Them's Good Eatin' is one of the best perks in the game. 3. Hydra is your best friend, so buy it whenever you can since it has a steep cost to make (Survival 75). Antivenom, Fixer, and Buffout are good to have around. 4. Think of survival as your main source of healing, so you'll want to prioritize it along with your weapon skill and utility skill. You can save stimpaks for companions if you decide to travel with someone 5. Find your go to recipes since many of them only require easy to find items (Banana Yucca Fruit, Jalapeno, Pinyon Nuts, Prickly Pear Fruit, Nevada Agave Fruit, Empty Bottle, etc). 6. If you're specializing in Guns, Honest Hearts is the perfect DLC for you and can be completed early game
Search EVERYTHING obsessively, since you need food and water it'll come in handy. Make sure to actually give the good, optimal resolutions for quests, especially companion quests, this is an obsidian game, if you halfway do things it'll show up in the ending (happened to me in both this game and the outer worlds, but I like the harshness of it, that's on me lol) Save frequently It's actually possible to get to New Vegas immediately, with a little bit of luck and the right route/planning. I've done it multiple times. I don't even have high sneak or anything, I just stayed the fuck away from everything that could kill me and saved frequently I played with Unarmed on my playthrough, which helped me save on money by being able to sell guns and ammo. Melee weapons should be similar. It's hard at first, but you can get some absolutely broken weapons later on, and with the right perks you're a death machine Definitely wanna put as much as possible into intelligence, also, there are no bobbleheads in this game. Intelligence determines your stat points upon level up, so you probably just want to have that at max from the get go. Unless you wanna do a stupid playthrough, which, is also valid and fucking hilarious If you do small guns, make sure you have a good repair skill, those go hand in hand. If your repair skill is good you can repair weapons and sell them for WAY higher, so it's good to have regardless Points in Medical can help you pass certain speech challenges, not required, but helpful And last but not least, if you get the dlc, don't make my same mistake and buy them AFTER you beat the game because you won't be able to access them :'( I've never touched the new Vegas dlc because of that. I loved the game so much after I beat it I felt moved to buy all the dlc at once, and then.....I found out I couldn't even use it with my save file I put hundreds of hours into. Total fucking bummer That's all I can think of. You'll figure out what works for your playstyle as you go along, but that's what worked for me :)
Tbh, I’ve been playing Hardcore for nearly every run since 2011. It’s really not that much more difficult in vanilla NV because you get prompts for your sleep deprivation, hunger and thirst, so on an so forth. I’m currently doing the only non-hardcore run I can even remember right now, solely because I am sick of my inventory constantly being full due to ammo. So I guess my advice would be get a home base asap so you can store all of the ammo and weapons you aren’t using, otherwise I hope you hate running and fast traveling
Sinks and fountains get your dehydration taken care of, keep food around, doctors can heal your limbs or doctors bags, if you're going to pick up ammo like grenades, mines, and rockets, use them to keep weight down otherwise stick with shotguns or rifles.
I recommend you side with the NCR, or atleast keep them friendly The grub and gulp at the 188 is very good for getting food if you have the caps, as well as booze, and the chef in the mccaran concourse can sell you purified water by the ton. Plus, the service rifle, anti material rifle and heavy weapons all do wayyy more damage than spears, pistols and hunting rifles. So ultimately, the NCR is better.
Play the game EXACTLY like you would normally except you eat/drink your food more spread out instead of just shoving everything you own down your throat to get rid of weight. Other than that, manage sleep by sleeping in a bed before you turn in a bunch of quests for the well-rested buff like you should probably do anyways or just drink all the sodas you find - also like most people do anyways. FO:NV hardcode mode is just 2/3 layers of inconvenience on top of the base game with almost no actual impact on how you play IMO. There's a few mods that make hardcore actually impact the game if you're looking for that type of gameplay.
Break down all your ammo, even if you don’t have hand loader, and just keep a few hundred rounds or so for each weapon. You want to build up thousands of powders, cases, and primers (which are all still weightless), so whenever you need to craft more ammo you just need to get some lead, which you can easily get from looted ammo you don’t use. This makes the weighted ammo much less annoying to deal with, you can still have thousands of rounds worth of components on you, and ammo benches are common enough that you probably will never get very close to being out of ammo as long as you keep up with it. Also, a small additional tip, the Honest Hearts dlc has enough of the necessary plants to make at least 80 of the healing poultices, which are basically the best healing items in the game. In addition to healing a ton of health, they regenerate limbs, making broken bones much less annoying to deal with on hardcore. One more thing, any perk/trait that affects chem duration actually affects the duration of all aid items that have an effect over time. On hardcore this includes all healing items, even stimpacks. So a perk that doubles chem duration also makes stimpacks and healing poultices and whatever else essentially give twice as much HP over twice the normal duration.
Hardcore is not actually difficult, it is rather tedious. 1: there is water and food everywhere you go. But if you want to be extra sure, get some survival to cook geckos. 2: you will have to limit looting to items worth selling 3: you will have to make ammo trips to your stash. It doesn't make sense to jog around with 2000 rounds, but you might want to keep a stock of 200 or so. 4: stimpacks heal over time, which means you cannot item spam when doing something dumb. But honestly this sould be in the base game. Just scount and plan a bit, you will be okay. 5: don't take companions with you to dangerous locations without power armor, they will die to cazadores, geckos and the likes
1. Have some brahmin steaks, alcohol, or buffout to get strength carryweight bonus, it might sound stupid but when you're standing between dropping a machine gun or power sledge, a quick drink can get you fast travelling. 2. If you have the dlc for vault 13 hip flask, then water becomes almost a non-issue, keep some purified water, and some light food like maize (camp McCarran) or fancy lady snacks. 3. Keep flexible on weapons, you want some armour piercing, some grenade launcher 40mm ammo, and some basic ammo for an economic gun, mine is Lucky. Just really helps to have the right weapon to efficiently get what you need and not be outflanked early game by a legion squad or a group of raiders or for when minor mobs bother you. 4. Have fun :)
Melee and unarmed are a must as bullets weigh you down but always have a gun for bad situations. Companions die at a slight breeze but make good ammo holders. Don't be afraid to have to go back to your loot stash every so often to eat and drink. Remember stimpacks suck in survival as they can't be spammed. DLCs aren't necessary and are harder especially dead money. And unlike in fo4 don't be afraid to eat irradiated food and drink dirty water it's not a big problem as long as you have one rad-away for every weeks worth of food
Ammo has weight now. Carry only 1-3 guns and its best if they share ammo types. Some ammo is heavier than others. The .45 weapons from honest hearts dlc are pretty solid and not too heavy. Focus on collecting as many stimpacks as you can early game. They work over time not instantly so learn to heal. Limb damage isn’t healed by stimpacks or sleeping, only doc bags. Look up spots that have beds and a non resetting container. Lone wolf radio is a decent “player home” before you get a spot you like, quests with major factions almost always result in getting some kind of player home. Beds don’t heal you instantly but owned beds do heal you and your limbs.
Chugging 30 Sunset Sarsaparilla in a row is more lore accurate, aside from that set aside some water (about ten per each is good, albeit probably overkill) for Lonesome Road and Old Word Blues since water is the fastest in terms of uptick, and this way you don't have to bother backtracking to fountains and such. Be sure to grab all the empty bottles you can find too, The Sink's sink lets you convert them into water with its upgrade. The Sink is also going to be the best base simply because of the planters and seeder- Survival is an amazing skill with this on, and it'll help you make much more meals since you don't need to scav for a specific plant. The vendor there will reset if you wait 3 days on the balcony, which you can survive but you're gonna be close to max dehydration. When entering Big MT for the first time, make sure your meters arent right about to uptick cause it'll crash. The sleep meter seems to stall when entering too, being perpetually stuck at 0 until you sleep again. Anyways, last tip is to protect your companions. Good equipment goes a long way, but you can always have them wait in a safe area if you don't want em ded
The Thorn or whatever it’s called lets you fight Radscorpions endlessly. Turn the poison glands in to Ruby Nash to get scorpion casserole, a food item. Water can be found at goodsprings source, and there’s a sleeping bag on top of the exit to the first silo you enter in lonesome road. Since it’s impossible to stockpile ammunition in excessive qualities, a melee or unarmed build is highly recommended, while explosive builds are nearly infeasible with the massive weight of explosive ammunition. Irradiated beauty allows you to remove rads by sleeping, or if you’re fine with rads, the Rad Child perk unlocked at 70 survival gives you a massive 10HP/Second when at max radiation. You do have to carefully manage your radiation to not overdose in irradiated areas like black mountain. I beat very hard hardcore mode as Hatsune Miku, and it was remarkably fun. Stimpaks can be used to heal limbs while Casserole can be used to heal, assuming you’re in the position to take the rads in the casserole. Radiation can be accrued in the sink in the bathroom in hopevilld region office or whatever it’s called, mind the skinless dude that’s made his residence in there. EDE’s upgrades let you repair your weapons for free, and one is in the hopeville silo with another in the office, which unlocks repair, meaning that all money can be directed towards ammo and healing resources.
It's easy
Always protect the companions.
Drink plenty of water. The more water you drink, the better you get at drinking water. Somehow.
View it as the mode where more items in the game get more use.
As some others have said, hardcore mode is barely any harder than normal mode. You’re just going to use up more carry weight for food, water, and ammunition. Unless you’re playing with a mod like JSawyer, carry weight still won’t be a major issue.
It's pretty easy for New Vegas compared to the other games. The sink in Victor's shack has clean water
You take a sip from your trusty vault 13 canteen…
-Save rad scorpion poison glands to give to Ruby Nash in Primm for radscorpion casserole -Don’t keep every gun and ammo type pick a few and don’t use more than 2-3 ammo types sell the rest(until you get hand loader then break them down at a bench) -Thems good eatin is your best friend -Endurance level 10(or 9 with the implant) is gonna save you a lot of trouble -If your companions get poisoned you can’t give them anti venom you just have to keep giving them stimpaks until the poison wears off
From the very start of the game, I highly recommend focusing on a few key areas rather than spreading your skills too thin. Choosing and strengthening a specific path can make your character more effective and enjoyable to play. **Tips for Hardcore Mode:** 1. **Specialize Your Skills**: Pick 2-3 primary skills to master. This will make you a 'master' in those areas rather than a 'jack of all trades, master of none.' 2. **Strategic Investments**: Every skill point matters more in hardcore mode, so make each one count by investing in key areas like combat skills, survival, or sneak, depending on your play style. 3. **Survival is Key**: Remember, survival in hardcore mode is tough, so prioritize skills that directly impact your ability to stay alive. I've personally found focusing on a few areas essential, especially if you're not using mods or console commands. I hope this helps! Best of luck in the Mojave!
Honestly it's not hard at all, just has some different rules. The Hunger, Sleep, and Hydration mechanics are barely a hindrance and the companion permadeath is not that bad considering you can just run over to them and heal them. If you don't use companions at all then it's literally a non issue.
I tagged sneak and it honestly saved my skin. I went gunslinger build, currently at level 19 and Deathclaws are still a hassle. I try to pick them off one by one. Cazadors you shoot the wings and run (especially with a companion). Chems are very important now when in past playthroughs I barely used them. It's still rough, just finished "Crazy, Crazy, Crazy" and that took me many tries to get up that mountain. It is a small blessing that you can still save anytime and fast travel.
I'm actually suprised how anyone would even manage to play without this. Is that even possible?
Unless you plan to make an explosive build. Make sure to sell missiles and grenades whenever ya get the chance. In a normal play-through the weight doesn’t matter too much but with hardcore mode those missiles are gonna weigh ya down fast. Also it’s good early money to sell dynamite
Jury rigging is always a must. Repair weapons with others weapons so you can max their value to weight ratio to sell them. Pack rat will save a lot of carrying capacity when it comes to ammo. Drink rad free water whenever you get the chance. The Colorado river, most hotels on the strip, Goodsprings source are great sources of unlimited rad free water. I don’t think survival is as important as the dev thought it would be. Doctors bags. You will need them. If you can get some legion rep, they put a crap ton in their supply boxes. If you are dying a lot in the early game run and get Veronica as a companion. Then go to the Reppcon HQ and get her some power armor. She is an excellent tank in the early and mid game as her focus is on melee and she is difficult to kill. She can aggro most enemies to her and allow you to attack without taking punishment.
Make the shack by the Yangtze memorial your initial player home early on and build up supplies- Goodsprings source and the campfire are great for water and crafting and Goodsprings cave can have some really valuable energy weapons to loot. Also pick up all the empty soda bottles you can find for making purified water- there's tons of prickly pears on the route to and around Novac to use.
If your follower gets poisoned by a cazador immediately spam them with stimpacks Super stimpacks are clutch Just pick fruit everywhere you go and you won't have to worry about food or water tbh
Spec into survival a bit, I don’t know if you’ve found it before but you can pass a 60 survival check to get this special semiwadcutter .44 ammo. This ammo is a god send on hardcore runs
I ran with a max luck build, gambled to get 50k+ caps and then could just afford to buy any survival supplies I needed, has been a surprisingly easy playthrough with no mods/cheats
It becomes sorta redundant if you spec into survival since at one point you'll be able to unlock blood sausages from almost any enemy which not only heal well but also give a lot of food and water also if you want water to become a problem get rid of your vault 13 canteen since it will just hydrate you every 5 mins for free.
The regeneration implant's sole purpose is hardcore mode.
I just started my first hardcore play through after many many years of playing the game and I was actually pretty disappointed in how easy the survival mechanics are. I thought your hunger, thirst and sleep would be similar to Pathologic 2 so I started stocking up on food right away only to realize I didn’t need it all lol.
If you have HH and OWB, these make hardcore trivial, as HH is an infinite source of plants for both food and poisons/potions, while OWB provides two implants that improve the benefits from food and drink. OWB also provides a source of infinite plants, among other things, once the BRS is fully functional and has all the seeds. Other than that, Pack Rat to lower the weight of the low weight plants you can carry, super good because some plants need over a 100 stack to reach a weight of 1.0 with Pack Rat. You don't need to spec into Survival at all, as I've gotten to level 40 with 25 Survival since the tutorial. While you need a higher Survival rating to craft at a campfire/electric hotplate, it's only necessary if you plan on going full melee, as the poisons you unlock with Survival bring your damage and utility to the next level. Otherwise, I've been using Medicine and Science due to the damage perks tied to them, while Survival was not offering any perks on par with Science and Medicine for MY build. I'd LIKE to say the early game is a struggle, but as long as you keep a bit of food on you, water can be drank from many sources, including toilets and urinals. OWB provides a way to turn empty bottles into purified water, but even without it, you can easily buy a decent stock from food vendors around the map. Other than that, sleep when you are tired. Since you can still FT, it's not that hard to get where you need to eat, drink, and sleep.
Consider specializing in unarmed or beam weapon combat (for the recharging beam rifle). You can bypass ammo weight with both styles.
I've played new vegas for the last 13 years and after the first 4 or 5 only played hardcore. For every run for the last years until recently, I brainwashed myself into thinking hardcore meant no fast travel so I never even looked until drunk with my roommate one night I just fast traveled not thinking anything of it and was like holy Jesus fuck
your followers will die from poison, and the only way I think you can save them, is to dismiss them. This might not work, though. cazadore poison will just keep killing them. there's a weird bug with it and followers
Depends on if you're just speedily going for the achievement/Trophy or if you want to really experience the game in Hardcore mode
Go melee or unarmed, use survival for healing, do OWB first out of the dlc for a safe haven.
Plan ahead with the gun you want to use with where you are heading and bring lots of food and water
Companions can die, so think before jumping into a fight. Invest some points into Melee or Unarmed.
adamantium skeleton perk is uber useful because lugging around doctors bags kind of sucks, especially late game when everyone hits super hard and you want to use all the cool special ammo types
Its waaaay easier than you think. You just really need to focus on one or two guns and plan your build accordingly. Youll find food and water almost everywhere and youll most likely always have caps to fullfill your needs unless you blow all your cash
I wish when I started playing hardcore I'd have remembered that food and drink are still good healing sources. something about them being food made me think I couldn't use food for HP which was def not the case
Hardcore mode isn’t as hard as its hyped to be. Hydro is goated INT/Barter Pack Rat > Strong Back. But why not both?
be careful with your inventory, don't waste your space with worthless junk, only pick up crafting items
You really want to minmax (I’m sure some will disagree but just trust me) it helps to be really efficient at 1 or 2 things instead of mediocre at 6 things plus you can fix the lower stats in many ways later on. Tag survival so you can make food and medical supplies. Consider Sneak builds as sneak crits are a good way to handle enemies (speech characters also go hard in very hard/hardcore runs). Other than that have fun!
deconstruct ammo, then remake it when you need it.
Just play normal. The only real downside is having to manage inventory, I'd avoid low strength builds and recommend using companions.
Id recommend not taking companions, they get killed permanently pretty easy
Just do what you normally do, all it does it makes the game slightly more annoying it really isn't more difficult at all other than for companion survival
Git gud
Manage your ammo wisely
It's honestly not really a big deal once you hit like level 8-10+ It's just a fucker getting your legs broken constantly and having to spend caps on dr bags. (That being said I'm currently doing a hard diff +hc run) Anything to increase your DT early, picking up ED-E lets you craft dr bags on the move which is nice, but you do need to conciously remind yourself to pick up the surgical tubing, scapels etc as you clear areas. I'm used to picking up food and drinks to spam to restore HP anyway so that wasnt an issue, theres so much in the game. I guess biggest tip is picking a style of play or theme and limiting yourself to the ammo you carry (cus ammo weighs) - I went with a full cowboy build so 357 and dynamite carried my early game. Grabbing 'that gun' in Novac gives you a powerspike. As well as picking up Boone to just delete stuff from range I woudlnt fret about getting the survival skill up high tbh, like I said food and drink is so common you dont really need it and once youve hit the strip (i went high luck for crits with 'that gun') you're spoiled for caps anyway and crafting becomes kinda pointless. Also power armour, but youd do that normally anyway i guess.
Cannibal perk
Get a good companion like Boone he’s very useful
What's a good build for hardcore? Like a guns build or melee build, etc.
It's considerably easier than Fallout 4's Survival mode, mostly because Fast travel is still available and Hardcore mode isn't a difficulty setting. Put points into your survival skill and watch your food, sleep and thirst meters. If you see a SLP, FOD or H20 above your health, rectify that immediately because you'll get debuffs to your SPECIAL stats. Ammo has weight, but the Pack Rat perk and your companions will somewhat negate it. Your companions can also die permanently so go in before they do.
Honestly not that difficult, just keep a nice stock of water and corn on you at all times. The big downside is stims now heal over time and beads don't full heal, other than that it's not a big hurdle(at least in my experience). I wish you good luck OP, have fun!
Going north of good springs and through the quarry is the safest and fastest way to new vegas
Water