User:ImmaculateKill

Creating the Ultimate Fallout 3 Character
The following is my recipe for creating the most powerful Fallout 3 character possible without console cheats or bug exploits. The build requires the Broken Steel add-on, without which it is not possible to maximize all SPECIAL attributes. My definition of an ultimate character is one that maximizes all SPECIAL attributes and Skills by the end of the game, and that has the fewest possible obsolete Perks (e.g., because they increased some stat that was later maximized anyway). Such a character has the most possible useful perks at the end, and is therefore the strongest. I have tried this build on Normal, Hard, and Very Hard, and can attest that it is very effective on all difficulty settings.

Gender
Start by choosing a Female sex for your character. This is useful later, since the Black Widow perk will give you an advantage against all members of the opposite sex, and there are more male adversaries in the game than female.

SPECIAL Attributes
All your SPECIAL attributes will be maximized by the end of the game no matter which initial settings you pick as long as you do not pick up any of the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. bobbleheads until you've reached level 30. However, certain minimal initial choices are required in order to qualify for certain perks. The following table shows the minimal settings required to obtain the important perks, along with the settings I recommend for greatest survivability until your attributes are maximized.

For those interested, here is a short justification for each of the above.
 * A Strength of 5 is required for the Strong Back perk, which is important for effective transportation of a flexible arsenal (not to mention loot).
 * A Perception of 6 is required for the Sniper perk. By starting at 5, the player can reach the required amount by acquiring the Ant Sight quest reward prior to reaching level 14.
 * An Endurance of 5 is required for the Toughness, Strong Back, and Rad Resistance perks, and 6 is required for the Life Giver perk if you decide you want it later.
 * Charisma is not necessary for any of the good perks and has no effect on gameplay other than to ease Speech challenges, which are better addressed by raising the Speech skill directly.
 * An Intelligence of at least 5 is required to maximize all Skills without wasting perks. Since it controls the rate at which your Skills increase, it is perhaps the most important attribute for early-to-midgame survival and for qualifying for the best perks. A starting value of 9 has the additional benefit of allowing you to pick up the Intelligence bobblehead early without waiting until level 30.
 * An Agility of at least 6 is required for both the Silent Running and Action Girl perks. It provides bonuses to Action Points and Sneak which are very important for survival in the early-to-mid game, so I recommend a relatively high initial setting.
 * A Luck of at least 6 is required for the Better Criticals perk. It also produces a higher chance of Critical Hits, which are very useful in combat.

Tag Skills
All your Skills will be maximized by the end of the game no matter which skills you tag. However, I recommend tagging Sneak, Small Guns, and Repair for greatest survivability in the early game. Sneak is essential for dealing maximal damage to enemies (through sneak attack criticals), and for tactical advantages (e.g. positioning yourself before battle, evading stronger enemies, etc.) Small Guns will be your weapons of choice at least until later in the game when you finally gain access to effective alterative weaponry. Repair is crucial for preventing all weapons from degrading beyond usefulness.

Optimal Skill Point Distribution
To maximize all Skills by the end of the game, you must be careful not to put too many of your skill points in any one Skill over the course of the game as you level up. The table above shows the minimum total skill points that you must invest in each skill throughout the game in order to max it by the end. As you level up, keep track of how many points you've invested in each skill on a piece of paper, and stop investing in that skill once you've reached the minimum required. Points obtained by tagging skills count toward the minimum, so start your table by recording 15 invested points for each skill you chose to tag.

Once you've reached the minimum required investment in all skills, you can safely distribute the remaining points of future level-ups however you wish without risking an un-maximizable skill. If you chose a starting Intelligence of 9 as recommended above, you will have a total of at least 126 extra skill points to spread around. (If you pick up the Intelligence bobblehead at around level 2-5, you'll have around 150-154 skill points of flexibility.) You may need to use some of these extra points early (i.e., before reaching the minimum required investment in some skills) to meet some of the skill requirements for Perks, or to push your Unarmed skill above the maximum (see below).

Pushing Unarmed Skill Over The Top
The Unarmed skill is the only skill that benefits from being raised over the 100 maximum. Your Pip Boy will continue to display it as 100, but internally the game keeps track of its real value, and your unarmed damage will continue to rise by 1 damage point per 20 Unarmed skill points. Late in the game this can become advantageous, as unarmed battle becomes one of the most effective ways of dealing with the strongest enemies in the game. Reading Pugilism Illustrated books and acquiring the Unarmed Bobblehead are the only ways to permanently raise the Unarmed skill after it has already reached 100. For a truly ultimate character, you must therefore avoid reading any Pugilism Illustrated, and don't pick up the Unarmed Bobblehead, until you have invested at least 79 skill points into your Unarmed skill. This will use up 79-38=41 of your 126 available extra points (see above), leaving 85 extra skill points of slack to help you meet the requirements of perks as they arise. If done correctly, your final Unarmed skill will be 141 (2 base + 20 from Endurance + 5 from Luck + 10 from Bobblehead + 25 from books + 79 from skill points), rewarding you with 2 extra points of unarmed damage per strike beyond what is otherwise possible.

(Note: With the Comprehension perk one can raise Unarmed permanently to 170. However, since this adds only 1 extra point of unarmed damage, I consider this a waste of a perk better spent on something more powerful.)

Perk Selection
To create the ultimate character, one must avoid choosing any perk that is made obsolete by later game developments. Since it is possible to maximize all attributes and skills by the end of the game with the aid of only one perk (Almost Perfect at level 30), other perks whose only function is to increase these values are not useful in the long run. This observation yields a fairly non-negotiable pattern of perk choices at least until level 24. Perk choices for levels 24-29 are more flexible, and I provide some commentary and recommendations for those levels in a separate section below.

Levels 2-23
Most of the perk choices listed in the table above are so significantly better in the long run than any other available perk at the same level, that they are essentially non-negotiable for anyone wishing to create the ultimate character. The only possible exceptions are Gunslinger at level 6, Scrounger at level 8, and Rad Resistance at level 23. These were selected for the following reasons.

At level 6, the only perks of long-term usefulness are Gunslinger, Toughness, Bloody Mess, Strong Back, and Demolition Expert. (Fortune Finder is useless because in a normal game you will acquire more caps than there are things to buy anyway.) Of these, Gunslinger is the most useful at level 6 when your character is still having trouble shooting straight. Toughness comes next. Bloody Mess I defer to level 11 when your damage is higher and +5% therefore means more. Strong Back is useful for effective porting of big guns and loot, but not strictly necessary so I defer it to level 26 (see below). Demolition Expert becomes most useful very late in the game in combination with Bottlecap Mines, so I recommend taking all three ranks of it within levels 27-29 instead (see below).

Scrounger is not a directly damage-dealing perk, but on Hard and Very Hard one of the biggest challenges is finding enough ammo to take down the large number of tough enemies. In addition, many of the best weapons are essentially unusable without Scrounger since their requisite ammo is otherwise too rare.

Rad Resistance is argued by some to be useless since radiation resistance can be maximized without it by wearing things like radiation suits. However, try to battle Super Mutant Overlords in a heavily irradiated area while wearing a radiation suit and you will quickly discover that it doesn't work well. This doesn't tend to arise until late in the game, so I choose it at level 23.

I do not recommend Mysterious Stranger at all because it backfires once you obtain Grim Reaper's Sprint&mdash;you don't get your AP back when the mysterious stranger appears.

Levels 24-29
Perk choices at levels 24-29 are slightly less clear-cut. I recommend first taking both remaining ranks of Iron Fist due to the increasing usefulness of unarmed combat late in the game. Unarmed combat starts to become very effective because it is silent and can immobilize even the strongest enemies via Paralyzing Palm. This allows you to gracefully dispatch groups of impossible enemies even when there is no weapon (for which you have a large reserve of ammo) that can dispatch them in a single round of V.A.T.S.

Next I recommend Strong Back to allow effective porting of big guns. This is necessary if you want to carry a flexible arsenal to battle (not to mention the considerable convenience of hauling more loot in fewer trips).

Finally, I recommend taking all three ranks of Demolition Expert to close out levels 27-29. This raises your damage with Bottlecap Mines to a whopping 802 points&mdash;the highest damage of any weapon aside from nukes&mdash;so that you can put a sizable dent in the mega-enemies of late-game on Very Hard. If you never use grenades or mines and you want to choose something else, the following are all reasonable choices:
 * Choose Fast Metabolism if you find yourself using Stimpaks a lot to survive tough enemies.
 * Choose Chemist or Chem Resistant if you find yourself relying upon chems to increase damage or action points during battle.
 * Choose Light Step if you keep running into traps during combat that you don't have time to disarm manually.
 * Choose Life Giver if none of the above applies. (+30 HP isn't much when you're already at 600, but every little bit helps.)

Level 30
At level 30 you must choose Almost Perfect in order to raise all SPECIAL attributes to 9. Do not pick up any of the SPECIAL bobbleheads until after you choose this perk so that you can pick them all up afterwards, raising them all to the max of 10 and achieving the ultimate character. Picking up the Skill bobbleheads earlier is fine, and will help you reach the perk requirements in the table above, but see the commentary above on the importance of delaying your acquisition of the Unarmed bobblehead. In addition, you can pick up a SPECIAL bobblehead if that skill has already been permanently raised to 9. This means that if you started your Intelligence at 9 as recommended above, you can pick up the Intelligence bobblehead as soon as you find it (the earlier the better).

Item Collection
The gameworld of Fallout 3 is littered with a vast array of junk and your carrying capacity is limited, so it is important to know which to collect and which to ignore. Here is a list of what to look for and why.

Skill Books
The most important items to obtain for stat maximization are skill books, which each permanently increase a skill by one point when read. There are 323 skill books in the game, of which 319 are reliably obtainable given the Perk recommendations above. With a starting Intelligence of 9, you will need to find 193 of them to maximize all skills (234 to also raise Unarmed to 141). Many are impossibly difficult to spot, so to find them all you should go to the Fallout 3 books page, use the sorting widget to sort the table by Map Location, and print it out. Then whenever you go to a new location, you can consult your list to see which books you should be searching for as you explore the area, and check them off as you find them. You can read each book as soon as you find it, except that Pugilism Illustrated should be collected and not read until you have invested at least 79 distributable skill points into Unarmed (see above).

Weightless Items
All weightless items should be taken. This includes ammo, stimpaks, and even seemingly useless things like metro tickets, which can suddenly come in handy when an awoken Protectron demands one of you.

Weapons and Armor
Saved weapons and armor are useful for repairing equipment. I try to grab all guns except for Assault Rifles and Hunting Rifles, which are extremely plentiful and therefore not worth collecting. Armor is typically heavier, so I typically only try to take:
 * Talon Combat Armor (for repairing Ranger Battle Armor)
 * Power Armor (all variants)
 * Roving Trader Outfit and Roving Trader Hat (to save some caps during expensive purchases until your Barter skill is maximized)

Junk to Collect En Masse
I recommend trying to grab as many as possible of the following miscellaneous items:
 * All non-irradiated health-raising items, such as Purified Water and Blood Packs (which become more useful after the Blood Ties quest)
 * Abraxo Cleaner and Turpentine (for constructing Nuka Grenades)
 * Carton of Cigarettes, Pack of Cigarettes, and individual Cigarettes have a fairly high value-to-weight ratio, and can be traded for valuable items from merchants in lieu of spending precious caps.
 * Flour is an incredibly rare item and should be snatched up by anyone lucky enough to stumble upon it. It is an essential ingredient for Mississippi Quantum Pie, which can be stacked with other items to temporarily boost AP to high levels.
 * Lunchboxes and Sensor Modules (for constructing Bottlecap Mines)
 * Nuka-Cola Quantum (necessary to complete the Nuka-Cola Challenge quest, create Nuka Grenades, create Mississippi Quantum Pie, and boost AP)
 * Pre-War Book (used in the Yearning for Learning quest)
 * Scrap Metal (used in the Walter's Scrap Metal quest)
 * Stealth Boy (for temporary invisibility)
 * Sugar Bombs (used in the Murphy's Bombing Run quest)

Junk to Collect Sparingly
I recommend amassing at least a few (around 10-20 total) of each of the following:
 * Conductor (for constructing Rock-It Launchers)
 * Crutch (for constructing Railway Rifles)
 * Deathclaw Hand (for constructing Deathclaw Gauntlets)
 * Firehose Nozzle (for constructing Rock-It Launchers)
 * Fission Battery (for constructing Railway Rifles)
 * Lawnmower Blade (for constructing Shishkebabs)
 * Leaf Blower (for constructing Rock-It Launchers)
 * Leather Belt (for constructing Deathclaw Gauntlets)
 * Medical Brace (for constructing Deathclaw Gauntlets)
 * Motorcycle Gas Tank (for constructing Shishkebabs)
 * Motorcycle Handbrake (for constructing Shishkebabs)
 * Paint Gun (for constructing Dart Guns)
 * Pilot Light (for constructing Shishkebabs)
 * Pressure Cooker (for constructing Railway Rifles)
 * Radscorpion Poison Gland (for constructing Dart Guns)
 * Steam Gauge Assembly (for constructing Railway Rifles)
 * Surgical Tubing (for constructing Dart Guns)
 * Toy Car (for constructing Dart Guns)
 * Vacuum Cleaner (for constructing Rock-It Launchers)
 * Wonderglue (for constructing Deathclaw Gauntlets)

Initial Quests
Fallout 3 has a very open world in which quests can be attempted and completed in mostly any order. However, early survival can be difficult since your character is still weak. Performing the following tasks first will help you get the most out of the rest of the game:

Leaving Vault 101
Once you leave Vault 101 you will not be able to return for some time. Thus, before leaving you should be sure to do the following:
 * Be sure you've obtained the Medicine Bobblehead from your Dad's desk.
 * Be sure you've obtained the Vault 101 Utility Jumpsuit and the Vault Lab Uniform.
 * Be sure you've obtained (and read) the Grognak the Barbarian book given to you at your birthday party.
 * Take with you everything else you can carry, such as armor, scrap metal, and guns. Don't worry about food.

Immediately upon leaving Vault 101 you will advance to level 2. With your first allocation of skill points, be sure to increase your Explosives and Repair skills to at least 25 each. This will help you complete two early quests that advance your level more rapidly early on.

First Stop: Megaton
Once outside the Vault, go into sneak mode, and head straight to Megaton, which should be marked on your map and compass with a green quest marker. Once there, do the following in this order:
 * Complete The Power of the Atom quest (which will give you a place to store all your loot, and a place to sleep well rested that boosts your XP acquisition rate by 10%).
 * Complete the Treatment quest (which will open the Walter's Scrap Metal quest to help you gain levels more quickly in the beginning).
 * Start the Wasteland Survival Guide quest and complete the food and medicine objective. Before leaving the Super-Duper Mart, grab a pilot light (from the room with the Protectron), and a motorcycle gas tank and handbrake (in the other back room). These will be important later. You should also end up with a few good weapons from dead raiders, such as an Assault Rifle and a Hunting Rifle. When concluding the objective, note that your conversation response to Moira has a significant long-term impact. See the Later Quests section below for details.

Second Stop: Rivet City
Next, go to Rivet City, which is located at the far southeast corner of the map. The best way is probably to fast-travel to the Super-Duper Mart, sleep there until about 7pm so it's dark, then sneak north to the river and follow it southeast, swimming when necessary. The more direct route across land is more dangerous in terms of enemies.

Once at Rivet City, pick up the Intelligence bobblehead in the science lab if your Intelligence is already at 9 as recommended above. (If you picked a starting Intelligence less than 9, then you will have to wait until level 30 to pick it up, since otherwise it will not be possible to maximize all your stats.)

Next, complete the Replicated Man quest so as to get BOTH the Wired Reflexes perk and A3-21's Plasma Rifle. Both of these will be life-savers at several points early in the game. Getting to Pinkerton at this early stage may be difficult. If you followed the skill recommendations above, your Sneak skill should be enough to avoid the Mirelurks (though getting past them undetected may take a few tries, so be sure to save before attempting) and your Explosives skill should be enough to disarm the mines.

Third Stop: Arefu
Once you've completed The Replicated Man, return to Megaton (by fast-travelling) and do the Blood Ties quest. This will net you your first Shishkebab Schematics as a quest reward along with access to the Repair Bobblehead in Evan King's house in Arefu. (Eat some Mentats and wear your Vault 101 Utility Jumpsuit if you don't have enough Lockpick skill to pick the lock.) To complete the Just For The Taste Of It quest below you'll need one more set of Shishkebab Schematics. To get it, travel to the unmarked Brotherhood Outcast shack just southwest of SatCom Array NN-03d, where it will be sitting on a workbench. This is a somewhat long journey, but at this point your character should be strong enough to survive an over-land, cover-of-night, sneak across the Wasteland starting from Arefu. Attempting the journey in daylight is not recommended.

Fourth Stop: Minefield
Return to Megaton and begin the land mines objective of the Wasteland Survival Guide quest. Approach Minefield from the road to the south but don't go into town. (If you do, you'll begin a faceoff against Arkansas that you might not want to do yet.) Instead, go to the southwest corner of the Gibson House (the house on the left as you're coming up the road from the south) and you'll find a lawnmower with a lawnmower blade in it. Take it. This is the last component you need to make a Shishkebab, so return to Megaton.

Fifth Stop: The Nuka-Cola Plant
With two sets of Shishkebab schematics, an elevated Repair skill due to the Repair Bobblehead, and all four Shishkebab components, you should now be capable of making a pretty decent Shishkebab weapon. Use the workbench in Moira's shop to make it. (Wear the Vault 101 Utility Jumpsuit while making it for best results.) Then go to the Nuka-Cola plant and complete the Just For The Taste Of It quest to obtain Ledoux's Hockey Mask, which is probably the best piece of headgear in the game.

Warning: I consistently find the NukaLurk battle to be one of the toughest battles in the entire game. The Shishkebab is the most effective weapon for battling them, but even with that advantage they are formidable opponents and can kill you in about four hits. Getting sneak attack criticals with the Shishkebab will be essential. In the Offices area there is a partially collapsed cubicle on the first floor at the center south of the map where the NukaLurks cannot enter. This is a good place to which to retreat and recover Action Points, after which you can emerge and attempt another onslaught. Note that while all the enemies are named "NukaLurk", a few will be much more powerful than the others (they are the equivalent of Mirelurk Hunters). If you cannot defeat them, an easier option is to just avoid them by sneaking (but watch out because they are very perceptive!).

By the end of the quest you might be pretty irradiated. If so, return to Megaton, finish the Minefield objective of the Wasteland Survival Guide quest if you haven't already, and then complete the radiation poisoning objective for a free cure.

Later Quests
Most of the later quests will not have outcomes that significantly affect your final character, but a few do. Below are the quests that must be completed in a particular way to achieve the ultimate character.
 * The Those! quest must be completed prior to reaching level 14 in order to acquire the Sniper perk. At the end of the quest you must choose Ant Sight as your reward, so that your Perception will be high enough to get the perk.
 * The Oasis quest has three possible paths. To achieve the ultimate character you must side with Harold and get the Barkskin perk at the end. (Also don't forget to get Yew's Bear Charm, which is important for maximizing your Speech skill.)
 * The Wasteland Survival Guide quest yields five possible Survival Guru rewards depending on the majority of your conversation responses to Moira upon meeting the objectives. The best two rewards are the ones obtained by mostly "snide" or mostly "tough" responses. Of these two choices I recommend the "snide" route. It rewards a +3% critical chance, which is better than the +6% DR awarded by "tough" for characters that spend more time delivering damage than taking it. (A more thorough analysis can be found in the Discussion section below.) If for some reason you want the +6% DR instead, you can achieve the requisite Endurance or Strength of 7 by wearing a Wasteland Wanderer Outfit or taking Buffout before talking to Moira at the end of each objective.

Final Ultimate Character
At the completion of the build above, your character should achieve the following derived statistics without chems: A single Med-X suffices to max out damage resistance at 85%, and a single Rad-X brings radiation resistance to a near-max of 84% (or full max of 85% with The Pitt). Combining NukaLurk meat, Nuka-Cola Quantum, Mississippi Quantum Pie, Jet, and Ultrajet can temporarily boost AP to 265 (270 with The Pitt using Tribal Power Armor and Fire Ant Nectar).

V.A.T.S. Debates
Much of the above build is based on the thesis that the ultimate character should spend as much time in V.A.T.S. as possible. Even if you are an expert at first-person-shooting and believe you don't need V.A.T.S., consider that while in V.A.T.S. your character will take only 10% of damage otherwise suffered and receives a +15% bonus to critical chance. If your starting damage resistance is 80%, this is like having 98% damage resistance, which is unattainable without V.A.T.S. even with chems since damage resistance is formally capped at 85%.

Roleplaying
If your goal is to play a particular persona rather than to maximize your combat effectiveness, the above build is probably not for you. That having been said, stat-maxing leads to a surprisingly interesting character development. The character above starts as a tough gunslinger toating her trusty 10mm, then progresses to a stealthy sharp-shooter favoring hand-customized rifles, and finally learns the ways of hand-to-hand combat to become a deadly ninja stealth artist. This keeps the game quite interesting as it forces you to learn new strategies and techniques to match your newfound abilities.

Survival Guru Reward
Choosing objectively between the +3% critical chance and +6% DR rewards of the Wasteland Survival Guide quest is difficult because of the many factors involved. Critical chance is capped at 100% and DR is capped at 85%. Both can be temporarily maximized without either reward (e.g., with Med-X and Firelance), so the decision only affects common-case battles that don't use these temporary measures. In the common case with standard top-level equipment (possibly degraded slightly), both rewards will tend to be fully used without being cut short by the caps. Which is better in such a case turns out to depend on the weapon in use. For example, with the Wazer Wifle the +3% critical chance bonus gets amplified by a x1.5 critical multiplier and a x2 critical damage bonus to achieve an average 9% damage increase (13.5% with Better Criticals)! But with the Xuanlong Assault Rifle, a x1 critical multiplier and mere x1.25 critical damage bonus yields a disappointing 3.75% average damage increase (5.625% with Better Criticals).

However, regardless of which weapon you prefer, there is a significant gameplay argument that puts the critical chance reward above the alternatives: The ultimate character inevitably spends a lot more time delivering damage than taking it. If you're sitting there trading bullet for bullet with a Super Mutant Overlord without any effort to take cover, you won't last long even with the ultimate character. Thus, rewards that increase your damage-dealing capabilities turn out to be far more useful than rewards that increase your ability to withstand the comparatively few hits you take. I therefore recommend the +3% critical chance reward as significantly more valuable to the ultimate character than the +6% DR reward.

Bad Perks
As argued above, any Perk (other than Almost Perfect) whose sole function is to increase SPECIAL attributes, skills, XP, caps, level, or karma, is ultimately wasted, since all of these can be maximized without said perk. In addition, any perk that increases HP outside of combat is wasted because of the great variety of better alternatives (e.g., stimpaks, especially with Fast Metabolism). There are 16 perks not covered by this reasoning that are not recommended above. Here they are in order of level, with reasons not to take them.
 * Child At Heart provides no advantage that cannot be duplicated by a high Speech skill or caps.
 * Animal Friend is useless at high levels because no affected animals are strong enough to be a threat or useful ally.
 * Mister Sandman is ineffectual because it is already easy to kill sleeping opponents.
 * Mysterious Stranger has a bad interaction with Grim Reaper's Sprint that robs you of your AP.
 * Nerd Rage! requires your HP to be so low before the DR benefit kicks in that it's relatively useless in practice. With base DR already at 80%, it only gives you 5% more DR anyway, which is better achieved via Med-X.
 * Adamantium Skeleton's function is obviated by the ubiquity of stimpaks.
 * Computer Whiz is rendered useless by not locking any computers. (Just power down and retry rather than risking a fourth password attempt.)
 * Infiltrator is likewise rendered useless by not forcing any locks.
 * Explorer is obviated by the Map page on this Wiki.
 * Puppies! is only useful if you've killed off Dogmeat. I recommend only taking him to non-combat areas to find hidden items so that he won't die.
 * Quantum Chemist is only useful if you need to make a huge number of Nuka Grenades. The number you can make without it is already so high that it seems doubtful that you would need more.
 * Nerves of Steel would be excellent except that the AP regeneration rate it provides is so slow (0.1 AP/sec) that it will never have any observable effect. (Basically your entire AP bar will regenerate before Nerves of Steel will ever augment it enough to give you an extra shot.)
 * Rad Tolerance only affects minor radiation poisoning, which is no threat to a maximized character (it doesn't even reduce HP).
 * Warmonger is obviated by simply acquiring all the blueprints.
 * Rad Absorption is ridiculously slow (at -0.05 rad/sec you'd have to leave your game running for over an hour just to cure one level of radiation poisoning) and is completely obviated by Rad Away.
 * Nuclear Anomaly is potentially useful but is impossible to acquire with Almost Perfect, which is essential for maxing everything else.