Disc One Nuke / Fallout

Examples of Disc One Nukes in the Fallout franchise.

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Fallout

• After leaving Vault 13, you can head straight to Lost Hills and receive the quest to go to the Glow to join the Brotherhood of Steel. It requires some Save Scumming to get there and back safely, and you'll need to stop in the Hub to pick up supplies (Rope and Rad-X, since the radiation of the Glow is fatal otherwise), but if you can make it to the Glow, the holotape you need for the Brotherhood's quest is on the first floor. There are traps along the way, but even at Level 1 you can survive them (though you may want to rest in-between to heal), and there are no enemies or skillchecks you'll have to worry about. With the holotape in hand you can return and be welcomed into the Brotherhood, and can get tons of end-game gear (including Power Armor) in their base, not to mention that the Glow itself has some valuable items too.
• After you enter the overworld for the first time and let a day pass (which you can do by just walking to the next tile and back), you can immediately head back into Vault 13. By passing a Speech check, you can get a Shotgun, a Medkit and some additional Stimpacks, which will let you defend yourself very well until you reach the Hub. You can also get over 40 Water Flasks for over 1000 caps just selling things, letting you buy pretty much anything you need.
• It's possible to skip Shady Sands and just go to Junktown and you can provoke Doc Morbid into attacking you. His bodyguards aren't that tough and they carry shotguns and leather armor, for some nice starting gear once you loot them.
• In "city" areas of the overworld, it's possible to run into two gangs of raiders fighting each other. You can sit back and wait to see who's going to win before easily picking them off now that they're weakened and loot both parties for their gear.
• In the second level of Vault 15, you can find a 10mm SMG. It uses the most common ammo in the game and is just as powerful as the 10mm pistol you begin the game with, but has a higher clip size and its Burst can shred pretty much anything at close range. And it can use armor-piercing ammo, too. There's little reason to use anything else until you start going after the Super Mutants and the Children.
• The most painless way to earn money in the game is to tag the Gambling skill, dump all your skill points from your first two levels into it and then pay a visit to any roulette table in the game (Gizmo's casino in Junktown is within easy reach of the start and the Hub's Maltese Falcon not far off from there). Then just hold down the 1 and 4 keys on your keyboard, wait a few minutes and you'll have tens of thousands of caps to spend on whatever you wish - skill books, weapons, armor and all the drugs you can carry. Much of the rest of the game becomes fairly trivial after a trip to the Hub library and then the Gun Runners.
• There's a loaded Plasma Pistol in the sewers of Necropolis that can be obtained as soon as the player leaves the vault.

Fallout 2

• The famous "Navarro Run" can be done as soon as you leave Arroyo. Head straight south to reach San Francisco and talk to the Brotherhood of Steel member there to get a quest to infiltrate the Enclave outpost at Navarro. While getting between places on the overworld requires Save Scumming to avoid the hostile random encounters that can drop you in a single hit, the quest itself requires no skillchecks and is very easy to do. Once you get to Navarro you have free run to loot most of the place, giving you tons of end-game equipment including a Combat Shotgun, a Super Sledgehammer, a Plasma Rifle, and most importantly, the Advanced Power Armor, the most powerful armor in the game short of one found in the Very Definitely Final Dungeon. You'll also receive a ton of experience points for actually doing the quest, enough to shoot you up several levels, and you get access to the Brotherhood safehouse, which has a suit of normal Power Armor for a companion to wear, and the Pulse Pistol and the Pulse Rifle, two of the best energy weapons in the game.
  • Around San Francisco, you may run into Hubologists fighting off mercenaries or press gangers. The Hubologists can often win and will be non-hostile after, so you can freely loot the corpses of the dead for items like Rippers, Plasma Pistols, Needler Pistols, and H&K G11Es. Between these encounters and the loot found at Navarro and the Brotherhood outpost, you'll have tons of spare stuff to sell to the merchants in town, who stock the best equipment in the game in large quantities. By the time the player leaves San Francisco and decides to return to the main questline, they can easily be over Level 10, have the best armor in the game, have their pick of end-game weapons with tons of ammo to use, lots of spare caps, and spare high-end gear for Sulik and Vic once you recruit them.
• There's another run you can do, less nuke-ish but also less difficult than the Navarro one. You're supposed to get to the NCR about halfway through the game, but nothing's stopping you from getting there immediately - in fact, even random encounters are less murderous since it's not that advanced in terms of plot. In the first area you enter you'll find Buster's gun shop, from which it is trivially easy to steal even if you have no points in the skill - given some patience you can rob him of everything he has, making yours among other things tons of ammo, a P90 and some pretty effective combat armor. And then you can also pickpocket the guards outside the shop for two Bozar assault guns, which run on the most common ammo around, effortlessly shred anything you encounter in the first half of the game and are perfectly capable of putting serious dents even in late-game enemies. To make the whole thing even more fun Buster restocks his shop every few days, entirely uncaring that his merchandise seems to inexplicably vanish every time you happen to be in town.
• The Den, the second town after Klamath, has two traders who can both be easily murdered with basic weapons and drop lots of loot, neither giving a Karma hit or even turning the townspeople against you.

Fallout Tactics

• It is possible to get some weapons early. You just need some poisons or drugs. You can try to get the brotherhood bunker encounter and kill the 2 guards using poison or drug overdose and get their miniguns, or poison the merchant and his guards to get Pancor Jackhammers and the Browning machine gun (though good chance you are not strong enough to use it yet, and ammo is rather scarce early game). If you get one of the merchant encounter, you can get EMP shotgun shells as well which let you easily bust the turrets in Preoria mission, along with a FN FAL rifle. If you get the Radscorpions fighting civilians encounter early enough and let the civilians die (which is easy, because they're fighting the Radscorpions with their bare hands) and loot the corpses, you'll find out that at least one of the civilians was carrying a Combat Shotgun.
• You can also use the gambling bug: Bet nothing for the merchant's entire inventory, click on gamble repeatedly, and after 1-2 minutes, you'll suddenly have his entire inventory...

Fallout 3

• The first two games have a steady armor hierarchy: Leather Armor -> Metal Armor -> Combat Armor -> Power Armor. The exception being the Power Armor, which you can get much earlier than you would expect. Not only will you only be using the Combat Armor for a short period of time prior to getting the Power Armor, but you might even find it beforehand—perhaps even before the Metal Armor. Fallout 3, however, is a different story. The first shop you'll come across (Craterside Supply) offers a steady stream of Leather Armor, and at random intervals, they'll have a set of Combat Armor available. The massive Damage Resistance spike makes the early game quests a cakewalk, and you'll be able to repair it by waiting for it to reappear, or by going to Rivet City which sells it in bulk. Expect to use it for pretty much the majority of the game, even when you gain the ability to use Power Armor since it has nearly the same DR but weighs significantly less. Furthermore, for a Good Karma player, it can appear even earlier. A player that has made the right decisions can have Talon Company attack you not long after you leave the Vault. Said Talon Company members carry their own variant of the Combat Armor that can be taken from their bodies (should you defeat them). Even better, if you prefer the standard Combat Armor, you can use the Talon Company variant to repair it. And, as Talon Company Mercs are a recurring encounter, they'll just keep coming.
• For the melee player in Fallout 3, there's a readily available equivalent to the Disc One Nuke which will see you through the entire game. The Shishkebab, the game's second most powerful melee weapon after the Awesome, but Impractical Jack the Ripper, is crafted from items laying in close proximity of each other in your warm up dungeon (Springvale School), and a schematic obtained from a merchant in easy reach of your first base town or as a quest reward for an early sidequest. The price may be high, but far from unobtainable at that level of the game. Although it doesn't reach its full potential until you get the third, well-hidden schematic and invest in the Pyromaniac perk to boost its damage by 50%, even at suboptimal power it beats the pants off its contemporaries.
• You can get Powered Armor at any time — but to use it, you need training, which is only available after a story event. However, if you have Operation Anchorage installed, you can complete it straight out of the Vault and are awarded Power Armor Training, as well as a suit of T-51b Power Armor that never degrades (and avoids the Agility penalty of T45-d and Enclave power armors). Alternatively, if you don't like power armor, there is also Chinese Stealth Armor in there, and among the stashed weapons is a Gauss Rifle and Jingwei's Shocksword. Oh, and please put the armor on immediately as Defender Sibley and his mooks will turn on you shortly after.
• You can complete a quest in Rivet City early on and get a unique Plasma Rifle, with a higher ammo capacity and damage output.
• The Xuanlong Assault Rifle is a unique Chinese Assault Rifle with boosted damage and an increased magazine size. It can destroy most low-level enemies and remains useful throughout the game. All it takes is completing a somewhat Guide Dang It! unmarked quest to spawn it, which is performed at an early location in the main quest line.
• With the DLC Broken Steel installed the companion Dogmeat which without the DLC has health around 500, levels with you and starts at 2,500 hp at level 1. Later hits around 15,000 when you hit level 30. Since he's coded to be a higher priority target than the player's character, Dogmeat will draw attackers' attention away from the player character, meaning that enemies will attack a near invincible companion leaving you to attack freely without having them attack you. Dogmeat can be found as soon as the vault is left for the first time.
• The Alien Blaster is found lying around a location open to the Capital Wasteland. Although the gun is very powerful, its ammo is very limited and it's impossible to obtain more (since it's of extra-terrestrial origin). There are more alien weapons if you download the "Mothership Zeta" expansion. And more power cells, too.
• It is possible in the game's early stages to make one's way to Evergreen Mills, home of a fairly large band of raiders. There they can pickpocket (or kill) the merchant Smiling Jack to retrieve The Terrible Shotgun. Far from being terrible, it's a unique variant of the Combat Shotgun that deals a whopping 80 damage at full condition and crits surprisingly often, making it ideal for gibbing almost any foe in close quarters. It does have the downside of degrading quickly, but if you have good Karma, frequent attacks from Talon Company will give you a steady supply of regular Combat Shotguns to scrap for repairs, as well as plenty of ammo. It's easy to get a big Karma boost early in the game, too; in fact, it's one of the very first quests you're ever given. Just defuse the bomb in Megaton (requires 25 in Explosives) and decline the cash reward and presto, +200 Karma.
• There is a sniper rifle hidden in a rock very close to Megaton. It's in a hollowed out rock which works like a normal container but looks exactly like a normal rock. It's way more powerful than anything found in the vault, and you can get it as soon as you leave.
• As soon as you're up for taking on Super Mutants, you can begin the quest Reilly's Rangers. Completing it gets you the Ranger Armor, a unique and improved set of Combat Armor. Very little in the first half of the game will be a serious threat to you in it, and you can keep it repaired easily using regular Combat Armor as well as Talon Combat Armor. If you aren't planning to use Power Armor, this will very likely be the armor you continue wearing throughout the rest of the game.

Fallout: New Vegas

• At the start of the game, if you go slightly east from Goodsprings to the Yangtze Memorial (you can see it from the Goodsprings cemetery), you can use a shovel to dig up a grave. It has a good chance to randomly spawn some form of mid-level weapon in it, ranging from Plasma Rifles to Incinerators.
• A short ways north from Goodsprings, (there are Cazadores about, so you'll have to find a way around,) you'll find Chance's grave. Bring a shovel, and you can loot it for Chance's Knife, which is the best melee weapon you can get for a long time.
• If you successfully pick the lock of the safe found in the Goodsprings Schoolhouse (which is easy if you put enough points into Science or Lockpicking early on) you'll get a free Stealth Boy, which can be used to acquire many of the items on this list with far less difficultly.
• The Ratslayer, a unique Varmint Rifle with all the mods attached to it, deals more damage than the standard version, and uses the same extremely plentiful ammo. It can be obtained extremely early if you know where to look. The catch? It's in a cave filled with very dangerous Rodents of Unusual Size. (Literally if you have the Wild Wasteland trait.) Getting the Animal Friend perk (requires being at Level 10) will make them non-hostile, allowing you to easily grab the rifle at a relavively low level. Alternatively, you can recruit Boone (see below) nearby who will make short work of the Giant Rats for you. Finally, if all else fails, a careful application of stealth combined with some Save Scumming will also work.
• Lucky is a unique and particularly powerful .357 revolver with a 2.5x crit multiplier (in Layman's Terms, it critically hits a lot). You can find it in Primm, likely the 2nd settlement the player will visit if following the main quest, if you can manage a buffed 75 lockpicking skill. (Not hard if you put a few points into the skill and collect a few +10 Lockpicking magazines, which have a chance to randomly spawn in the Goodsprings and Primm mailboxes.)
• There are two companions available very early in the game who will absolutely nuke the first half of the game, especially if used together. To note:
  • Boone - He can be recruited as a companion after his relatively easy quest and will make the trip to New Vegas absurdly easy if picked up during the player's first trip to Novac. His default Hunting Rifle is a nuke in itself early in the game and his Guns stat is maxed out, meaning that he'll kill many enemies with a headshot before you even realize you're under attack.
  • ED-E - Normally, you need a Repair skill or Science skill much higher than you'll reasonably have during your first trip to Primm to acquire ED-E as a companion. However, you can also gather a few common junk items (sensor module, scrap electronics, and scrap metal) to repair him regardless of your skills. (You can find everything but the scrap metal at the Lone Wolf Radio trailer if you go off-road to the west between Goodsprings and Primm.)^note And if you don't mind stealing, owned scrap metal can be found in the Nash residence directly next to ED-E. Since ED-E does not count as a human companion, you can pair him with Boone and proceed to trash the rest of the first half of the game. In particular, ED-E's maxed out Perception will allow you to notice faraway enemies, who Boone will then blow away.
• At Crescent Canyon, at either entrance (West and East), there's always a footlocker that contains an Advanced Radiation Suit, which is located next to a trailer of a wrecked overturned truck and a radioactive barrel.
• The Space Suit and Helmet you find at the REPCONN Test Facility is Disc One Nuke Armor. It has decent defense, is a Light-type armor (which means no stat penalty for wearing it,) and has the added bonus of having as much Rad Resistance on it as an Advanced Radiation Suit. YMMV on whether it looks ridiculous or awesome, but either way, it's effective.
• "This Machine", an M1 Garand Rifle that deals incredible damage, has a semi automatic firing rate, has a larger clip size than any other rifle (save the Marksman's Carbine), and reloads very quickly. With a decent Science skill, you can get it right before making it to Outer Vegas.
• Bonnie Springs is host to a small group of Viper gang members, one of which has the unique spiked knuckles "Love and Hate." Pushy and the Ballistic Fist are the only vanilla unarmed weapons with a higher DPS.
• The Q-35 Matter Modulator, one of the best energy weapons in the game, can be found at the REPCONN Headquarters not too far from Boulder City on your way through the first main quest. It's also found alongside a lot of ammo for it, there are no skill requirements to find it, and the building is so small you can be in and out in five minutes with weapon in hand.
• North of Nipton, you can find a dead Bright Brotherhood ghoul. If you're lucky, you can get a Plasma Defender, a small, light energy pistol that's faster and almost as powerful as a plasma rifle while using ammo that costs half as much. There are also Bright Brotherhood follower corpses found in several places accessible early in the game, such as in Goodsprings Cave and under the bridge near Sloan. Besides Plasma Defenders, they can also be carrying the Laser RCW, which is basically an energy tommy gun with good damage and low spread for a machine gun. Its ammo type (Electron Charge Packs) are somewhat scarce at early levels, unfortunately.
• In Camp Searchlight, you can pick up Knock-Knock, a unique Fire Axe which, when used in V.A.T.S., has a 50% chance of knocking foes down. If you know where to look the upstairs level in the fire station, in the men's bathroom, have Stealth Boys, and have anti-radiation meds, you can pick it up as early as level 2.
• Obtaining 50 bottles of Sunset Sarsaparilla, Save Scumming after drinking one until you get a Blue Star Cap, and repeating until they are all star caps gets you Pew Pew, a laser pistol that hits like a shotgun and does about four times the regular laser pistol's damage. If you have high Energy Weapons, this gun will carry you until the end of the game. The save scumming isn't even all that necessary. There are one hundred star caps out in locations scattered throughout the wastes, sometimes they have three or more star caps in the same location. You can kill three NPCs early in the game to get an additional fifteen of the fifty required caps. Add that to the sarsaparilla you normally drink to regain health and you have thirty or forty caps by the time you can actually claim the weapon without trying.
• You can steal the various weapons in the Van Graff store by dragging it to the toilet and then pocket them there (or by popping a Stealth Boy). Among them is a Plasma Caster, a Gatling Laser, and a Plasma Defender.
• With judicious tailoring of your character, use of stuff given or found in Goodsprings, and the right perks to max out your Lockpick, you can obtain the Gobi Campaign Rifle at level 4. Of course, you'll be at least level 7 before you can fire it without penalty, but it is an end-game level weapon.
• The Reinforced Combat Armor can be found in Walking Box Cavern, just off the road to Novac. The only trouble is that the cavern is inhabited by a pack of Nightstalkers, which can quickly do in a low-level player.
• For Survival/Hardcore Mode players, the most powerful healing item in the game, Desert Salad, is amazingly easy to craft; even the relatively rare Pinyon Nuts (as compared to the absurdly easy to find Barrel Cactus Fruit and Brahmin Steak) are sold by most vendors, and there are a couple of places where they're guaranteed to be found very early in the game. At a minimum of 14 HP restored per second by the time you have the 55 Survival required to craft it, it makes the more difficult enemies cited in other examples of this trope much easier to weather.
• The Cowboy perk, available at level 8, gives a large bonus when using any weapon traditionally associated with the old west, but most notably, lever-action weapons and revolvers. These weapon types are everywhere early the game making this a very worthwhile perk, but two examples reach full-blown Nuke status:
  • The Lever-Action Shotgun. Easily found early in the game, plentiful ammo, and has a relatively quick reload speed for a shotgun. The first enemies you come across in normal game play that this gun cannot handle are Cazadores and large groups of Legionaries. (If you invest in the Shotgun Surgeon perk, it can continue to dominate even into the mid-game.)
  • "That Gun," a unique 5.56mm revolver can be found in the shop in Novac, one of the earliest settlements visited during the main quest. When the owner goes to sleep at night, pick the (Very Easy) lock on the backroom and take it. It's a nice enough gun even on its own, with everybody and their mother selling 5.56mm ammo that early, but it gets an additional boost with the Cowboy perk and is also one of the only pistols that can use armor-piercing ammo. It will dominate early and can last deep into the game as your sidearm.
• With the Gun Runner's Arsenal DLC, the 5.56mm Pistol, a slightly diminished version of That Gun, can be purchased at the Mojave Outpost.
• Gun Runner's Arsenal adds the Mad Bomber perk, available at level 6. Get repair and explosives up to 45 and you get a few recipes to craft at any workbench. While most requier you to do some scavenging, the exception is the MFC grenade, which requires 3 microfusion cells and nothing more. With how common microfusion cells are in the wild and how cheap they can be gotten from vendors, you can be throwing grenades until the cows come home.
• The Courier's Stash DLC counts as one in its own right, giving you all of the formerly retailer-exclusive Pre-order bonus packs all at once at the very start of the game. Highlights include the Weathered 10mm Pistol, which is surprisingly powerful at the start and remains a decent sidearm up until the midgame or so (more so because, unlike most unique weapons, it's compatible with its base variant's mods. So you can add a silencer, laser sight and extended clip to it), an improved leather armor and caravan shotgun, and even a Grenade rifle, which makes killing Legion patrols and pawning their stuff possible at much lower levels. The Broad Machete is also a decent melee weapon, if you're into that sort of thing.
• While it requires you to go out of your way a bit, it can be done immediately at the start of the game if you don't mind a bit of a hike. North of New Vegas, on the Horowitz Farmstead, a hunting shotgun can be found in the bed of a pickup truck outside the barn with 3-4 Vipers in it. It is severely damaged, but it's one of the most powerful shotguns in the game, and normally won't start appearing in shops or as loot for quite a while.
• Although in poor condition, and you have to fight a number of Fire Geckos to reach it, a Fat Man can be found in a crater to the southeast of Searchlight, and (unless you have the Wild Wasteland trait) three Mini-Nukes are present in the eastern church basement in Searchlight itself.
• For all your chainsaw knife needs, just make your way to the Monte Carlo Suites and take out the weak Scorpion gang members there. One will always carry a Ripper, which ignores armor and quickly makes a mess of most enemies that want to get into melee range—it can actually provide some protection against Cazadores especially, since it mangles their fragile wings very easily. Alternatively, you can kill Vulpes Inculta in Nipton to get one really early on.
• Couriers with focus on unarmed combat should try sneaking around in Boulder City or its ruins—you'll quickly come across a set of Spiked Knuckles, an improved version of the basic Brass Knuckles, as well as a Power Fist. Both of these can be quickly acquired without needing much in the way of skills and can be repaired at the Mojave Outpost if necessary.
• Each Expansion Pack offers the opportunity to acquire a "nuke" (or ten,) largely because they can be accessed as soon as the Courier leaves Goodsprings. To note:
  • Dead Money. It's extremely difficult to complete on any level below 25, but not impossible if you're patient/lucky enough. It's possible to haul out over 100,000 caps, tons of experience, several new and powerful perks, quality armor, and some great weapons with ammo for each. Old World Blues offers similar but still-difficult opportunities.
  • Honest Hearts might be the easiest of the expansions to complete for a low level player, particularly because it's possible to deliberately "fail" the DLC by killing an important NPC, thus cutting off the main plot early. However, there is no shortage of "nuke" class equipment to pick up, including the "Survivalist's Rifle" (an absurdly-powerful rifle found in a duffel bag at the top of Red Rock Canyon, that can be picked up almost as soon as the DLC begins). The Compliance Regulator, an energy weapon found in Fallen Rock Cave (located near one of the Survivalist's stashes) that allows the player to Stun Lock anything and everything in the game, regardless of level. There are also the .45 Auto handguns which are plentiful in the region. There is a (dirt cheap) Silencer mod for them which will be extremely useful to a sneaky player. It doesn't come with the bonus critical chance of the .22 Silenced pistol, but it packs a much bigger punch on its own.
  • Lonesome Road:
    • You won't be getting very far into it at a low level, but unlike the other DLCs, you can enter The Divide and return to the Mojave any time you like. The first area you explore in it actually doesn't have any enemies in it until you get a fair ways in, and in the meantime, you can find rather impressive equipment lying around, including the Arc Welder, H&H Nail Gun, the Industrial Hand, and the first upgrade for ED-E (which turns it into a travelling Workshop and Reloading Bench, essentially trivializing crafting in the basegame). And if you can scrounge up 6000 caps worth of goods to trade (easily done if you don't want to keep those weapons), you can also pick up the Riot Gear, which has stats equivalent to Mark II Combat Armor and has a helmet that confers Sneak Sight (auto-visibility in dark interiors and at night), an ability that normally takes a long time to get access to.
    • It also adds Satchel charges, a placed explosive as damaging as the extremely rare and expensive C-4 charges; strong enough to take off the majority of even a max-level Courier's health. Though only moderately useful in the DLC itself, just having Lonesome Road installed allows the player to craft them in the main game immediately. It requires no schematic or perk, just 25 Explosives skill and a few parts you can find lying around everywhere (lead and pistol powder you can find from the most common ammo, scrap electronics, and a sensor module) and you have something that can kill most things up to mid-game, often several times over.

Fallout 4

• Companion nuke (multiple variants)
  • Travis: (a) beeline to Diamond City (b) go to the Dugout Inn (c) launch the the Confidence Man quest chain (d) meet Travis at the brewery, but don't go inside ...and Travis will follow you forever as a "temporary" companion. Travis can level up massively - he can be manipulated into entering Power Armour (e.g. if you march a few paces in the Museum roof set, then get out, Travis will get in) - and he will wear that armour forever. On Travis, and only on Travis, Power Armour plates are self-healing. He will also equip better weapons, if a gun+ammo are in a container near where he is fighting. e.g. put the minigun + ammo into a toolbox on the Museum roof, and he will grab it. This makes him the strongest "companion" early or late game, particularly relative to how easy he is to maintain: he doesn't talk, and any ammo he has becomes infinite.
  • Preston: he will also follow you forever as an invincible "temporary" companion if you leave a quest (Taking Independence) incomplete. He will continue to wear and wield whatever you had him equipped with before beginning the quest; any ammo or grenades he uses become infinite - so try to get him kitted out perfectly (e.g. unique melee weapon + melee / strength boosting apparel) before securing your 5th settlement.
  • None of the humanoid companions use up fusion cores while wearing Power Armor (one is required for them to get into the Power Armor, but it will not drain while they use it. By putting one of your humanoid companions into Power Armor and letting them handle most of the fighting, you can easily nuke your way through the first several hours of gameplay. Also, if you give Danse a helmet to his armor, it never receives damage.
  • Travelling merchants and their guards can be followed indefinitely. They are immortal, so will eventually defeat any enemy that they meet normally, plus any enemies that you "pull" to them. The guards will pick up better weapons during fights; the player can speed this up, by seeding any nearby "container" (including corpses and gibbed body parts) with weapons and ammo. These immortal, up-gunned NPCs can easily crack open locations that would be suicidal for a low level player: Doc Weathers' crew can clear most of the north for you (including tanking multiple missiles and mini-nukes around Hub City Auto Wreckers). Cricket's crew can clear everything between Vault 81 and Warwick Homestead. This can net the player about 2 dozen unique and legendary items, without a real fight.
• A Nuka Grenade can usually be found when looting the corpses at Jalbert Brothers Disposal. Give it to an essential NPC, such as a provisioner (or pickpocket it to one of Cricket's guards), and they will use it infininitely. Follow them, and loot all the corpses this generates.
• Numerous examples can be found within the first few hours of game play if the player knows where to look or, thanks to addition of Legendary enemies dropping Legendary weapons and armor, gets very lucky. And, thanks to the removal of skills, the player can use any weapon they have without any penalties as long as they have the right ammo (though the right perks do help).
• Several gold bars, 10mm pistols and other high value, low weight items can be scavenged in and around Sanctuary, without a fight (notably from the Root Cellar). Selling these will cover all your early equipment and ammunition purchases.
• A Bolt-Action Sniper Rifle can be picked up from a house in Concorde, and combined with a Suppressor stripped from a weapon that Trudy sells. With 7 points in Agility, and supporting perks (Bloody Mess, Rifleman, Ninja and Sandman), a level 4 character can use this to deal about 180 points of damage per headshot.
• A Fat Man can be found at the Robotics Disposal Ground, and a mini nuke can be found at the USAF Station Olivia, both only a very short jog northeast of Sanctuary. (You can even program the Sentry Bot at the disposal ground to clear the Raiders outdoors at Olivia, making it easier.) These can be found in several other early-game locations as well, and have a chance to spawn on Raiders if the player is very lucky.
• The Laser Musket that you get at Concord, the second town you'll visit if following the main quest, is lying on the ground by a fallen Minuteman. This weapon can be charged with extra ammunition, allowing it to deal incredible amounts of damage at the start of the game. It can also be upgraded with better mods at lower levels of the Gun Nut and Science! perks than more standard laser weapons. It will eventually become outclassed, even with upgrades, but will get you through the early parts of the game quite easily.
• Justice, a unique variant of the Combat Shotgun that causes staggering, can be purchased in Covenant, which requires only a short side-trip to reach after Concord. Normally, legendary items available for purchase are too cost prohibitive for low level players, but for quest related reasons, the merchants in Covenant are selling at an incredible loss, meaning you only need to scrape up about 1000-1500 caps to purchase it (depending on Charisma and perks.) As a bonus, it comes with several mods already in place that a low-level character will be unable to craft for some time, adding to its usefulness.
• The Shishkebab, a Flaming Sword melee weapon, can be obtained at low level by a settlement quest, though it requires you to fight through The Forged and their boss who is in power armor.
• It requires a good amount of bottlecaps (a little over 2,000) to buy it, but the "Spray & Pray" .45 submachine gun that Cricket sells is an absolute beast, featuring the devastating exploding bullets perk long before you're meant to have access to it. The result? A ridiculously powerful and relatively cheap-to-feed weapon that has all but the strongest enemies going down within half a magazine's worth of ammo... And even those usually won't survive getting the full mag. Add on a few of the stackable Commando perks, and the only challenge you'll face from baddies is from the ones who are too far away to easily pick off. Several workarounds can increase the (effective) range of "Spray & Pray" and similar weapons are: (1) carry a light pipe pistol with a recon scope; use this purely to spot distant enemies (2) take shots when there are surfaces near the target, e.g. get up high and aim at the victim's feet. The explosive damage will cripple them even if your direct fire misses (3) Demolition Expert makes these near misses more damaging.
• A quest you can obtain relatively early on sends you to investigate Pickman's Gallery near the southern outskirts of Boston. It is only guarded by a few low-level raiders (and several tripwires / traps), and if you can fight through the raiders in the gallery itself and rescue Pickman, he rewards you with a key to his safe, which contains Pickman's Blade, a fully upgraded combat knife with the Stealth Blade mod and the Wounding effect, which allows it to deal an absurd amount of damage as well as an extra 25% bleeding damage per strike.
• You can get an almost full set of Heavy Combat Armor (which normally does not start to appear until you are around level 30) anytime by killing the Gunner boss Captain Bridget in Hub City Auto Wreckers. Because of the enemies with Missile Launchers and Fat Men occupying the highway overpass, including the boss, as well as multiple mines and traps, this is very difficult to pull off at a low level (unless you follow Doc Weathers, and let his guards tank the area for you, as noted above) but quite rewarding.
• A starting character can grab scrap from Sanctuary, then zoom directly to Hangman's Alley without any fights on the way (travel by night, avoid ghoul-packed Lexington). The Raiders in the Alley are locked inside, so they can be killed safely by sniping and/or tossing grenades over the walls. If you then build a few dozen water pumps, but summon no settlers, you'll generate lots of water but draw no attacks, and will be near to DC, where all that water can be sold, and you can buy / craft all the gear you need.
• The quests Fire Support and Call to Arms are triggered if you use the radio anywhere near Cambridge. Paladin Danse will tank both quests for you (you can simply follow him in sneak mode the whole time), then hand you the Righteous Authority, an unique laser rifle that uses cheap and very common ammo, charges up Critical Hits faster, and does double critical damage. Despite being a reward for an early-game quest, it can stay useful throughout the entire game if you mod it a bit, especially if you lower its AP cost in VATS to best take advantage of its critical power.
• The Cryolator can be found in Vault 111, where the game starts. You need to open a Master-level lock to get it, which means you'll have to return much later when you've gained a lot of levels in order to get it, but if you have Cait as a companion, she can open that lock for you and get you a powerful late-game gun that freezes foes solid much earlier than you're supposed to. In older versions, you could also have Dogmeat fetch it for you, though that's no longer possible.
• Really though, if you are lucky enough any Legendary weapon or armor that just so happens to suit your playstyle has the potential to be this, as Legendary enemies spawn randomly and it is possible to encounter one right after exiting Vault 111.
• The Overseer's Guardian, a unique two-shot combat rifle with a night vision scope, can be purchased early on in Vault 81 for the relatively low price of 1230 caps.
• The Railway Rifle does as much damage as a fully modded combat rifle without needing any upgrades, uses ammo that's rare in the world but dirt cheap at vendors, and can be found at a junkyard before you get to Diamond City. It's guarded by Super Mutants, but it's an open air location, so with a little sneakin' and a little snipin' you can get a gun that'll last you 'til the the endgame.
• A short trip east of Diamond City is Hubris Comics, where you find Grognak's Axe, which causes bleed damage and increased stagger, and has an unusually low AP cost for a two-handed melee weapon.
• The Ashmaker is a Legendary Minigun which does extra incendiary damage and can be acquired fairly early, simply attach the Shredder and Accelerated Barrel modifications and you can now grind everything to charcoal with it. The only things stopping it from becoming a flat out Game-Breaker are the absurd need for (rare and costly) 5mm ammo, and its weight.
• The first Railroad quest, "Tradecraft", earns you the Deliverer, a unique James Bond-inspired suppressed 10mm pistol that outperforms all other comparably modded 10mm pistols, along with increased VATS hit chance and low AP cost.
  • Finishing "Tradecraft" and agreeing to run missions for Dr. Carrington will net you a Combat Rifle modded with a .308 Receiver, suppressor, and night-vision scope, all of which require Level 39 and Gun Nut 4 to build.
• If you can afford it, buying General Chao's Revenge (a unique serrated Chinese Officer's Sword) from Trudy can be one of the best early weapons you ever got, in addition to letting you cut most foes to ribbons in just a few swings, it can inflict 50% more damage on robot foes, which allows you to make short work of even some of the toughest robotic foes (like Sentry Bots) with just a few well-timed swings. Just remember to run like hell before they explode in your face.
• With Nuka-World installed, the Nuka-Mixer station can be built at any settlement before starting the DLC quests. The two recipes possible to craft before visiting the park are Newka-Cola (Nuka-Cola+Nuka Cherry) which restores 200 HP and 50 AP, and Nuka-Free (Nuka-Cola+Dirty Water) which restores 130 HP. Both are immensely powerful when starting a new game considering the ingredients are fairly common from the start, and they lack any perk requirements to make.

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