Crafting Tips and Tricks
- When you start the game you’ll only have a few basic recipes for weapons, armor, cooking, and other items. The only way to learn more is by finding these recipes in the wild, buying them from traders or other players, or finding them in chests.
- Many basic food recipes can be learned just by finding the food or plant item for the first time.
- Weapon and Armor Mods can be found in the world or in chests, and you can also find plans the same way, or learn more plans for mods by scrapping the associated weapon. Scrapping a weapon or armor in perfect condition may even give you the recipe for how to make it.
- Weapons and armor can break over time, but they won’t disappear, they just can’t be equipped – but you can repair them at Weapon and Armor workbenches.
- When building your CAMP, you can “Blueprint” other structures you place down to save the layout of your CAMP. When you log out and then back in, or need to move the location of your CAMP, you can pull up the blueprint list to instantly restore your CAMP to the way it was. Just remember that your CAMP cannot be placed too close to other static Locations and points of interest, and must be on somewhat flat terrain.
- Store, Don’t Scrap – after placing your ideal campsite, if you need to get rid of something you plan to put somewhere else, don’t scrap it: you’ll only get a portion of the resources you used to make it. By storing an item, it can be brought back (or placed in a blueprint) without an associated cost.
Combat Tips and Tricks
- Early on in your adventures, you’ll find that guns may be more plentiful than ammo, especially when fighting the Scorched, who will always drop the weapons they carry. Fight smart, and have a melee weapon as backup to conserve ammunition. You can also visit Tinker Stations to craft more ammo.
- VATS has changed in Fallout 76 – your target is highlighted in real time, with a constantly changing percent chance to hit based on your stats and the distance to the target. You don’t need to manually aim – as firing will pull form the percent chance to hit alone, and will fill the Critical Meter you can use for a guaranteed hit.
- Tapping the VATS button is a good early warning system that can highlight dangers you may not be aware of – especially minefields or small enemies – but each tap will drain your Action Points, even if there’s nothing to target, so don’t spam the VATS button!
- Before you reach level 5, you’ll be unable to participate in PvP, and will have Pacifist mode permanently enabled. Once past level 5, shooting another player will deal reduced damage and alert them if they wish to fire back – at which point damage will be normalized, or will stay reduced if they do not fight back. If you don’t want to accidentally engage in PvP, you can re-enable Pacifist Mode in the options to avoid this.
- Any player who kills someone that has not fought back will be labeled a Murderer, and their icon will become red on the map, but they will not be able to see other player locations. They will also have a much larger bounty of caps on their head that is paid from their own stash if they are killed in revenge.
- If you keep murdering and have no Caps to pay out as a bounty, you’ll instead be hit with a sizable debuff when killed, recuding your damage output across the board – both against monsters and players – for a certain amount of time.