Fallout 4 / Tropes A to C

Tropes for Fallout 4
Tropes A to C | Tropes D to I | Tropes J to P | Tropes Q to Z

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A

• Abandoned Camp Ruins: Frequently encountered spread out across the Commonwealth, often with feral ghouls or a deathclaw nearby to give a hint as to the fate of the campers. Though once cleared of the threat, can be a good place to search for loot or sleep to recuperate health (and save on Survival mode). Probably the best example is the Acadia National Park campground in the Far Harbor DLC (set on an island in Maine), as the island's eerie and persistent fog makes the area resemble a location pulled straight out of a Stephen King novel.
• Abandoned Mine: The Dunwich Borers location. Used by the Dunwich company pre-war, it's currently being used by raiders. As you get deeper into the mine however, you'll find feral ghouls, who scare the raiders so much they blocked access off to that portion of the mine. And then you get further into the mine, start having some weird visions/hallucinations, and discover that the executives of the Dunwich company were using it for rituals involving human sacrifice.
• Abnormal Ammo:
  • The Far Harbor expansion introduces a gun that shoots bowling balls.
  • The Nuka-World expansion has squirt guns that can shoot acid or radioactive glowing soda.
  • The vanilla game has the successor to the Rock-It Launcher, the Junk Jet, which fires anything you can load into it.
  • The Railway Rifle makes a return to this game, shooting rail-road spikes.
  • The Syringer can be loaded with chems, inflicting their effects on the target.
• Abominable Auditorium:
  • The Combat Zone, Tommy Lonegan's fighting area, is set in a pre-war theater. According to Lonegan, the Zone used to be fairly legitimate by Wasteland standards... up until raiders took the place over. Since then, it's gone downhill - to the point that cheaters have to be trussed up and put on display so nobody gets any ideas about breaking the rules in a match.
  • The Charles View Amphitheater has been taken over by the Pillars of the Community and is now their base of operations in their efforts to rip off passers-by.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: Much like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim , leveling continues on for as long as you want it to. If you do want to fill out every single perk and S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attribute, then you need to grind like hell to reach level 272, although finding the seven SPECIAL bobble-heads and the "You're SPECIAL" book reduces it to level 264. The effective "hard" level cap is 65,535, but it's near impossible to reach due to the combination of the sheer amount of grinding required to reach it and the fact that even if you do somehow reach it, the game will crash if you try to go any further.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • Among many traditional series Hollywood Science moments: in the prologue, a nuclear bomb (presumably, the same dirty device that created the Glowing Sea) actually goes off within your field of vision, and you can actually see the rush of wind and heat... but you're not blinded if you're looking directly at it, even if you would be in real life. Rule of Drama applies here. Oddly enough, you can find a data log from a survivor of the blast that mentions being both blinded and deafened by the detonation, and they weren't that much closer to the bomb than the Sole Survivor was.
  • Along the same lines, Natick and the Broadmoor National Wildlife Sanctuary (the real-life location that corresponds to the Glowing Sea in-game) is a good twenty miles as the crow flies from Minute Man National Historical Park, where Sanctuary Hills is located. It's implausible that a shockwave could travel unimpeded over urban and heavily forested terrain for that distance to begin with. Not to mention The Island in Far Harbor also having been seemingly affected by the nuke, despite being over 150 miles away from Boston, though it's more likely another nuke could have gone off much closer to it.
  • In the game, cooking is the primary way to get rid of radiation in food and water. In real life, not even thorough cooking will suffice to protect you from the effects of radioactive food on your body, and animals, your primary means of getting this food, have their bones as the primary carriers of radiation. It's an Acceptable Break because there is no other way to produce non-radioactive food in the game. It's also an acceptable stand-in for making raw food safe to eat in a game system that (normally) does not account for diseased animal meat.
  • The Ridiculously Fast Construction and Easy Logistics that go with settlement-building and crafting. Painstakingly ripping apart a town for weeks for every little nut and bolt or manually watching your workers take breaks for food and water would not make for a fun game; this system is complicated enough as it is.
  • While the Sole Survivor's control over the Minutemen as their General (and over the Institute as their future Director) largely consists of you receiving orders from someone else to help with that faction, it still counts as this since having to actually listen to and manage the endless complaints and bickering between the various Minutemen Colonels and members of the Institute's Directorate would be incredibly boring and frustrating.
  • The game makes no difference between "fresh" surface water from ponds, rivers and lakes, and salty water from the Atlantic ocean, which means you can drink the later with no other penalty than taking some rads (or catching a disease in Survival mode) and build water purifiers over them to get drinking water for settlements. This simplifies the water mechanic for settlements by creating a universal water source rather than adding a complicated water desalination system.
  • Certain crafting resources are abstracted to streamline the scavenging and crafting process. For instance, "cloth" can represent wool, silk, cotton and even paper. "Oil" is a catch-all term for anything greasy, slippery or flammable, and is used in weapon mods, generators, turrets, Molotov Cocktails and making food. You can get it from things like gasoline canisters, oil canisters for greasing machines, soap, paint and cooking oil. There is only one "plastic" resource as opposed to the dozens that exist in real life. The kicker is "Nuclear Material", a generic term for anything radioactive, which can be looted from the body of irradiated creatures, alarm clocks or uranium ore deposits in Vault 88 and used as nuclear fuel or glow-in-the-dark weapon sights.
• Accidental Pun: Bobbi No-Nose drops one during the "The Big Dig" quest when the team breaks through into a ruined subway tunnel. That's exactly what she was looking for, so she eagerly announces that they're right on track. Her partner-in-crime Mel immediately picks up on the pun, but Bobbi doesn't, and when she finally does get it, claims that she didn't intend it as such.
• Ace Custom:
  • The Deliverer, a silenced pistol acquired from the DIA Switchboard that was formerly the Railroad's headquarters, unique in the wasteland. The Railroad's chief technician, Tinker Tom, has heavily modified it before it ends up in the Sole Survivor's hands.
  • For Power Armor, you can get a full set of legendary T-60c armor if you have the Automatron DLC and follow the Brotherhood of Steel questline. You get the Tesla arms and chest from Ivey in Fort Hagen. From the Brotherhood, you can get the Visionary's helm and Exemplar's chest piece as quest rewards and the legs, Honor and Vengeance, can be bought from Proctor Teagan after promotion to Paladin and Sentinel, respectively.
• Achievements in Ignorance:
  • The luck-based Idiot Savant perk lets you prove that it's better to be lucky than wise! It randomly gives you the ability to get three times the EXP for anything that would grant EXP, with a higher chance of kicking in if you have low INT. The upgraded version gives five times and the final version has a chance of giving triple kill XP for a time when it activates (but negates the quintuple bonus while in effect making it less good overall).
  • Sierra Petrovita (appearing in the Nuka-World DLC) managed to cross the Wasteland from Washington D.C. to somewhere around Boston and enter the heart of a Raider-controlled city, one you were nearly killed entering, all the while seemingly completely oblivious to the danger she is in. Yet the Raiders barely even notice her, while she acts like a cliché tourist.
• Achievement Mockery: The achievement "Touchdown!" is earned by being killed by a Super Mutant Suicider or the Mini-Nuke launched by a Fat Man.
• Action Bomb:
  • Some Mole Rats can have mines strapped to them, blowing themselves up on you if they get near. One unmarked location seems to be the home of the crazy person who puts the mines on the Mole Rats; things get very messy in there.
  • The Super Mutant Suicider that runs at you with a glowing, beeping Mini-Nuke. And you can still snag the nuke it carries but only if you kill it with a head shot or body shot. Blasting It Out of Their Hands or shooting the right arm will make it blow prematurely and only give you the (admittedly useful) "nuclear material".
  • Sentry Bots and Legendary robots will now explode in a mini nuke-sized explosion when killed, with Legendary Sentries exploding twice. Take caution when facing them.
  • Any robot that can have all its weapon carrying limbs removed can and will do this. This is most notable with Mr.Handy's and Mr.Gutsies because its rather easy to shoot their limbs off and they are much faster than the player.
  • With the Robotics Expert perk, you can hack robots and reprogram them to self-destruct. Higher levels of the perk let you sic the soon-to-explode robot on your enemies.
• Actionized Sequel:
  • The combat in 4 takes a lot of cues from other first and third person shooters: dynamic crosshairs and iron sights, V.A.T.S. works more like Bullet Time than Turn-Based Combat, quick melee, and grenades are now treated as secondary weapons to be used tactically rather than a primary weapon in their own right. These in turn build up on the changes introduced in 3 and New Vegas.
  • It is also a lot harder to make stealth / Pacifist Runs compared to Fallout 3 and New Vegas. While in those games a character could basically master stealth by level 5-ish depending on builds, the new perk system in Fallout 4 makes mastering any skill — stealth included — impossible until your character is at level 38, the minimum level for "Sneak"'s last rank. And even then that's just for the perks. True stealth mastery that'll let you sneak past enemies in close quarters requires one to find a lot of related skill magazines. Meaning that if a character wants to avoid combat, they'll have to scour the Wasteland and kill a lot of things to get there. Then there's the fact that no matter how stealhty you are, your companion will not be; you'll have to go solo.
  • There's a much bigger focus on boss fights than previous games, where Talking the Monster to Death was a viable option. In 3 and New Vegas, you could talk down any human that you have to fight as part of the story, such as Col. Autumn or Legate Lanius. No such option exists for Kellogg, who has to die one way or another from your encounter with him. Similar such problems arise at the end of the main story, regardless of faction. This continues in the Automatron DLC; while you can talk the Mechanist down, it's only after a very long battle against numerous waves of the Mechanist's Mecha-Mooks, which can't be skipped even if you're a master diplomat. A master hacker able to figure out how to unlock a certain elevator at the start of the dungeon, on the other hand...
  • The boss fights are also far more challenging than in previous games, especially Fallout 3. Bosses often weren't that much more sturdy than common Mooks, and even if they were, that's what nuclear catapults are for. Now bosses and mini-bosses often have special attributes that cap the amount of damage that can be done to them in one shot.
• Actor Allusion
  • Strong mistaking the "Milk of Human Kindness" for something you actually eat? Why does that sound familiar?
  • Not exactly the first time Crispin Freeman's voiced a member of a highly secretive, morally grey faction. Although ironically, he has to be worried being eaten himself via Trappers.
  • Ashly Burch once again voices a character called Tina. A different character she voices, Cricket, is what Tiny Tina could have become when she grew up. This Tina has a connection to "chems", often mentions someone named Rachel, and desperately wants to leave the place she's living in right now.
  • In yet another Life Is Strange allusion, Dani Knights, the voice behind Victoria, is now voicing another spoiled rich girl in the form of Emogene Cabot.
  • In the Nuka-World DLC, Robin Atkin Downes is once again a gang boss who has grown complacent, and still sporting an out-of-place Cockney accent.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: The Commonwealth strangely has a worse economy than the D.C. Wasteland just ten years prior and that place was a literal nuclear wasteland! Mark ups for merchants selling and markdowns for merchants buying has increased 150-1122%. This may be due to the developers strong-arming players into using the game's crafting system to get anything (but said crafting system doesn't let you craft ammo or build weapons, so...). Boston merchants really seem to hate "giving up" their caps. Thankfully, this has been mitigated with the Contraptions Workshop add-on, which allows for both ammunition and weapon manufacturing.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: The original Silver Shroud serials, which can be heard over the radio, are jam-packed with alliterations.
• Adventurous Irish Violins: Being set in Boston, they were pretty much a given. The ambient music has a prominent track of calm but spirited violin that plays in peaceful places in the city.
• Affirmative-Action Legacy: Multiple examples with the various Hubris Comics characters who show up. A black guy who thinks he's Manta Man (originally a blond, being a Captain Ersatz of the original Aqua Man) can show up as a random encounter and The Mechanist from Automatron is a double example. While we never see the original version's actual face, his voice in the Silver Shroud radio dramas sounds like he's supposed to be a white guy. The Mechanist in Fallout 3 was a black man while the new one is a Hispanic woman. Depending on how you customize your character and/or what companions you give the costumes to you can also do this to the Silver Shroud and Grognak the Barbarian.
• After-Combat Recovery: The party in the Game Within a Game, Grognak & the Ruby Ruins, has all members' health returned to full after a battle. But not their Focus.
• A Homeowner Is You: Just like previous games the player can buy a personal house in Diamond City to store goodies and rest at. Unlike previous Fallout games the new build mechanic allows them to make their own furniture and decorations to tidy up the inside with. Of course, if you don't feel like forking over your life savings for the key to the place you can always go rescue some settlements for the Minutemen, which will give you the option of building your own house from scratch.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • The Sentry Bot Sarge within the Minutemen Castle. Once a Minuteman-allied robot, the years spent abandoned have done bad things to its AI, and he immediately turns hostile upon activation.
  • The Synth responsible for the Broken Mask incident, who shot and killed a dozen Diamond City residents.
  • Subverted by the Robobrains under the Mechanist's control, who, due to their brains all originally coming from criminals on death row, were twisting their directive to save the people of the Commonwealth into killing them instead. What makes this a subversion is the aforementioned fact that their brains are those of living, breathing humans. You can't really accuse Artificial Intelligence of being a crapshoot when the Intelligence in question isn't even artificial to begin with, now can you?
  • Averted with Codsworth and Curie who should be as insane as all the other Mr Handy/Gutsy robots around the wastes but managed to keep their focus.
  • Also averted with Greygarden's Overseers Green, White, and Brown, all of whom are completely lucid (if a little quirky).
• A.K.A.-47: As with previous entries, a number of the game's firearms are heavily based on real-life guns.
  • The "Submachine Gun" is a Thompson M1A1 "Tommy Gun" with a drum magazine.
  • The ".44 Pistol" is a Smith & Wesson Model 29.
  • The "Deliverer" is a Walther PPK chambered in 10mm.
  • The "Hunting/Sniper Rifle" is a Remington Model 700, with the Marksman's Stock modfication converting it to the VTR model.
  • The "Assault Rifle" is a bizarre mixture of the coolant line and two ports near the muzzle from the water jacket of the Maxim Gun^note Despite the gun being aircooled. The coolant line connects to nothing, the foregrip of the M249 SAW, the receiver and grip of the MAS AA-52, the charging handle of a Vickers gun, the barrel shroud of a Lewis gun, and the side loading box magazine of the FG 42. None of which are actually assault rifles.^note The closest one to an assault rifle is the FG 42, which is either an automatic rifle (distinct from an assault rifle, as they use full-sized rifle cartridges as opposed to intermediate sized ones), a battle rifle, or a light machine gun, depending on who you ask, though it should be noted that a fair amount of how it operated was copied from the Lewis gun, the main idea behind it was to create a lighter, shorter machine gun for airborne forces, and the majority of guns influenced by the FG 42 were machine guns, like the M60
  • The "Radium Rifle" introduced in Far Harbor is a retrofitted WWII-era Volkssturmgewehr.
  • The "Handmade Rifle" introduced in Nuka-World bears a striking similarity to the eponymous Kalashnikov rifle family, with some of its sniper variants closely resembling the Dragunov sniper rifle. It's even chambered for the same 7.62mm caliber. When fitted with a light stock, the Handmade Rifle greatly resembles the Type 56-2◊ assault rifle, a modified Chinese copy of the original AKM design.
• Alas, Poor Villain:
  • If you didn't kill him before the final quest, in any scenario where the Sole Survivor does not support the Institute, Father ultimately dies knowing that his own mother/father is about to destroy his life's work, still convinced that the Institute was the only hope left in the world. His last interaction with the Sole Survivor is to bitterly tell them to leave. Even if you strongly oppose the Institute and his mindset, it's very easy to feel bad for him.
  • The Sole Survivor has the option of judging Kellogg this way, after viewing his memories and seeing evidence of the tragedies that shaped how his life turned out.
  • The raiders at Libertalia are revealed by their leader's journal entries to have begun as Minutemen. Surviving their General's betrayal, they became mercenaries, but descended into raiding because the merchants they worked for kept stiffing them on the supplies they'd promised as pay- leaving them to face starvation unless they took up robbery and murder.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: If the Sole Survivor chooses to use speech and caps to persuade the Commonwealth settlers to support the Raiders then they're reluctant but do so willingly. May qualify as Gray-and-Gray Morality since the Raiders are appeased by your actions.
• The All-Seeing A.I.: Thankfully averted. If you strike an enemy with a shot from long range while sneaking, they may not necessarily know where you are. Some will shoot in your general direction, and melee-based foes will attempt to head towards you in the hopes of flushing you out. But so long as you can drop them all fast enough, or are able to move to a different spot, they will never know what hit them.
  • Invoked with regards to Preston Garvey during the Nuka-World main questline. Claim any Commonwealth settlement for the Nuka-World Raiders and he will know instantly no matter how far away he is at this moment. Oh, and don't expect a warm welcome next time you meet him. This is Justified, though, if you've reclaimed The Castle, as they know when any settlement is having problems right away.
• All Up to You: So, you're the new General for the Minutemen huh? Well, we need you to go and resolve every single settlement's problems, and if there's a gang of Raiders/Ferals/Super Mutants messing with them, or a settler's been kidnapped, only you can resolve it. Can get incredibly annoying as turning in a quest to Preston Garvey will often prompt him to immediately give you another quest that another settlement is having an issue that you have to take care of. Fortunately, you can avoid this by running away from him fast enough once he starts mentioning another settlement needing help. This allows you to turn in the previous quest, and avoid automatically picking up the next one. However, if you're in the Castle with the radio up and running, or listening to their broadcast, they will also announce missions that then get added to your quest log in between the music.
  • A user-created mod fixed this by limiting Preston to a single settlement mission at a time, and would prompt you for another. It is amusingly titled "Enough Already Preston Garvey!"
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us:
  • The Institute and the Brotherhood launch a major attack on the Castle in the "Defend the Castle" and "With Our Powers Combined" respectively, and it's up to you to defend them. In "End of the Line" and "Tactical Thinking", you do this to the Railroad.
  • A more low-key example is the original version of the game's treatment of settlements, specifically if one your settlements comes under attack. Though you're generally given sufficient time to reach it and fend off the attackers, if you fail to respond at all, your settlement can get sacked. It doesn't matter if you've made an impenetrable wall of turrets and fences with limited entry/exit points and given all the settlers good weapons and armor. If you didn't help defend it, almost everything that can be broken will be, and you'll have to spend a lot of time and resources repairing all the turrets, crops, and generators to get them all back to working order. Thankfully, this was patched in a later version, and you don't have to be at a settlement for it to successfully defend itself. Though you really have only a max of 69.4% chance of a settlement defending itself, even if it's a impenetrable wall of turrets and fences that would slaughter the raiders or whoever is attacking before you find where they are when you arrive.
• Alternate History:
  • Scollay Square, an area in the Boston wasteland, no longer exists in real life Boston. But prior to being demolished, it was a major locale in the 1950s. Just one of those points of diversion in the timeline. Likewise, it's mentioned that the Boston Red Sox hasn't won the World Series since 1918 even in 2077, whereas in real life, the team did win in 2004.
  • Bedford Station is an abandoned train depot haunted by feral ghouls and the terminal there has messages that makes it seem like trains still pass through there. In real life, Bedford, Massachusetts was home to a train station until 1977, and the abandoned traincar that was left by the depot is actually part of a restaurant now.
• Alien Sky: The sky gets weirdly yellow-greenish during a "radiation storm." It is possible to have brief moments in the Glowing Sea where you can see the sky, however more often than not the sky will look this way for hours and hours. It's a good thing you have a map as a lack of a sun or a moon can make getting lost in the sea very easy.
• Always a Bigger Fish:
  • In the West Everett Estates, you can find a computer terminal that includes logs from the families who walled themselves up there after the bombs fell. The final log entry is from the leader of a band of Raiders who killed the families and took over the buildings as a base of operations. This is important because when you encounter the locale, it's occupied by a force of Super Mutants and includes the corpses of a few dead Raiders. And of course you can kill all the Super Mutants and loot the place for yourself.
  • The Raiders at Concord follow Gristle, who himself follows a Raider named Jared at the Corvega factory in Lexington. Jared in turn is small potatoes compared to some of the other Raider leaders.
• Always Accurate Attack: Critical Hits. They will hit that part of the enemy without fail and for increased damage, even if said enemy's body part moved behind cover.
• Always Chaotic Evil: In addition to the villainous human organizations, several creatures are exclusively murderous.
  • Super Mutants keep this trend from their Fallout 3 counterparts, despite being seemingly a little more intelligent. Pretty much all of them save for a few ( namely Strong, Virgil, and Erickson) will attack on sight.
  • Radstags are an exception, and will only fight if you or — as is more likely — your companion attack them first. Leave them to their own devices and they will leave you alone in turn.
    • Doubly subverted thanks to the Far Harbor DLC. The so-called Devolved Radstags have mutated to the point where they've grown large fangs and attack everything on sight that's not a member of their own species. Yes, that includes humans and every other animal up to and including Yao Guai and even Fog Crawlers.
• Amazonian Beauty: A female Sole Survivor is a good foot taller than any of her female Companions. The customization system also has a "Muscular" option so you can make a character as Amazonian as you please.
• Amazon Brigade: A female Sole Survivor has the opportunity to form one during quest "Memory Interrupted." Bring a female companion and go full Amazon with Glory.
• Amusement Park of Doom: Nuka-World, boy howdy. It's got crazed robots equipped with deadly soda based weaponry, giant parasitic worms that can burrow underground and nest in corpses, mutant Deathclaw hybrid creatures, painted Feral Ghouls, mutant cola crabs that glow in the dark, and so many safety standard violations its a wonder the place wasn't immediately closed and burnt to the ground. Oh yeah, it's also home to one of the biggest Raider outposts on the entire East Coast, with no less than three separate gangs fighting for dominance of the place. Even before the Great War it wasn't much better and had a lot of shady shit going on in the background.
  PA Announcement: "Attention Nuka-World guests, lost children and items can be claimed at the security office for a small fee..."
• Anime Hair: The unlockable Megaton Hair is a hairstyle approximately a foot high and shaped like a mushroom cloud.
• And I Must Scream: The reactions of almost all the human candidates for the Robobrain program after their brains were extracted but before their memories were wiped. One candidate was seen as the most ideal because instead of screaming, he calmly promised to kill every single person in the facility if they put him in a robot chassis instead of back in his original body.
  • The Nuka-World quest Cappy In A Haystack adds a similar example to the list. Before the world fell to atomic war, John-Caleb Bradberton, inventor of the Nuka-Cola soft drink, struck a deal with a high-ranking Army general: In exchange for Nuka-World's specialized beverage chemists lending their expertise to a military chemical and weapons program, the Army would give Bradberton access to a highly experimental life extension program so he could outlive the coming apocalypse. He realized too late that it wouldn't be possible to preserve more than his head, but he went along with it anyway. And so he became a disembodied head in a jar mounted to a control console, utterly alone and unable to do anything but stare at the same wall for more than two centuries. When he is eventually discovered by the Sole Survivor, he begs them to shut down his personal vault's power so he can finally die. The real salt in the wound for Mr. Bradburton is the sumptuous setting he was left in. Here you will find the only intact versions of a Pre-War car and motorcycle in the entire game, still shiny and new. A car and a motorcycle, for a head in a jar, with no body.
• Androids Are People, Too:
  • While Synths are treated no better than tools by the Institute and are discriminated against as a whole by the Brotherhood, there are factions such as the Railroad who treat them as people, saving and protecting runaway ones. Even as far as the Railroad is concerned, Deacon himself lampshades that this trope is only in full force for the Gen 3 Synths that are nigh indistinguishable from regular humans. He says that the line really begins to blur between many Railroad members about whether they should also help the Gen 1 and Gen 2 Synths and questions when do you begin to say enough is enough.
  • In Memory Interrupted, if you bring Glory along she asks if you can't just chase off the Gen 1s instead of "killing" them. It doesn't stop her from doing so, though.
• And the Adventure Continues:
  • Like in Skyrim, the credits never actually roll. Once you've determined the future of the Commonwealth, missions for your chosen faction continue.
  • If Jack Cabot survives the confrontation with his father Lorenzo, he mentions the possible existence of another buried alien city in the Mojave Wasteland, and is planning on travelling there to search for it.
• An Entrepreneur Is You: Via the settlement mechanic you can now grow crops in abundant quantities. An exploit recognised early on involves growing and selling these crops to the various shopkeepers and merchants in the Commonwealth leads to an abundance of caps that can then be spent with these same merchants and is one of the best ways of ensuring a plentiful supply of the resources needed for other endeavours (including fusion cores for using power armour, stimpaks, ammunition and the resources needed for further crafting and improvement of settlements). The most efficient ways to do this feature prominently in online guides to the game that were formulated very soon after its initial release.
• An Interior Designer Is You: You can design settlements, including the insides of houses, in the game. So it's up to you to design the layout, power sources, features, comforts, crops, and defenses for the citizens who move in and inhabit them.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Before the climactic encounter with Kellogg, a Fat Man and ammo can be found shortly before. Bethesda realized that the Disc-One Final Boss encounter might be too difficult for certain builds, so players could just blast him and his henchmen even before opening dialog with him.
  • You have the ability to break out of conversations and perform other actions before selecting a dialog choice when talking with someone. This is especially helpful if you have clothing or aid items that increase your charisma. This feature enables you wear your normal armor and stock your items right up to the point when you need to use your charisma aiding items and clothing to pass a speech skill check. It's also helpful if you realize it's pretty dark and want to turn on the Pip-Boy light so you can see the other person.
  • Companions in general have several improvements to them. Firstly, as long as the companion in question is travelling with you, they cannot be targeted in V.A.T.S. (though friendly fire is still possible and can sour your relationship with them). Secondly, companions will always teleport to your side after a few seconds should you go to an area they cannot easily access, or load to a new area. Thirdly, companions are incapable of dying so long as they're in your party, with enemies ignoring them when they get too low on health- you have the option to dose animal and human companions with a Stimpak to get them back in the fight instantly, but they will recover on their own eventually.
  • You have the option to tag specific pieces of scrap so that items that can be broken down into that material will have an icon next to them in menus, making it very easy to track down what you need.
  • Regardless of how far into the game you get, if it's necessary to hack a terminal or bypass a locked door to progress in a main story mission or a major quest line, one of two things will happen: the terminal/lock will be at Novice level (therefore not requiring any points in the Lockpick or Hacker perks), or a key/password for the item will be nearby. In addition, terminals only lock out for ten seconds after failing to hack them, as opposed to being permanently locked. This interval can also be eliminated with the right perk.
  • A "Quicksave" feature was added for the console versions of the game. Saving the usual way takes several button presses and takes some time on the consoles, which may dissuade the player from wanting to interrupt the game. Quicksave allows the player to save progress with a single button press and is very useful before entering dangerous areas where the player risks being killed unexpectedly. (This feature has existed on the PC for all of Bethesda's other Fallout games as well as most of the Elder Scrolls series.)
  • Power armor ingress/egress is mildly time-consuming (merely waiting for the animation to complete), but in a combat situation, where seconds count, this could be disastrous. Thankfully, anyone entering or leaving power armor in the proximity of hostiles makes extra haste, including the Player Character.
  • Worried you might leave one of the Total Hack holotapes behind in a security control terminal? They auto-eject back into your inventory after you're done tampering with that turret or protectron it's connected to.
• Anti Poop-Socking: A very subtle one from Nick Valentine:
  Nick: You good to keep going? I don't sleep or eat or anything like that, but if ya need to, you do it.
  • Ada has a similar line.
  Ada: We can keep traveling as much as you want... I don't require sleep or food in order to survive.
• Apocalyptic Log:
  • The prologue gives a brief one when a news program is interrupted by reports of nuclear detonations as the Great War begins.
  • In the game, there are logs like this scattered all over the place, the first of them being the security and Overseer's logs from Vault 111. A few of them may highlight a new area for you to find, but most are just there for ambience.
• Apocalypse Not: Post-war Boston is relatively intact compared to the Capital Wasteland and even the less devastated Mojave, coming complete with skyscrapers and running electricity. This has made the Commonwealth a bastion of civilization in the Wasteland comparable to that of the Core Region in the NCR. Director Todd Howard mentioned at E3 2015 that only a single bomb was shot at Boston. Said bomb fell short of hitting Boston proper, landing somewhere southwest of Natick and leaving only an area called "the Glowing Sea", which is still filled with lethal radiation even 210 years later. The regional flora still did not take well to the Black Rain, however, as most regional flora in other games.
• Arbitrary Weapon Range: Unlike in 3 or New Vegas, guns do not have a hard maximum range: instead the "range" stat refers to distance within which they deal full damage. More distance past this decreases damage until reaching double the weapon's range, where it will do halved damage, and further distance doesn't penalize damage any more.
• Arc Words:
  • After realizing America and China were going into all-out war, despite it meaning nuclear armageddon, a newscaster voiced by Ron Perlman says the series-wide Arc Words.
  Newscaster: We do, we do have... we do have coming in confirmed reports of nuclear detonations. My God, our soldiers were right... war, war never changes.
  • The (male version) of the Sole Survivor was to give a speech the day of the war, and was practicing it in the character creation mirror. You later find the building he was to go to, and can use the microphone to give the quote.
  Sole Survivor: War. War never changes.
  • The Nuka-World DLC has "the real deal," often used to refer to how the Sole Survivor is extremely efficient at getting things done.
• Armored Coffins: Vertibirds are this to virtually memetic levels, due to being deathtraps both for the occupants and for anyone on the ground nearby when they inevitably fall from the sky in a fiery explosion. Sometimes the only way you'll know that there was a Vertibird nearby is when your activities are interrupted by an explosion followed by a rain of flaming debris and Brotherhood corpses.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: A terminal in Saugus Ironworks details people who failed "The Forged", how they failed, and their punishments. Three of these charges, which resulted in the offenders being fed to a forge, were: cheating on a trial, fleeing from battle, and refusing to change their name.
• Art Evolution:
  • The art design of the game got completely overhauled from the previous games where now environments are vibrant and have more color, almost every monsters, mechanical designs, and weapons, even staples of the series like what Vault doors look like got revamped (they are now somehow even bigger and the one you starts in has an entrance elevator.).
  • Character creation is much more in-depth this time. In addition to preset shapes for features such as your eyes and nose, you can now fine tune the size, position, and shape of your facial features much better than in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. You can even morph their body within a "Thin-Muscular-Large" parameter, meaning that every human, Synth, and Ghoul NPC no longer share the same physical build.
  • The Ghouls are slightly different than in previous games. A fair number of them are able to keep their head of hair and many now have completely black eyes. They also have varying levels of decomposition and don't all speak in raspy voices. Feral Ghouls also look more like lumpy, hunchbacked mutants rather than straight zombies, with bulging heads and twisted limbs. Overall, Feral Ghouls in Fallout 4 look more like actual real-life burn victims or patients suffering from severe degenerative disease, rather than the high-fantasy undead zombies they looked like in Fallout 3.
  • The Pip-Boy interface and icons now looks more high res, having a more solid font than in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. The Pip-Boy icons are now even animated humorously. It was also redesigned to have the switches and dials on the right side, where someone could actually use it when wearing it on their left hand.
  • Mirelurks are no longer bipedal crustaceans, instead looking more like oversized mutated crabs or lobsters depending on the species.
• Artificial Brilliance: Enemies (and to a lesser extent, allies) are a lot smarter here than in Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
  • Humanoid enemies won't just stand in place shooting at you — they'll move around to avoid your fire, will duck behind cover to heal and reload, peak their heads out to look for you, and will fire from around corners and over barricades without stepping out into the open. When facing multiple enemies they'll fan out to attack from multiple directions, particularly melee enemies who will sneak around and rush you from behind if they can. They'll also use suppression fire to pin you down behind cover, and anyone who has grenades will use them to flush you out. When attacking a group of enemies from range, after a couple of shots they'll fire back at you and start to make their way towards your location, because even if you're in stealth and using a suppressor on your gun, they still recognize they're being shot at and can tell the general direction its coming from regardless of how visible (or not) you are. Sufficiently intelligent enemies will also sometimes try and use environmental hazards against the player, such as Raiders or Gunners firing at oil slicks on the ground to set the Player Character on fire, or Deathclaws throwing wrecked cars at you.
  • Mutated animals (such as Wild Mongrels) will attempt to surround the player while in combat. Deathclaws are now intelligent enough to weave to the sides to dodge gunfire. Feral Ghouls, instead of serving as shambling bullet catchers, are now flailing, erratic, and extremely aggressive adversaries. Mirelurks now cover their faces with their pincers when they are charging at you. In cases where the enemy is incapable of finding its way to you (such as Deathclaws being unable to climb a truck), they will retreat to cover and stay there until you either manage to shoot them from another angle (which makes them retreat even further) or come down to ground level, which renders you vulnerable to attack once more.
  • Sneaking is more difficult in this game than previous titles and in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, where the enemies were infamously bad about dismissing arrows as the wind and going back to milling about as their friends were being slaughtered one by one. Enemies in this game will spend a fair bit of time searching for you if you aggro them and will cover a fairly large area in the process, and making noise or moving around makes it easier for them to find you and they'll keep looking. As mentioned above, if you give away your position by firing at them from the same place, they'll start firing back randomly because just because they can't see you doesn't mean they don't realize someone in that area is attacking them. For that matter, if you're sniping them with a firearm or assassinating them with a melee weapon, they'll either take cover or be more thorough in looking for you, recognizing your preferred method of attack. In large dungeons or the open world, enemies will even disengage combat and run to tell their allies you're coming.
  • Companions and other NPCs can pick up weapons on the corpses of other characters and will use them as long as they have the appropriate ammunition. Dogmeat often fetches items for you or points out more hidden caches by barking and pointing when you're not fighting.
  • Random NPCs in towns and settlements will comment on your exploits that they've seen or heard you've done, such as your answers to Piper's questions for her newspaper. Additionally, some of the stuff you do while exploring the ruins of Boston will also be reflected in comments that other NPCs mention in their computers. For example, if you kill a named Raider during your travels, a rival Raider Boss may comment that said Raider was killed by someone.
  • Enemies attacking settlements (at least those specifically attacking a settlement during a "Defend..." quest, not those who randomly spawn nearby and simply wander in) will usually attempt to enter from the weakest points in the defenses. Once inside they will always target the settlement's generators if they are vulnerable, which most turrets need to function and can easily be the most difficult to repair after the fact.
• Artificial Human: Third-generation synths blur the line between this and Cyborgs. Aside from the ambiguous "Synth Component", 3rd Gens look, act, smell, and feel just like real human beings. Even when you catch a glimpse of their construction methods, their bodies are constructed with actual tissues piece-by-piece, manufactured from real human DNA. Synths feel pain, bleed, and have the same organs as humans. So far, the only known concrete difference between them and humans is that their personalities and memories can be erased or overridden, and even then, as Memory Loungers prove, there's some gray area.
• Artificial Stupidity: Unfortunately, there are still some issues.
  • AI characters apparently do not realize that radiation is harmful, and so will make no effort to avoid it. In particular, the mission-founded settlement at Starlight Drive In has a large radioactive crater smack dab in the middle, and the settlers apparently love nothing more than to go and stand right next to it. They don't die, but the process of losing all their health and getting back up wipes their commands, including instructions to carry out jobs to support the settlement. It's necessary to remove the radioactive barrels through the settlement building interface in order to keep everyone from dying.
  • AI Settlers pathfinding becomes worse and worse the more complex a player built settlement becomes, leaving half or more of your population just standing around and shops and defense posts unmanned, so forget about making that Megaton replica.
  • It's an Enforced Trope sometimes. A lot of enemies intentionally lack the buffs to their AI mentioned in artificial brilliance, seemingly to reflect that said enemies are dumb as hell in universe. A good example of this is that low level raiders will take cover behind the very explosive cars. Higher level raiders not only don't do this, but will tell any of their colleagues who do to stop being dumbasses.
  • Many of the hostile factions are pretty trap-happy, laying booby traps all around and in their territory. However, sometimes they don't remember where these traps are. This can lead to situation where Super Mutants and Raiders charge through their own minefields or get hit by their own tripwire rocket launcher in their eagerness to attack you.
  • Any melee based NPC will try to get up and close to a Super Mutant Suicider. Said Suicider will also explode should any hostile creature get close, including half dead Radroaches that they could easily stomp on...
  • Vertibirds will almost always get shot down eventually wherever they appear, though given that they are the only flying enemy/ally in the game composed of multiple NPCs, this can be somewhat forgivable. Still they almost always die because they try to orbit around allies they are escorting or enemies they are trying to kill. This strategy makes them harder to hit but also exposes them to far more groups of enemies who will take potshots at them and eventually down them. To make matters worse they often deploy the only person assigned to the mini gun when they land, depriving them of their most effective weapon.
  • Dogmeat gets this pretty bad. Unlike other companions, he is programmed to run in front of the player and seems to predict their movement to better get ahead. Good dog behaviour perhaps, but terrible for a companion since he'll frequently barge into trouble. He'll open rigged doors, blunder through minefields before you can disarm them, saunter through tripwires◊, walk directly into enemy camps while you probe the outskirts, and will constantly dodge attempts to access his inventory. Conversely, if you're trying to get through a door or down a set of stairs, he'll be right in front of you blocking the way and refuse to move, and will constantly move into your crosshairs when you're trying to loot corpses.
  • Companions still have no concept of stealth, and can be highly unpredictable when you're in stealth (either trying to kill everything all the time or ignoring enemies that are attacking them).
  • Companions are set to teleport to you periodically to prevent you from getting separated from them. If you're in a tight space in a building however the game tends to teleport them into an adjacent room or even onto the floor above or below, usually right into a group of enemies.
  • Trying to get companions to enter power armor can be a real chore. They will often try to run straight into it rather than coming up from behind as they should, and to make matters even more frustrating they will give up trying after only two seconds.
  • NPCs don't really handle the verticality of the world very well. Settlers will often deduce that the only way to get down from a roof isn't to take the stairs you carefully placed to let them up there, but to walk off a nearby ledge. Raiders, and especially Gunners due to their raised highway forts, will occasionally walk right off the edge of their vantage points and die instantly on contact with the ground.
    • Some of the issues with AI and verticality, such as Settlers not using the upper levels of multi-story buildings in settlements, can be fixed with mods, although several other problems remain.
  • During the "Defend the Castle" quest, it quickly becomes clear why the Minutemen lost control of the castle in the past. They seem to have no understanding of the value defensive fortifications, as they will mindlessly charge out of the castle to attack the oncoming Synth army instead of staying behind the walls and letting the enemies come to them. They will also turn on you if you accidentally hit one of them with a stray round or explosive, which is hard to avoid when they are constantly charging in front of you to rush the foes. This severely limits your weapon selection for this quest, as a few stray rounds or splash damage from a grenade can actually turn your own garrison against you in the middle of the battle. It's best to bring your companions to the castle beforehand to aid you.
  • Similarly, Settlers assigned to guard duty will abandon their fortified positions during an attack. It's quite jarring to see a guard equipped with a sniper rifle leave his guard tower that is flanked by turrets to charge right up to melee weapon-wielding Super Mutants before he starts shooting.
  • Kidnapping missions are generated at random, regardless of how well defended a settlement is or the armament of the victim. This can lead to some extremely baffling and frustrating situations, such a settler wearing power armor and armed with a plasma rifle being kidnapped from a settlement with over 150 defense turrets covering every possible angle of approach.
  • Before it was patched, the first few months the radiant Minutemen quests were generated randomly without regard to defences you set up or equipment of your settlers, leading to a heavily fortified settlement with well equipped inhabitants being afraid of three ghouls at the other end of the commonwealth or even getting kidnapped. Similarly, attacks on settlements needed your immediate attention and personal presence to be successful, just as regardless of any defences and equipment, even if your turrets would take out the attackers before you even had time to find out what's going on, so that four raiders could destroy your whole infrastructure. Both issues have been addressed though, so that well defended settlements won't endure kidnappings anymore and if attacked and ignored send you a message that they succeeded in defending themselves.
  • Settlers will sometimes ignore the beds provided for them and stand around all night, which reduces the settlement's happiness score. The only way round this is to open the settlement interface and manually assign them to beds. In some cases, this can be caused by the NPCs not having enough room to carry out their lying-down animation, which can be fixed by making sure that there aren't any objects too close to the right side of the bed (from the perspective of someone lying down with their head on the pillow).
• Artistic License – Engineering: Too many instances to count with settlement construction. In general, you'll get far more resources from scrapping junk objects than you would guess from their size, can build objects much larger and heavier than their individual components, and can even scrap items to get components whose world models are bigger than the object you scrapped. To say nothing of "pre-fab" construction objects that seem to use fewer materials than would be needed if you built an equivalent structure one piece at a time.
• Artistic License – Gun Safety: Many gun animations are set up in a way that would be unsafe in reality. For example, the bolt action weapons are left-handed bolts used by right-handed shooters. In real life, this would result in the trigger hand remaining on the trigger while working the bolt action, the rifle being pointed into the air instead of downrange at the target, and the hot spent casing being ejected in the direction of the shooter instead of away.
• Artistic License – Physics: Somehow modifying the receiver of a gun makes the bullets do more harm to enemies. The kinetic energy of a bullet is determined by the amount of powder in the cartridge to propel the round and the mass of the projectile. The construction of the gun would matter little in the lethality of a firearm. This is entirely in keeping with the video game design philosophy that single-shot weapons are more powerful than a repeater of the same or higher calibur for balance reasons.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Arthur Maxson, previously a young boy of seemingly little significance in Fallout 3 makes a return as the East Coast Brotherhood's Elder.
  • RJ MacCready was the Mayor of Little Lamplight in Fallout 3, and is an adult (and recruitable companion) in 4, having relocated from the Capital Wasteland to the Commonwealth in the interim.
  • The Institute and the Railroad were both introduced in 3 as part of a side quest, with a few references to the sad state of the Commonwealth. Here, they're both major factions who drive the plot forward.
• Ascended Glitch: In 3 (and New Vegas), Radscorpions would sometimes glitch underneath the ground, and would fall through when you got close to them. Now in 4, Radscorpions are one of only two enemies (the other being Mole Rats) that gain this ability as an attack.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: If the Sole Survivor's current companion hates their guts and is asked how they feel about the partnership, none of them will take too kindly to it.
• Asshole Victim: Plenty in the game.
  • Almost every Raider can be considered one, especially named ones that keep a journal talking about how they tortured and killed people For the Evulz, so don't feel bad killing them because they'll kill you given the opportunity.
  • The Gunners also count, since they're shown to be Sociopathic Soldiers-For-Hire that do anything for the right price, and just generally act like complete Jerkasses.
  • For a non-Raider/Gunners example, look no further than Bobbi No-Nose, Goodneighbor's resident Ungrateful Bastard who contracts the Sole Survivor for a daring heist on Diamond City's mayor McDonough's strongroom. It soon turns out that her actual target is Hancock's private warehouse, and she's doing it less for the money and more out of spite because he's a popular leader and she's not. Bear in mind that Hancock welcomed her to Goodneighbor with open arms when she had nowhere else to go. Considering how well-liked Hancock is among players, most won't think twice about giving Bobbi her comeuppance the moment the opportunity arises. Needless to say, no tears are shed on either side of the screen.
  • A non-villainous one is Ricky Dalton, a Railroad "tourist" who's overbearingly insulting and confrontational no matter how helpful the Sole survivor tries to be with him. You can do a hard speech check to convince him to run interference on the Synths infesting the Railroad's old headquarters while you infiltrate the compound, which everyone involved seems to be aware will get Dalton killed, and invariably does. Deacon, who isn't a companion at this point, doesn't have a problem with it, either. Companions like Curie and Hancock won't, though.
• Atomic Superpower: This is the first game where the player can use radiological weaponry (Gamma Guns in the base game and Radium-infused carbines in Far Harbour). There are also gamma-ray laser upgrades for energy weapons. Also, some Legendary items feed off the radiation in the Sole Survivor's body, becoming more powerful.
• The Atoner: Ada, a robot working with a group of caravaners, seeks your help to avenge the deaths of her friends after the route she'd chosen leads them into an ambush by the Mechanist's robots.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Some hostile factions/species have super-sized versions far larger than any other of their subtypes. These are the Super Mutant Behemoths and the Mirelurk Queens, both of which stand at roughly 20 feet in height. Even more monstrous creatures — namely truck-sized Hermit Crabs and building-sized Fog Crawlers — were introduced with the Far Harbor add-on. All of them have two things in common: you really, really, really don't want to get hit by their attacks... and they respawn regularly.
• Attack Its Weak Point:
  • Sentry Bots can be dispatched much more easily by attacking their fusion core, which deals a huge amount of damage to it. The trouble is that it keeps said core protected in a hatch, only opening it when it overheats to cool itself down.
  • Likewise, Mirelurks will usually die from two good hits to their face. That, however, requires getting past their massive and extremely tough shell, a fact they will exploit by charging you with their heads down to minimize exposure and crouching to block hits.
  • Deathclaws are vulnerable in their unarmored belly area. Good luck trying to hit them there, though, since they know how to dodge, and tend to be bent over when moving towards the player.
    • Deathclaws also become much easier to kill when their legs are crippled, reducing them to a helpless crawl.
  • One of the stock phrases that Paladin Danse shouts in combat as a companion is this, word for word. Though he shouts it at random whether the enemy has a weak spot or not.
  • Subverted by Protectrons and Assaultrons. Their heads actually receive less damage than their bodies. Their legs and arms are somewhat frail, but on most robots, destroying their arms just sets off their self-destruct mode.
  • A well-placed shot to the fusion core of an enemy's Power Armor will set off a chain reaction that, after a few seconds, will cause them to blow up like a bomb. The fusion core is on the back of the Power Armor and a very small target, but unlike Sentry Bots, it's completely exposed.
• Attack Reflector: The 10-Luck Perk is Ricochet, which gives enemies' bullets a chance to bounce off you and kill themselves, with a higher chance of kicking in when you are close to death.
• Authority in Name Only: You can be named the leader of both the Minutemen and the Institute over the course of the game, but this just results in someone else giving orders to you to complete quests for the faction.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Plasma weapons are functionally useless at long range compared to laser weapons and conventional firearms for one simple reason: travel time. Lasers and slug throwers do damage almost as quickly as hitscan weapons. A plasma weapon gives targets that have seen you plenty of time to dodge so that multiple shots can easily miss, making them frustrating to use unless fired point-blank or modded to be full auto for More Dakka.
  • Laser weapons themselves are less useful for sniping than kinetic weapons because they can't be silenced. They can kill a single target well enough, but if you try to pick off a large group, they will be alerted by your first shot. They also don't get the benefit of a stealth kill damage multiplier perk because of this.
  • Radiation weapons due to their Crippling Overspecialization. Human and non-mutant animals are the only ones vulnerable to it, and they represent maybe a third of the things you'll be killing in this game. They're useful for selling at least and, unfortunately, very deadly in the hands of the Children of Atom. The Kiloton radium rifle from Far Harbor is probably the best due to the fact that it has the "Explosive" legendary effect and shoots really fast, the radiaton damage is more of a bonus.
  • Missile Turrets. They're turrets that shoot missiles. Rapidly^note Or rather, in rapid 3-shot bursts. They give the highest level of settlement defense, and are extremely likely to deter raiders and the sort from attacking. That being said, it's a very bad idea to rely exclusively on them, since they lack the concept of a blast radius. Exaggerated during Defend the Castle, considering the fact the Synths can teleport to the top of the walls to try and flank you. The missile turrets are unaware of the possibility that there might be friendly settlers within close range of their targets, or even other turrets.
  • The Junk Jet has been rendered impractical since junk is now extremely important for all kinds of crafting, so why would you want to get rid of it? There are some resources you can spare — steel is common enough, for instance — but objects made of only one resource are rare, and usually too heavy to justify carrying around to use as ammo. Junk jet items are also orders of magnitude larger than bullets, and thus more likely to be intercepted by cover the target may stand behind or near to. It's much easier to hit someone's body protruding behind a pillar for example with a bullet than with a basketball, which is far more likely to partially hit the pillar and bounce off.
  • An invoked example of Technology Marches On, the opening narration shows a scientist working on the Pip-Boy 1.0. It's a giant hulking contraption with a clunky metal frame and heavy circuitry that was three times larger than the wrist of the wearer.
  • The Big Boy with the MIRV Launcher Mod: The Two Shot Legendary Effect with the other Mod effectively multiplies your payload from two to twelve, but also increases the blast radius to the point that it's better to carry a regular Fat Man indoors, and shortens the trajectory so much as it stands nearly as great a danger to you as it does to your targets. Thanks to the game's Level Scaling, getting caught in your own blast is guaranteed to kill you.
  • The Fat Man in general. Yes, it one-shots pretty much anything players can come across, but it's total overkill against the vast majority of enemies. Add to that its extremely high weight, its rare and expensive ammunition, its not-quite-trivial handling due to the nukes' ballistic arc, and as well as the above-mentioned likeliness of blowing yourself to kingdom come as quickly as the intended target. That goes double in Survival Mode where carry weight is severely reduced and even ammo has weight, with mini nukes being by far the heaviest ammo type in the game (one single nuke weighs as much as a powerful military rifle).
  • In general, any weapon that has an ammo type that enemies do not drop, is not generally found as loot, and that only a handful of merchants carry in limited (sometimes very limited) quantity is prone to becoming this, even if the weapon performs otherwise fine. Notable examples are the Broadsider, the Railway Rifle and the Cryolator.
  • The Syringer can also fall victim to this. Its ammo needs to be crafted, and requires some rare components, making it too precious to use freely, yet the weapon's weight can make it impractical to keep around "just in case" you meet someone worth using it on. It's ammo is proabably worse as their effects aren't all that impressive for their costs as it's far easier to just shoot people rather than poison them/make them bleed out/reduce their damage resistance or gamble on whether or not they'll spawn a bloatfly on death.
  • The Harpoon Gun from the Far Harbor expansion is a very powerful weapon, but it only holds a single shot and it has an insanely long reload time that's all-too prone to being interrupted (forcing you to start all over again). It's also not particularly accurate. If you're being attacked by multiple enemies or a single enemy that's too durable to be killed by a single shot, you're in for a world of hurt.
  • The Automatron expansion brings with it the ability to create various robots who can be used as companions or to perform tasks at settlements. After many difficult fights against Sentry Bot enemies, it may come as a pleasant surprise that you can now build one of your own. Unfortunately, creating one and outfitting it with worthwhile parts requires massive amounts of rare resources. They're also huge, which makes bringing them indoors as a companion extremely difficult and they have odd pathfinding difficulties on top of that. They also break for cooldowns mid-fight, leaving them helpless and with their fusion cores exposed, ripe for being picked off by enemies (which causes the Sentry Bot to explode violently.) Finally, many of their best weapons are inaccurate at anything beyond a short distance and are prone to breaking mid-fight, which can cause them to activate their self-destruct sequence. Even if you are right next to them. Their only practical uses are for guard duty in open settlements (getting around the pathfinding issues mentioned above) and as muscle to bring along when you know you're headed for an outdoor battle in an open area.
  • Several perks fall under this category, with Pain Train being a good example. Yes, it undoubtedly has quite some entertainment value in addition to dealing damage and possibly knocking enemies down by simply sprinting into them. The downsides? It must be upgraded to the highest perk level to be able to knock down actually dangerous foes like Deathclaws, it requires the full 10 points in Strength to even unlock, it only works while wearing power armor, the damage it deals is insufficient to kill low-level raiders even at the highest perk level, all of that on top of sprinting draining action points and fusion cores at an alarming rate as well as requiring a certain inrun distance to reach full speed, thus making it largely useless from up close. Finally, in a game full of enemies that either wield powerful long-range weaponry or specialize in ripping their victims to shreds in melee, charging into close combat while having an entire arsenal of guns in all flavors available is not exactly a tactic one could call sound. It's far simpler, safer, easier and cheaper (from a perk point of view) to just grab a BFG and rain death on the targets from afar.
  • The Nuka World DLC adds several new Nuka Cola flavors, and the ability to mix these flavors together to boost their effects. Introducing Nuka-Cide, the result of mixing all Nuka Cola flavors into one super drink, restroing a whopping 1,200 Hit Points, 300 Action points, +50 Max HP, +20 Max AP, +35 Rad Resistance, and +35 Carry Weight. Very rarely is a player ever going to need all these effects at once, and making it requires you to mix together nine Nuka Cola variants, some of which are rare enough as it is, into one drink. Most players would be better off carrying around the individual flavors to use as needed, or making some of the 'lesser' mixes.
  • The Broadsider from the main game: it's a cannon that hasn't been used for centuries, lasted a nuclear war, and now carried by a husband/wife. All of this means that you have a gun that's stupidly heavy (27.4 lbs), has poor range and acurracy (with no pointer while sighted as well), carries a single shot at a time (it's a naval cannon) unless upgraded, and lobs rare, pricy, and heavy (in survival mode) cannonballs in pronounced arcs. Its cut ammo (a timed-fuse cannonball and "nukes") would have made it even harder to justify carrying. However, it still deals decent explosive damage, and has a tight enough area of effect that it can be used in close range, and cannonballs are easier to find with Automatron installed, as you can use Eyebot Pods to find them in counts of 34-40.
  • Being able to build your own Vault as a settlement is an awesome idea, but its implementation in Vault 88 is lacking. The cavern it's located in isn't properly designed to accomodate the grid-based layout of the Vault tiles, so it is difficult if not impossible to build a continuous network of rooms like an actual Vault, and the cavern's layout is huge with several entry points; when enemies attack, they will spawn at these entry points and get lost, forcing you to track them down to end the attack. On the upside you can ignore most of these problems because the main cavern where the developers intend you to build the Atrium is huge, 12x12 square and 5 stories tall at its central point and not even filling the entire main cavern yet — this means you have plenty of room to give each settler their own fair-sized room and still have plenty of room left for shops, scavenging, farming, and whatever other rooms you feel like making. But be warned that's going to take a long time because building a full Vault is very resource-intensive, requiring thousands of units of materials including Steel, one of the most widely-used building materials. And it's possible you'll end up hitting the building cap for settlements before you're even done. The summation is that it is difficult to properly utilize all the building area Vault 88 gives you, the game wouldn't let you utilize all of it anyway, and you don't even need to expand the vault's sectors to be able to build a massive vault with maximum population.
• Awkward Poetry Reading: The Atom Cats garage has several lootable holotapes, with recordings of the gang hosting a poetry night. In one of the tapes, Rowdy tries to read a poem called "Ode to my Hammer", but suffers Performance Anxiety and gives up after the first line.

B

• Badass Bystander: If you arm your settlers properly, they'll be able to make hay of many threats like Super Mutants, Gunners and even freaking Deathclaws without your assistance.
• Badass Longcoat: There are a number of longcoats in the game, and each one could fit. Special mention however goes to the Silver Shroud outfit: a long, black trench and the Silver Shroud's iconic scarf. It even comes with a hat and a gun to complete the look. If you're siding with the Minutemen, you can also get the Minutemen General's outfit, which is a mix of an American Revolutionary War-style coat and Captain America's costume, and sports decent defenses, low weight and a bonus to Charisma.
• Bare Midriffs Are Feminine:
  • The game has a few Gendered Outfits, including the "Road Leathers". On a male, they are a Shout-Out to the main character of the Mad Max series. On a female, the shirt exposes the midriff.
  • The "Harness" outfit, both the regular and the "Gunner" variants, have women wear nothing above the waistline but a greenish strip of cloth to (barely) cover their bra, plus some canvas straps to keep the pants in place like skimpy overalls.
  • The Nuka-Girl Rocketsuit, added in the Nuka-World DLC, basically combines skintight white leggings with a skimpy long-sleeved top, topped off with heeled boots and a Fishbowl Helmet. It is intended by Nuka-Cola to be worn on a pinup model mascot, after all.
  • The Grognak the Barbarian costume consists of skimpy Pelts of the Barbarian on both male and female characters. On males, it is simply a loincloth. On females, there is a top strap that covers the bra and fully exposes the midriff.
• The Barnum: There's a man hanging out in the South Boston area near the remains of the Minutemen's former base of operations (The Castle AKA Fort Independence) who gives out supposedly useful cards called Charge Cards in exchange for 110 caps each. He claims that these cards are useful in bypassing the need to spend bottle caps with vendors everywhere in the Commonwealth. In reality, these cards were only valid before the bombs fell and are no longer relevant in the post-apocalyptic world; in other words, he's a scam artist who rips off unsuspecting Wastelanders of their hard earned caps just to satisfy his greed. He even calls you a "retahd" straight to your face whether or not you accept his offer, immediately blowing his guise as a scammer. Surely enough, this puts him into Too Dumb to Live territory. Brooks in Far Harbor, however, will accept it, and even then he takes the card and gives you a hundred caps for it.
• Bat People: The cover of Grognak the Barbarian: Jungle of the bat-babies depicts Grognak being attacked by a swarm of small humanoids with bat wings and oversized, pointy ears.
• Battle Butler: Codsworth is a literal one once he joins you as a companion.
• Battle Couple: The Sole Survivor can become one with their romanced companion, if you take them along.
• Batter Up!:
  • The Baseball Bat is back as a heavily customizable weapon, and baseball plays a minor role in the game's setting. One of the settlements, Diamond City, is inside Fenway Park. Shopkeeper Moe Cronin wears an ersatz Red Sox uniform and sells baseball equipment as weapons and armor, believing that baseball was a Blood Sport where people beat each other to death. Diamond City Security uses umpire armor.
  • The Grand Slam Perk gives up to 100% melee damage and has a chance to slam some poor bastard's head off. HOME RUN!
  • The unique 2076 World Series Bat has a slim chance to send your enemies to the fences.
  • Nuka-World has also added several powerful mods for bats, including jets mounted on the sid.! Naturally, if the player is skilled enough to make use of these mods their homemade baseball bats can easily become one of the strongest melee weapons in the game.
• Bayonet Ya: One of the new weapon mods, which increases a weapon's melee damage but slightly lowers ranged accuracy.
• Bears Are Bad News: Yao Guai, giant mutant bears, are back and are as mean as ever.
• Bear Trap: Far Harbor allows the Sole Survivor to make their own at crafting stations. If they have the right skills the player can even make an upgraded version with bleed damage.
• Beef Gate:
  • Typically any areas where Deathclaws are prevalent are meant to be explored when you're a higher level, with hopefully better gear as well. If they're not around though, any enemies with a skull by their name should also give you a hint that you're probably not strong enough for this place yet. It's not that they can't be killed; you'll be at an extreme disadvantage if you attempt to fight them, such as doing less damage to them than an enemy that's about your level or lower.
  • The early portion of the main quest has you traveling southeast from Sanctuary Hills, first to Concord and then to Diamond City. If you take a fairly direct path to both places, the enemies along the way are quite manageable for a low level player. However, if you venture too far from that path, the game will randomly spawn high level Yao Guai nearby you as you travel. At a low level and with the fairly weak early-game weapons, they will be a massive challenge to defeat.
• Benevolent A.I.: In contrast to previous games, many of the robots have both evolved far beyond original parameters and remained extremely friendly to humanity. Codsworth, Curie, Nick Valentine, and Ada are among the nicest and most polite of the recruitable companions, and the Commonwealth residents in general. Many other robots and A.I.s (like Synths) encountered throughout the Commonwealth, like the Graygarden Supervisors, have stayed friendly while their programming has evolved and gained sapience (if a bit eccentric at times).
• Beware the Nice Ones: Your friendly canine buddy will viciously tear out raiders' throats when they're down. Many of your more benevolent companions count as this, with Preston Garvey never hesitating at disintagrating Raiders with his Laser Musket.
• BFG: Several, as usual: the Missile Launcher, the Broadsider, the Gauss Rifle, the Minigun and Gatling Laser, the Harpoon Gun, the Junk Jet, the Flamer, the Cryolator, and of course, the Fat Man.
  • The Tesla Rifle counts as well with the Charging Barrel.
  • A Creation Club mod adds in the 2016 incarnation of the Trope Namer.
• Big Bad: Depends on what faction you choose to side with, either way you'll have to go war with one of the two most powerful by the main story's end. These include facing Elder Arthur Maxson, the Synth-discriminating leader of the Brotherhood of Steel, or 'Father', the leader of the mysterious and human-replacing Institute. You yourself can become this to the entire Commonwealth by allying with the Nuka-World raiders, conquering peaceful settlements by (threats of) violence, bullying others into supplying your troops and killing, enslaving or robbing people blind left, right and center.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Besides the Radscorpions and Radroaches from earlier games, there are giant mosquitoes known as Bloodbugs, and giant Scorpionflies called Stingwings (which are this game's answer to Cazadores). The Nuka-World DLC delightfully introduces the player to all sorts of mutated ants, from examples the size of a large dog that merely want a bite out of the Sole Survivor's legs, to others the size of small dogs that come in erratically flying swarms. As if that wasn't creepy-crawly enough, giant, heavily armored cave crickets are also on the hunt for some tasty human flesh. And of course the DLC doesn't skimp on all the regular chitin-armored nastiness mentioned above either. It even goes so far as to give especially large Radroaches the new trick of spawning an entire swarm of smaller roaches that burst forth from their Broodmother's dead carcass. Watch your toes.
• Big Good: The player character can become one of these like in all Fallout games. The thing is, this can happen very early by you taking over the Minutemen and becoming their General.
• Bilingual Bonus: The band of Raiders at the FMS Northern Star wreck speak entirely in untranslated Norwegian.
  • Yao Guai, the mutated bears, can be translated from Chinese as monster. In-game fluff explains that the name was given to them by Chinese POW's (which is a Call-Back to the Chinese "internment" camp found at Big MT in Old World Blues).
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • Henry Cooke. When you first meet him, he's presented as a calm and reasonable person, but in the quest related to him, you can find out that he's been doing exactly what he's been accused of (sleeping with another man's wife), dealing drugs, willing to murder, and will sell you out when things get too much for him to handle. And if all that wasn't enough, he's also an informant for the Institute.
  • Ultimately, the entire town of Covenant counts as this, due to their firm assistance on doing Not Quite the Right Thing in their secret war with the Institute.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Irrespective of which faction you support, your son Shaun dies. If you helped the Brotherhood, the Railroad or the Minutemen and didn't kill him beforehand, you meet your son on his deathbed for a poignant last scene as your forces storm the Institute and destroy his life's work as he scowls at you and rants that you destroyed the Commonwealth's last hope. But at least with the Institute gone, the Synths are finally free from their slavery, the remaining scientists can join the Minutemen and actually help the surface world, and the people of the Commonwealth can sleep easy as a new society is formed. It's likely the Synths will be reduced to a Dying Race, but Hope Springs Eternal.
  • More-so bittersweet if you supported the Brotherhood, as the Commonwealth enjoys a level of stability and prosperity never seen before... at the cost of putting an end to the Synths, whom are viewed by the Brotherhood as a threat to mankind's continued existence. It's also likely that sapient Ghouls will be next on their checklist...
    • Especially more bitter if you executed Danse or failed to save him from Maxson. Sweetened or maybe made even more bitter if you betray the Brotherhood afterwards and destroy the Prydwen as stated down below, avenging your friend but at the cost of many innocent lives. In addition, Danse holds no ill will to Maxson and the Brotherhood for betraying him, believed in the Brotherhood's ideals to the bitter end and would probably have been enraged and devastated to see the Sole Survivor destroying the Prydwen.
  • Even in what's generally considered the happiest ending, the Minutemen ending, can result in a war with the Brotherhood which results in a Minutemen victory... and the Prydwen being blasted out of the sky, lost with all hands including all of the children on-board.
  • Even if you side with the Institute, Shaun is not long for this world; he has end-stage cancer, and because the treatments would turn him into a Super Mutant or a monster like the Master, he has elected to instead let the disease run its course and Face Death with Dignity. This is on top of the fact that the Brotherhood and Railroad have been wiped out, the Institute's practice of Kill and Replace will continue unimpeded, and the Synths still in the Institute will likely remain slaves forever.
  • Far Harbor embraces this as there is no Golden Ending. Even getting all three factions on the Island to live in peace comes at the price of keeping DiMA's crimes secret, and helping him murder someone(though if you have done enough quests for the Children of Atom, you can convince him to just leave the Island) and two Synths having had their mind wiped and replaced, which goes against the very purpose of Acadia. All other endings require the destruction of at least one faction.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Downplayed. Of the three factions that can't be reconciled in the game, the fact that you can choose the one that kidnaps and murders random people to replace them with robot clones in order to more efficiently steal resources from starving Wasteland dwellers to side with without feeling you're making the evil choice highlights that all of the main factions are flawed, and that it's up to the player to decided which faction is the lightest shade of grey. And even the Railroad, the nominally "good" faction, are so fixated on Synth liberation that they're firmly grey as well. The only outright "good guys" in the setting are the Minutemen, who are inadvertently rendered grey themselves by the fact that you can convince them to side with any other faction, even the Institute. The player, however, can subvert this.
  • The Triggermen are ruthless killers modeled on the Mafia, but they have a surprisingly progressive hiring policy — they have no problem allowing ghouls in their ranks.
  • A Sole Survivor Overboss can actually get through Nuka-World without hurting anyone who didn't deserve it. They can talk settlers into selling their land to them rather than simply being forced off of it at gunpoint, and can also bribe other settlers into financing your operations. This appeases the Raiders and keeps them from going on a rampage (unless you want them to).
• Black Comedy: While not necessarily at the level of New Vegas, the game clearly has a darker and sillier sense of humor than 3. Just to pick a few examples, there's the Raiders of Hardware Town & downtown Boston (near Trinity Church) talking about the "Grenade guy" (who was so bafflingly bonkers that he even managed to confuse the Super Mutants enough to let him go free) and Codsworth complaining to the Sole Survivor upon their return of the futility of trying to clean a collapsed house.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • Fallon's department store and Fallon's Basement are references to Filene's and the associated surplus/overstock bargain store.
  • The model for Purified water, which is in a can instead of a bottle like the previous games, is an almost exact replica of real cans of emergency drinking water, just with the label changed from "MacDonald Bernier Co." to "MacDougal-Bernard Co."
  • The beverage Vim! from Far Harbor is based on the real-life brand Moxie, a soft drink that's popular in greater New England and coined the term "moxie" as a synonym for, well, vim.
• Blatant Lies:
  • "Our intentions are peaceful." Says the giant, heavily-armored airship surrounded by minigun-equipped Vertibirds.
  • "It's a training exercise." Says the Railroad Sole Survivor to a young Brotherhood Initiate. Right after you shoot a half-dozen of his older comrades right in front of him in the Railroad ending.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The Institute's nasty case of Bystander Syndrome has given them this in regards to the Commonwealth. As the Institute's been led to believe that the Commonwealth is utterly doomed and the surface world is a lost cause impossible to save (due in part because of the dismal failure that was the Commonwealth Provisional Government), they believe they need to safeguard the future of humanity by turning the Institute into a utopia and recolonizing the Wasteland after the surface dwellers have died off. Thusly, in their eyes it's perfectly acceptable to screw with the surface, as the people up there are essentially "dead men walking" anyway.
• Blue Is Heroic: The Minutemen is the most benevolent group in the Commonwealth, and their flag has their sigil on top of a blue background. The Uniform worn by their Generals is a dark blue, as well.
• Blood Knight: Super Mutants in general. Most Raiders are also implied to be this.
• Boats into Buildings:
  • A downplayed example can be found in the FMS Northern Star, a ship that apparently ran aground after the bombs fell. It's goulified Norwegian crew simply turned it into a raider base.
  • In the Far Harbor DLC, the Children of Atom inhabit a submarine dry dock, complete with a submarine that's clearly not going anywhere soon.
• Body Horror:
  • The Putrid Glowing One has been in such a state for so long that either fungus or tumors are growing from them, which serves as makeshift armor.
  • Older Gen 2 Synths can suffer a rare mechanical case of this trope when they suffer damage. The more and more they're injured, the more and more their plastic "skin" breaks off, revealing their circuitry-based innards.
• Boom, Headshot!: Played straight with human and humanoid enemies once you have a strong enough gun and the right perks for it to do more damage. Subverted or averted with other enemies, as their head may not be their actual weak spots, such as Mirelurks being weak to face-shots, but they often hide it behind their claws and thick husks. And Deathclaws having a mostly unarmored belly being their weak point, so shooting them in the head is less useful. This is also mandatory for dealing with Feral Ghouls and it's not just because they're "zombies": Glowing Ones (Feral Ghouls with a ton of radiation in them that makes them glow) can actually bring other Feral Ghouls Back from the Dead as well as heal the ones still alive! You gotta shot 'em in the head to make sure they're down (or use the Bloody Mess perk to gib them). It also helps kill the Ghouls playing dead (because they do that now).
• Boss-Altering Consequence: Mama Murphy has a special power called "the Sight", which lets her see into the future to give you advice, at the cost of requiring her to use chems (drugs), leading to a fatal overdose if you use this too many times. There are a few occasions where using the Sight affects an upcoming boss fight:
  • When rescuing Nick Valentine from Skinny Malone, she'll tell you a cryptic phrase ("remember the quarry and Lilly June on the rocks"). If you repeat it to Skinny in a dialogue option, he'll give you a 10-second chance to leave with Nick peacefully, but if you don't take advantage of this opportunity, he will attack you.
  • Using the sight before the fight with Kellogg, the Starter Villain responsible for your son's abduction, will give you a secret perk that reduces his damage by 25%.
  • When you're going after an Institute Synth Courser in "Hunter/Hunted", Mama Murphy's Sight will have her inform you of a Trigger Phrase you can use against the Synth. If you choose "Reset Code" as a dialogue option when you encounter it, it will force the Synth to shut down. It's worth mentioning that the game effectively treats this as a One-Hit Kill rather than a Skippable Boss since the Synth collapses in-game almost immediately afterwards as if it were killed by the player.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The humble 10mm pistol, previously a ground-level only weapon, remains a competitive sidearm for quite a while if you keep its mods up to date. Take a couple levels of the Scrounger perk, and you'll be pretty set with ammo for it as well.
  • The Deliverer pistol. It does high damage using cheap and plentiful 10mm rounds and it comes with a suppressor already attached. The feature that sets it apart from other 10mm pistols is its action point cost. With a little bit of upgrading, you will be able to fire an entire 16 round magazine or two of them with a full AP bar (although you can never fire more than one magazine's worth within one VATS sequence). It's little wonder that stealth gunslinger builds tend to swear by it.
  • The Spray'n'Pray Sub machine gun for explosive build, especially in Survival mode. A Minigun or Shotgun with the Explosive may be flashier and more powerful but getting either of them requires an insane amount of patient or luck even on lower difficulty. With Survival Mode disabling quick save and fast travel, you are better off sticking with the Spray'n'Pray for for its sheer ease of access alone.
  • Any of the early-game pipe weapons which use the extremely plentiful .38 ammo. They'll take care of low-level enemies for quite a while, allowing you save the comparatively rare ammo for your better weapons for tougher enemies. The mods for them are also relatively resource cheap compared to other weapons and can be accessed at lower levels of the Gun Nut perk. As it eventually falls behind, the still-plentiful ammo becomes Better Off Sold.
  • In previous games, food was largely useless (unless you were playing New Vegas' Hardcore mode). This time around, food is much more useful because it heals a specific amount of hitpoints, not a percentage like Stimpaks. Especially in the early game this makes food far more practical than the rarer Stimpaks, which require perk investment to get up to a high percentage. Because most uncooked food irradiates you, and radiation subtracts from your max health, the "Lead Belly" perk is suddenly a lot more important, too. In addition, not only does cooked meat now heal a large amount of HP, it also has beneficial temporary buffs, and no longer poisons with radiation when eaten. Some can even heal radiation. Cooking also gives experience and increase the item value in case you wish to sell them instead of eating them, steaks from rare meat like Deathclaw Steak and Mirelurk Queen Steak are worth quite some caps.
  • The Laser Musket is the bog-standard Minutemen weapon and one of the very first guns you'll find in the game. However, if you level up the relevant perks and slap on a six-crank capacitor, this baby can one-shot Legendary Mythic Deathclaws — even before finding an Instigating one. Putting a long extended bracketed barrel, a high-powered scope, and a focus muzzle attachment also allows you to really reach out and touch someone too.
  • When it comes to salvaging, you can't go wrong with Tin Cans. They weigh only 0.1 pound, but a single can breaks down into two units of Steel, making hoarding cans the best source of Steel in terms of weight-to-yield ratio, and since Steel is needed for a large number of settlement construction projects, you'd do well to grab every can you see. While you're at it, grab every Power Relay Coil and Fuse you see for the Copper, needed to build nearly everything under the "Power" tab, and they too are very lightweight for the Copper you get from them.
  • The perks for crafting weapon mods do only that and each of the 4 perks needs 3 or 4 points to fully utilize. This might seem boring compared to perks that let you pacify enemies but modding weapons is a very practical way to keep your guns relevant and let your armor resist more damage.
  • The Strong Back perk has four ranks. The first two are nothing fancy, just a +50 total carry weight. The third lets you run while encumbered using action points, which isn't all that helpful. The fourth lets you fast travel while encumbered, which is an incredible time saver when you consider how much junk you can cart out of a single building.
  • For factions, the Railroad and the Minutemen. While the Brotherhood and the Institute have ridiculously advanced and amazing technology, the Railroad and Minutemen are just poor Wastelanders. However, the Railroad uses disguises and sneaky guerrilla tactics to sabotage their enemies' superior technology while the Minutemen can both Zerg Rush their enemies and attack from miles away with 19th century artillery, hitting hard enough to curb stomp even the Brotherhood.
  • Fortune Finder and Ammo Scrounger are pretty mundane, increasing the chances of caps/ammo/fusion cores appearing in containers. But in this game, as caps are much harder to come by and the shopkeepers are a lot stingier than in past games and only carry limited amounts of ammo. Having enough cash on hand to buy materials you need and having enough cores to keep you in Power Armor continuously suddenly get a lot more likely with these two inconspicuous perks.
  • The Aquaboy/girl perk. Since it's right up against the coast, there are a lot of irradiated rivers and lakes dotting the map, which are annoying to go around but give a healthy dose of radiation to directly cross, not to mention just how many indoor areas have basement flooding. With the Aquaboy perk, water radiation is completely negated, allowing you to just swim across with no trouble. It's especially useful in Survival mode, as almost no enemies spawn in the water, or even close enough to come after you if you're far enough out, and the few exceptions can be avoided by ducking to the other side of the river, or taking the next step of the perk and become totally hidden in the water. And if you swim to the right place and take the correct path when you get out, you can walk directly to Diamond City, Goodneighbor, Bunker Hill, the Castle, etc, all without interacting with a single enemy at all.
  • The Rad Resistance perk. With the changes to the radiation mechanic, creatures which do radiation damage on top of physical damage, and the increased scarcity of RadAway, having radiation resistance is all the more important.
  • Much like previous games, Black Widow. Since you'll run into an almost disproportionate amount of male enemies compared to female, it basically amounts to 5/10/15% extra damage that requires just 2 Charisma.
  • The Local Leader perk has a non-trivial cost in SPECIAL points and gives no bonuses for combat, crafting or character interaction, but it is de facto vital to settlement management as it enables assigning Provisioners, which network settlements' crafting resources, water, and food when assigned a route.
  • The Rifleman perk. Descended from Small Guns, previous entries' most Boring, but Practical skill, Rifleman gives you damage and armor penetration bonuses, with later ranks adding a small chance to cripple enemy limbs. The thing is, Rifleman applies to all, rifle-type guns that aren't fully automatic, including shotguns and non-automatic energy weapons. This means it will help you all the way from the simple pipe rifles of the early game to technological marvels like the Gauss Rifle. Beyond that, Rifleman guns are the only weapon type that is effective at any range (with heavy guns and explosives being weak/dangerous up close, plus Unarmed, Melee, and Pistols being unusable at longer range). Oh, and since the perk motivates you to use semiautomatic guns, you'll use (and in Survival, have to carry) less ammo overall.
  • There are all sorts of possibilities for designing settlements for your Settlers. You could give them each their own two-story home fully furnished with appliances, carpets, and lighting, and fill the settlement with things for them to do like playing games and excercizing. Or, if you don't really care for all that, you can just slap some Floor, Wall, and Roof titles together to make a huge single common room, toss a bunch of beds in it, and call it a day.
  • The Instigating Legendary effect. Competing with Legendary effects that freeze or torch enemies, turn them to goo, or never need to be reloaded, an Instigating weapon deals double damage to enemies at full health. Useless on an automatic weapon, Instigating sniper rifles and heavy melee weapons (particularly on stealthy characters who can score a powerful sneak attack critical) can kill most enemies with a single hit. An Instigating Laser Musket with a six-crank capacitor can kill a Deathclaw with a single sneak attack critical at range.
  • In-universe there's pipe guns and Laser Muskets. Fashioned out of scrap, pipe weapons are the go-to choice of offense and defense for most of post-War Boston's belligerent population due largely to their light weight and vast customizable options, having the most in game with the least number of perks (Gun Nut 2, and Science! 1) to make them. The Minutemen Men use Laser Muskets as their go to weapon, formed out of scrapped laser guns and pre-War muskets and powered by a crank. While Laser Muskets need to be cranked after every shot (similar to a real musket) the times cranked increases the power every odd crank (1-3-5) allowing the weapon to be more versatile than it's appearance suggests. Additionally a large squad of Minutemen can unleash a devastating barrage of laser fire in short order without the need to carry (micro)fusion cells to power their weapons.
  • The Combat Rifle. It's a step up from the pipe guns in the early levels and it uses the same ammo as the submachine gun. Normally, you can discard it in favor of other guns with higher damage. Fair enough, you have that option. Later on in the game, the Combat Rifle becomes pretty much the weapon for raiders, Gunners, and other opponents, replacing the pipe gun completely. They're so commonplace you can find enough of them to equip virtually all of your settlers in your settlements across the Commonwealth. Oh, and they can be customised to be either semi-auto or full-auto and can be made as a sniper rifle as well, and be fitted with different ammo types. Simply put, the Combat Rifle becomes the mainstay gun of the Commonwealth.
    • One particular Combat Rifle that deserves a standing ovation for this is the Overseer's Guardian. The rifle has the effect of shooting an additional projectile per shot without affecting ammunition count, meaning it essentially does twice as much damage as any other combat rifle in the game. It can be acquired for less than 3000 caps at Vault 81,^note As low as 1230 Caps with maxed-out bartering skills and could carry the player through the entire game.
  • Basic and Heavy Machine Gun Turrets, thanks to being much cheaper in resource costs compared to the more exotic turrets (especially the former), and not needing an external power supply in order to run (making them even cheaper), whilst still providing fairly decent amounts of protection (5 points for the Basic, 8 for the Heavy). Just plop down a bunch of them and watch your settlement's safety levels sky-rocket.
  • Dogmeat, Codsworth and Piper as far as companions go. While they aren't as strong, versatile or talented as the other companions you come across later in the story or further on your travels, you come across them early in the story when you're underpowered and weak, require little to no effort to recruit, are generally easy to please if you're not a dick and could mean the difference between life or death if the only thing keeping a drugged out raider from you is a strong set of jaws, a buzzsaw or a 10mm.
    • If you're more of a cat person, Dogmeat is a little less fun to bring around due to being unable to converse with you and having low carrying capacity and no ranged attack. However, he's a stone throw's away from the vault, would join you as soon as you pet him and occasionally brings you goodies. He will also never judge you for your actions, so you can bring him along without having to tip-toe around your words and worry that he'll hate you. Lastly, his small size allows you to shoot at your enemies without risking hitting him, and he often sinks his teeth in on an enemy's juicy leg, arm or neck, stunning or even killing them.
    • Like Dogmeat, Codsworth has no ranged attack aside from a sporadic flamethrower, leaving him hacking at his enemies with a buzzsaw, and he can't be dressed up in more than a spiffy bowler hat. However, as shown when you first meet him and tour around the neighbourhood, he'll make kashi out of radroaches and bloodbugs even without you firing a bullet. He provides good company on the road as the only companion who knew you beforehand, is fawningly loyal if you're a decent person and serves up purified water on the regular, a godsend in Survival Mode. And if you had the ''Automaton" mod installed, you can fit him with laser turrets and other raider-incinerating goodies that would put Danse to shame.
    • Piper is a little more intermediate, with you likely meeting Dogmeat, Codsworth, Preston and Danse before finding her whinging at the Diamond City gates. As a companion, she has average health and carrying capacity, doesn't have any particular talents and is pretty talkative. However, unlike Preston who you have to save a settlement for or Danse who only joins up after backup arrives, all Piper wants from you is a quick interview that can be done in two minutes tops before agreeing to join you on the road. Unlike Dogmeat and Codsworth, you can dress her in and arm her in whatever you please, she proves a shockingly deadly combatant for a mere journalist, and if you find yourself falling for her, she can be romanced. She also provides snacks like bubblegum and Nuka-Cola on the road.
  • Want a nice settlement to send all your companions to but don't want to have to spend five minutes searching each house whenever you want them? Send them to the Red Rocket Truck Stop or Tenpines Bluff. You won't lose them this way and your companions will still have each other for company.
• Born in the Wrong Century:
  • Downplayed, but Nick Valentine fits the bill, given how he's a Hardboiled Detective Synth who acts like he's walked straight out of The Maltese Falcon. Justified though in that his personality and neural patterns are that of a Pre-War police officer.
  • Obviously, the Sole Survivor was literally born in the wrong century.
• Boss Battle:
  • In contrast to Fallout 3, which generally avoided straight boss fights (with the exception of the Super Mutant Behemoths, Commander Jabsco, and General Jiangwei), Fallout 4 has a number of boss fights that occur during the main quest line or major side-quests, such as the Concord Deathclaw, the Castle Mirelurk Queen, Swan, Elder Maxson (potentially), the Courser Z2-47, and Kellogg himself.
  • Automatron features Ahab, a unique Sentry Bot equipped with armor and weaponry no other robot in the entire Commonwealth utilizes. The final battle against the Mechanist's hordes also includes a couple of unique and very dangerous Automatrons.
  • Nuka-World comes up with Puzzle Boss Colter and Flunky Boss Oswald the Outrageous, the latter being a Skippable Boss. All the Raider gang leaders at Nuka-World count as Flunky Bosses due to being constantly surrounded by their own Mooks.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • One can find Legendary Enemies with a star next to their names. Not only are they much deadlier and tougher, but they can mutate when their health is drained, regaining all their health and making them even deadlier!
  • The Mirelurk Queen (level 50 boss fought with multiple Minutemen helping you out) can be found at one of the uncleared settlement areas in a marsh. And you have much less help here. You can, however, prepare before attacking it, unlike the one at the Castle - or the one that also shows up in the Massachusetts State House, in a cramped area with several other mirelurks, any one of which can themselves be legendary for good measure.
  • Generally speaking, the larger the enemy, the more dangerous they are. Super Mutants aren't too difficult to beat once you've gotten decent gear and perks. But run into a gigantic Behemoth, and you probably don't want to go toe to toe with it, at least at low levels. Even plain ordinary humans wearing power armor will be more difficult to defeat than their counterparts.
• Boss Remix: If you encounter a dungeon boss, or a particularly strong opponent like Deathclaws and Sentry Bots, the epic remix of the main theme ("Dominant Species")will play instead of the usual combat theme.
• Boss Room: Beware of any suspiciously open space with no enemies, whether inside a building or a marked location in the open, especially if there is no apparent way back up if you jump into it. Deathclaws are a common sight in such places.
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • Downplayed with a legendary weapon mod called "Never Ending" which does Exactly What It Says on the Tin. If you find a weapon with this mod, it will draw directly from your ammo supply without having to reload. It's an amazing mod to have for a sniper rifle, full auto weapon, minigun, missile launcher or Fat Man. Hilarity Ensues when you get a Never Ending Laser Musket, as you can now crank infinitly for ludicrously high damage.
  • Averted with enemies wielding powerful weapons such as the missile launcher or the Fat Man. They don't have an unlimited ammo supply like most other enemies, so it's possible to goad them into wasting their supply, rendering their weapon useless and making them much easier to beat. Though if you can kill them before they fire at all, you can take their entire supply of rare ammo for yourself.
  • Also Averted for companions when not using their default weapon: while they can pick up or be given nearly any weapon (and often do of their own volition) they still need ammo. If they use their default weapon, it's Played Straight and they will never need ammo for it.
  • Played straight with your settlers. Give them a gun and one round of ammo for that gun, and they will happily fire away forever. This doesn't work for missile launchers or the Fat Man, but does work for powered armor; they don't wear out the fusion core.
• Brain Uploading: Nick Valentine's base personality was created this way. He's a second generation synth who is completely mechanical (as opposed to third generation synths, who are organic enough to have DNA), but his personality is patterned after the uploaded brainwaves of the real Nick Valentine, a policeman who lived before the Great War, hence his Hardboiled Detective look.
  • You can also help one of your robotic companions do this, allowing her to upload her robotic personality into a Synth body, so that she can develop human emotions. (Gaining the properties of a Human companion in the process)
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:The Diamond City Radio announcer is describing the Minutemen taking over The Castle: "There were monsters? Fish? Monster fish?"
• Brick Joke:
  • There was an achievement in Fallout 3 called "The Bigger They Are..." for killing all Super Mutant Behemoths. A similar Achievement/Trophy in Fallout 4 is named "... The Harder They Fall". Bethesda waited seven years for this one.
  • In the Strength stat's S.P.E.C.I.A.L video, one of the items that Vault-Boy considers using against a raider is a paddle ball, which quickly gets noted as 'unreasonable' and is crossed out before Vault-Boy switches to a Power Fist. Nuka-World adds in an actual Paddle Ball that becomes rather lethal when you get your hands on some top secret military documents.
  • Long after being teased at in one of the viral promotional videos for Fallout 3, you finally get to see Jangles, the Moon Monkey.
  • A more meta one: the artist behind the Pip-Boy in Fallout 3 really regretted that he put the knobs on the left side rather than the right. No need to worry: It's on the right side this time.
• Bring It: One of the many things the Sole Survivor will scream when they're high on Psycho before attempting to hammer in face of the closest bastard near them.
• Broken Bridge: Certain areas are blocked off or sealed with keycards you don't have depending on where you are in the main quest. For instance, if you go to Fort Hagen, the basement is inaccessible until you get the quest that leads you down there. You can enter the building, but all you'll find is a few synths. In the ruins of Boston, an entire building is sealed off until the quest that requires you to search it.
• Brush-Off Walk-Off: If you reach the lowest affinity possible with Deacon, you can walk away from him during the final confrontation. This is the only time his Nice Guy ruse drops.
• Bullet Time:
  • Jet now provides this effect rather than simply refilling AP.
  • During combat the V.A.T.S. system was changed to slow down time to a crawl rather than stopping it outright, allowing for dynamic shots.
• Bullying a Dragon: Once you reach a high level and have decent armor on, low level enemies will essentially be doing this to you. You can easily One-Hit Kill them, but they'll still attack you anyway even if they're clearly outmatched. It's a similar situation from Skyrim where you can single-handedly kill a dragon, absorb its soul, and then some low level bandits nearby decide they can take you out. One could argue that they're simply defending their turf, especially if you're about to loot their place. But they'll still do this if you just happen to be walking by close enough to them. Could also be Justified in the case of Raiders, as unlike Skyrim's motley crews of bandits, Raiders often use psycho-active drugs which make them more aggressive, plus they tend to be quite unhinged anyway.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Doctor Gray managed to build a completely self-sufficient hydroponics garden run entirely by Mister Handies, still working fine even 200 years later, besides the garden's water supply becoming dirty once the Sole Survivor gets there. However, in the words of Supervisor White, "Genius is restless" and, bored of the standard Mister Handy personalities, he revised the Supervisors' personalities to mimic his favorite TV personalities. As a result, White is a Femme Fatale, Greene is a cheesy gameshow host (right down to thinking the Sole Survivor has won a prize for doing absolutely nothing, said prize being a rusted, broken down old car) and Brown is somehow even more stereotypically British than the default Mister Handy.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • Madison Li, last mentioned to have left for the Commonwealth, returns as one of the department heads of the Institute.
  • LIBERTY PRIME IS REPAIRED AND ONCE AGAIN READY TO DESTROY ALL CHINESE COMMUNISTS!
  • Nuka-World features the return of Sierra Petrovita and the Hubologists.
  • The leader of the kids of Little Lamplight, Mayor MacCready, is all grown up and is currently a mercenary, and available to be a companion.
• But Thou Must!:
  • Rejecting certain quests or quest stages is often simply not an option. In the most prominent example, the Sole Survivor is offered to help ambush and rob a caravan by two characters. The player can't outright refuse to participate; the closest to actually rejecting their offer is having the Sole Survivor declare that they could just kill the two conspirators and rob the caravan themselves.
  • At the beginning of the game, you cannot refuse the Vault-Tec salesman's offer for a place in Vault 111. Trying to do so will result in the the player character's spouse overruling your decision and the game carries on as if you accepted the offer anyway.
  • In a rare case for a Fallout game, you cannot persuade Kellogg AT ALL about anything when you finally catch up to him. The only thing you can control is how demanding, desperate, angry or snarky you are when ordering him to tell you where Shaun and the Institute are. The situation inevitably turns violent.
  • During the first mission with Deacon and the Railroad, you're given the option to either perform a frontal assault on the Railroad's old base, or go in the back way. Going in full-frontal reveals that the Synths turned off the power. Since the elevators can't take you down to the old base, you have to go through the back tunnel anyway.
  • If you side with a faction other then the Institute, you eventually get a mission to destroy it by blowing up their reactor. Taking over the Institute with any faction, including the Brotherhood, is simply implausible due to both the logical and logistical issues of taking over an entire society of people who would be opposed to your respective faction, but opposing the Institute means that you have to destroy it.
  • If you intend to finish Nuka-World's story properly, you have to take over a settlement in the name of one of the Raider groups. Worse yet, Preston Garvey will refuse to work with you afterwards if you raid any settlement.
    • Of course, this is an aversion. If you're playing a good character, the only "proper" way to complete the story, is to just continue killing Raiders until they're all dead. Upon completion of the related "Open Season" quest, everything unlocks - meaning the only thing you have to do without, are things you wouldn't want to do in the first place.
  • If the player is aligned with the Brotherhood and then begins the Far Harbor DLC, the next time they speak with Lancer-Captain Kells will unavoidably initiate dialogue where they report the location of the synth refuge at Acadia and trigger the quest "Search and Destroy", where you have to join up with a group of Brotherhood soldiers and wipe out everyone there (which can include Kasumi Nakano if you've not finished the main quest). The same can happen with the Institute: speaking to Dr Moseley in Advanced Systems will initiate the quest "Forbidden Knowledge", where the Institute invades Acadia and reclaims all the escaped synths. This quest is more optional than "Search and Destroy", however, as Moseley is a far less important character than the radiant-quest-giver Kells. Thankfully, it's easy to ignore the Brotherhood attack group in Far Harbor if you're unwilling to destroy Acadia.
• Butt-Monkey: Vault Boy in the 7 "Vault-Tec Educational Materials" shorts. He gets killed or severely injured at least twice a episode.
  • Raiders as a whole. Being that they Can't Catch Up and they're hostile to virtually everyone in the Commonwealth, everyone seems to like using them as a punching bag.
• Bystander Syndrome: The Institute has this, with them believing the Commonwealth to be a lost cause and seeing any abuse they inflict upon the surface as "acceptable" since the people living up there are doomed anyway.

C

• Cain and Abel: Returning to Diamond City after leaving for the first time, a scene takes place with two brothers causing a commotion; Kyle believes that his brother Riley has been replaced by a Synth copy, and is threatening to shoot him. Subverted, as either the guards or the Sole Survivor will kill Kyle before he has a chance to shoot Riley.
• Call-Back:
  • A couple of characters from Fallout 3 are either mentioned or present in the game. This includes Dr. Madison Li, Arthur Maxson, Dr. Stanislaus Braun, Sierra Petrovita, Confessor Cromwell, and Mayor MacCready.
  • You also encounter one in the form of a settlement name, oddly enough. At the start of the game you can look through Vault 111's terminals, in which it is logged that one of the few Vault-Tec workers who failed to make it to the Vault was named Nordhagen. One of the settlements you can ally with later is called Nordhagen Beach, suggesting that Nordhagen survived and started a settlement.
  • You can also encounter the Vault-Tec rep from the intro later in Goodneighbor's hotel. Hilariously, he's wearing the exact same outfit.
  • A lot of reoccurring scenery elements from both 3 and New Vegas have been painstakingly rebuilt for this game. What makes this special is that there are usually a dozen or so new recurring scenery elements that could easily fit the same role, but the old switchboards and posters still pop up now and again.
  • Kellogg's flashbacks mention him working for the Shi, the Chinese-descended people living in San Francisco, who haven't been seen since Fallout 2.
  • In Far Harbor, High Confessor Tektus mentions that "the great prophet" Confessor Cromwell in "the holy city" of Megaton told the Children to go north and spread the word of Atom, which is how they eventually ended up on the Island.
  • Possibly unintentional, but most of the songs playing on the Minutemen's radio stations — Radio Freedom and the Settlement Recruitment Beacons — are the same as those played on Enclave Radio in Fallout 3, further showing how the Minutemen are the Enclave's Foil.
  • A fictional version of the Mechanist is the Big Bad in the Silver Shroud radio drama being broadcast by Kent Connolly. Kent also mentions in passing listening to a crossover episode of said drama involving Captain Cosmos.
  • The Glowing Sea is very similar to The Glow from way back in Fallout 1, being a highly-radioactive impact site from a nuclear bomb. Also confirmed by Word of God to be a visual nod to Fallout 3's aesthetic, with its strong green tint.
    • It shares certain similarities to the Divide from New Vegas as well. Particularly how the locations within them tend to have more poetic names than the rest of the Wasteland (eg. Forlorn Reactor, Crater of Atom, Forgotten Church, and Courier's Mile). Both also are full of Demonic Spiders, have utterly alien atmospheres compared to the rest of the Wasteland, and have storm systems that occasionally imperil their neighboring regions (dust storms from the Divide (courtesy of the Think Tank) and the radiation storms of the Glowing Sea (courtesy of the Great War).
  • MacCready at one point couldn't resist quipping "Tunnel Snakes Rule!", mentioning how he heard quite a bit of it back in the Capital Wasteland.
  • Cherry Nuka-Cola from Fallout Tactics (which was loathed by consumers in-universe) makes a return in this game, as Nuka-Cherry, where it is actually loved in the Commonwealth and New England.
  • The Wattz Consumer Electronics building is one to Fallout 1, 2, and New Vegas. Wattz Electronics made the laser weapons from 1 and 2, as well as the cattleprods and handheld radios.
  • Nuka-World adds a squirt gun that shoots acid.
  • Nuka-World brings back Nuka Cola Quartz and Nuka Cola Victory, both of which last appeared in New Vegas.
  • The quest "Taking Independence" refers back to the similarly named "Stealing Independence" from Fallout 3.
  • A "Fusion Pulse Charge" is used to help destroy the Institute's main reactor in 3 endings. Another previously appeared in Fallout 3 for an equally destructive purpose — the detonation of Megaton's nuclear bomb.
  • Near some gravestones at the Museum of Witchcraft, one can find a hollowed out rock, containing a note, along with a weapon and supplies. The note itself is from someone known only as "S" to another person named "E". In the note, "S" regrets missing "E" in Megaton, and mentions that it looks like history is repeating itself. This is a Call-Back to the hollowed out rock south of Megaton, in Fallout 3 - which also includes a weapon, supplies, and a holotape titled "As Requested" - also by "S" and addressed to "E".
  • Upon first arriving in Sanctuary Hills after leaving Vault 111, the opening bars of "Maybe" by The Ink Spots play.
• Caltrops: These were added to the crafting recipes in Far Harbor. The vanilla version is very cheap to make and does minor damage while the poisoned version is a bit more powerful and useful.
• The Cameo:
  • The voice of Ron Perlman, who served as the narrator in previous Fallout games, appears in the prologue of the game as a newscaster on the day of the Great War. He even gets to say his famous "War never changes." line.
  • Shinji Mikami, known for directing God Hand, Vanquish, several Resident Evil games, and the Bethesda-published The Evil Within, voices robot vendor Takahashi's single line.
• Cane Fu: Walking Canes are one of the new weapons players can find in Boston. They generally suck compared to most other melee weapons, but find a legendary one and slap a few mods on it and it can be a decently powerful weapon, especially during the early game.
• Canine Companion: In series tradition, you can recruit a dog party member named Dogmeat. He's the only one that's unfailingly loyal (in the base game, at least).
• Can't Catch Up: Downplayed with Flamers. They sound cool in-concept - Sustained energy damage on anything in front of you, while being one of the few weapons whose mods can be maxed out early without Perk requirements. But they come with numerous downsides.^note Their fully-modded damage caps at 40 (a basic non-modded 10mm can do twice that in half the time a Flamer ticks thanks to static damage per shot and late-game enemies), modifying the nozzle actually reduces your range (the main selling-point of the weapon is spread and trying to roast enemies point-blank'll just get you pushed around and lead to wasted shots), they're useless in VATS due to dealing damage over time, they don't stagger enemies whatsoever and they don't benefit from Demolition Expert like some other Heavy Guns can. By mid-game, a Flamer's inability to really penetrate an enemy's armor (much less stagger), means that most late-game enemies take a lot of time and fuel to kill; by which point you've either swapped to something else or you're dead. Legendary titles that kick in per hit (Crippling, Wounding, Bleeding, etc.) give streams of the weapon's flame much-needed utility, but without those the power-ceiling of a Flamer ends up cripplingly low. Inversely, enemy Flamers have no problem penetrating your armor and can roast you pretty quickly, especially on Survival difficulty.
• Cap: In the settlement areas, there is a limit to how many things you can build. Once you reach the cap, the game won't let you build anything else in the settlement unless you remove something else first, including yellow-highlighted materials that for the most part are only useful as scrap, such as destroyed cars. For PC players, there are mods out there which lets you raise said cap, but be warned that putting too many things in a small area can slow the game down when in that area on lower performance PCs. There is also a bug working on both console and PC, where placing weapons in the workbench during the construction mode will effectively increase the cap.
• Central Theme:
  • "Letting the Past Define You". All of the companions are either struggling to reinvent themselves, traumatized by their past, working through some serious baggage from their past, or some combination of the above. The sole exception being X6-88, who is just a slave of Father. Additionally, this theme ties into the Sole Survivor having defined themselves as a parent, spouse, and their Pre-War occupation no longer mattering versus the fact they must build new lives in the Wasteland without those prospects. They can either try to recapture the past by becoming a soldier in the Brotherhood of Steel, aligning with the Institute to be with Shaun, joining the Railroad to seek justice for the oppressed, or leading the Minutemen into forming what the Pre-War U.S. should've been, or struggle to build a new life on their own. The fact that Shaun is about sixty-years-old and your spouse is long-dead means that the past is impossible to recapture, even if you can try with Synth Shaun or symbolically marrying a new companion with your Tragic Keepsake wedding ring.
  • A secondary running theme is trying to decide who or what makes up human civilization in 23rd Century post-apocalyptic America, which is populated by a scant handful of "pure" humans, irradiated humans, mutants (both Super and not), Ghouls, robots/A.I.s, and Synths — all of whom have to try and live together. Unfortunately, some think they're better than others.
  • Generally speaking, Fallout 4's main theme seems to be about examining how people let loss alter their identity in countless different ways. Everyone in the Commonwealth - with special focus given to the Sole Survivor, their companions and the main factions - have lost either something or someone important in their life, and now they are struggling to reinvent themselves with a new identity while coming to terms with that previous loss.
  • The main theme of the Far Harbor DLC is suspicion and secrecy - Everyone on the Island has their own Hidden Depths and Dark And Troubled Pasts, and the Sole Survivor can decide to either force the truth into the light or accept the lies while letting the truth fade away into the Fog.
  • Nuka-World's main theme is hedonism, with the three different Raider gangs representing indulging one's vices to the fullest extent in different ways - The Disciples indulge their bloodlust, the Pack indulge their pride and domination over others, and the Operators indulge their greed. It's also likely not a coincidence that the DLC is set in the ruins of a massive theme park that was practically a monument to the hyper-capitalist & over-consumption-based hellhole that Pre-War America really was.
• Cerebus Retcon: Codsworth's explanation of what he had been doing for the past 210 years while waiting for someone to emerge from Vault 111. At first, his dialogue is darkly hilarious, what with him shouting about the futility of trying to get radioactive fallout out of vinyl wood. However, getting into later conversations with Codsworth has him reflect far more seriously on the intervening decades, with him then mentioning to the Sole Survivor about how he's seen countless people get torn apart by the Wastes or resort to horrific means to survive, and how utterly impressed he is by the Sole Survivor for them staying a good person.
• Changing Gameplay Priorities: 4 changes the franchise formula, removing Breakable Weapons and Armor, while making ammo generally more plentiful to address Early Game Hell complaints of previous entries. However, you will still likely be a major hoarder of junk items due to another major series change - the addition of settlement building. Early on, you'll max out your encumbrance leaving every ruin to bring back junk items. Once you have established a fairly robust settlement network and enough caps to buy shipments of the resources you need, you'll shift to only bringing back items with the rarest components needed for the highest-level upgrades and structures.
• Charged Attack:
  • Weapons like the Gauss Rifle and Junk Jet can be overcharged by holding down the trigger, increasing their damage. Since weapon repair is not an issue in this game, you can overclock your weapons as much as you like.
  • The Laser Musket can only hold one shot before it needs to be re-cranked, but that doesn't mean you can't make the single shot much stronger by cranking it again. By default, you can add an additional charge to a standard musket, and mods allow you to upgrade it to holding six charges at once. Combine it with a long range scope, and you've got an extremely powerful — if slow to charge — laser sniper in your hands.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Professor Scara, the cranky lesbian scientist in Diamond City, is the Brotherhood's fallback for reconstructing Liberty Prime should the Sole Survivor get banished from the Institute before recruiting Madison Li.
• The Chessmaster: The Sole Survivor can become an evil one by allying with the Minutemen and establishing dozens of thriving outposts all over the Commonwealth, then using them (or some other faction) to deal with the Big Bad... and then conquering all those juicy settlements for the Nuka-World Raiders to extort the terrified settlers for ludicrous amounts of money far in excess of anything the player could rake in as a Minuteman.
• Chewing the Scenery:
  • The Sole Survivor can play up the part of the Silver Shroud if they take the quest of the same name. The finale of the quest itself allows you to really get into character, so much that you terrify a bunch of raiders who think you're the real deal.
  • Captain Ironsides can do this from time to time as well, such as claiming they're slightly closer to sea after their ship leaves one building, only to then ram into a highrise in the downtown Boston area if you helped them fix the rocketship up.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: Just like in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, the Bloody Mess perk makes your enemies explode when you kill them. This game gets a little creative by localizing the mess to whatever part of the body that you hit. For example, smashing a Raider with a sledgehammer, exploding his head and body so only his limbs remain. An upgrade to Bloody Mess now allows the shrapnel of the exploded enemy to explode other nearby enemies, too!
• City Noir: Goodneighbor, where Scollay Square is located, is dark and rainy. There's also Nick Valentine, a Synth Hardboiled Detective, who comes with a trenchcoat and a revolver.
• Cliché Storm:
  • Invoked and Played for Laughs with Sgt. Dave Mallory's final log entry in the BADTFL regional office. He's the department's angry, no-nonsense chief who complains that he's "too old for this shit" and hates dealing with loose cannon agents who don't play by the rules, only taking solace in the fact that he's three days from retirement.
  • And then there's Unlikely Valentine, which plays up classic Film Noir tropes (detectives, gangsters, double-crossing dames, ironically named mob bosses, etc.) to the hilt.
• *Click* Hello: Albeit without the click; the Charisma 10 perk "Intimidation" basically lets you take take a page out of the Payday crew's book and lets you to pacify any human target below your level simply by pointing your gun at them. Higher ranks of the perk allows you to give them commands.
• Cold Turkeys Are Everywhere: Invoked in Vault 95. The residents were all addicts put on a five-year rehabilitation plan, whereupon a massive supply of every kind of chem was revealed. They promptly did one of three things: grab part of the stash and fatally overdose, start fighting over it, or resist and hide as long as they could until despair and loneliness drove them give in. The entire Vault population was wiped out.
• Combat Pragmatist: Weapon bashing humanoid enemies in 3rd person cam allows you to pull this yourself by sometimes performing a grappling move instead. Sometimes, all you do is kick or push the enemy away. Others, you kick their feet out beneath them, pick them up and drop them, or punch them a couple times before clotheslining them. There, now you have a defenseless opponent.
• Commonplace Rare: Certain crafting materials are this:
  • Adhesive. All of your weapon and armor mods require it; hell, it's the first part on the list. While you could go through the trouble of scrounging for every bottle of wonderglue and every roll of duct tape left in the Commonwealth, it's just easier to just buy up (or grow) the right veggies (corn, mutfruit, and tatos) to mass-produce vegetable starch at a Cooking Station. (Vegetable Starch breaks down into 5 units of Adhesive.) If you're impatient, you can also buy big shipments of it from many traders, though it costs a fortune.
  • Aluminum. Large quantities are required to repair more advanced models of power armor and to create power armor mods. If you're a frequent user of power armor, you'll be grabbing every single aluminum can and alarm clock you can find.
  • Screws. All kinds of weapon mods need them, some settlement adjustments need a lot. What makes it worse is that tons of junk items that should logically contain plenty of screws yield none at all. You'll quickly find yourself scanning each office area for desk fans, typewriters and other relatively heavy junk items just for the one or two screws within. The Scrapper perk exists specifically to address this problem, which you really should take before scrapping armor and weapons.
  • Oil has a similar problem. Luckily, you can make it yourself at the chem station, though you'll among other things need bones and acid, which are both not that easy to come by themselves.
  • Chances are, with the exception of steel and wood, you'll be hurting for every type of crafting component at least once in any given play through if not repeatedly. And even those two, while seemingly abundant, can run out pretty fast if you decide to build a major settlment structure, since building floors and walls can use it up again quickly.
  • The list of voiced character names includes Fuckface and Imperator Furiosa, but not Jane.
• Competitive Balance: Between pistol-type and rifle-type weapons. Pistol-type weapons tend to have better "from the hip" accuracy (read; aiming with the crosshairs instead of using the aiming sights), a higher rate of fire, and better recoil than rifle-type weapons, in exchange for lower damage, accuracy, and range. The result is that two otherwise identical weapons behave very differently depending on if they're in a pistol or rifle configuration; pistols give you a more fast-paced gameplay where you can rapidly fire at enemies in real time, while rifles are better for slower-paced fights where you have time to aim and line up your shots to make them count.
• Confusion Fu: Feral Ghouls are dangerous because you can't predict when they'll suddenly break into a run and charge you. They often wait longer than they need to before going on the attack, which can be annoying to melee players trying to knock them down quickly.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Averted, at least early in the game. If you get caught in the open with no cover to hide behind for multiple ranged attackers, or can get easily surrounded by melee enemies, such as in a small room or a really narrow hallway, you can die pretty quickly. Once you've upgraded your gear and have decent perks, then it can be played somewhat straight against anything other than Elite Mook encounters.
  • Then there's Preston Garvey's team-up perk, which increases your damage and defense when mobbed by three or more enemies, enforcing this trope.
• The Conspiracy: The Institute rules the Commonwealth through proxies and Synth agents who operate behind the scenes. They do not take a direct hand in controlling events but make sure any threats to their power are neutralized before they get anywhere near them. They also have a nasty habit of removing any Pre-War tech by sending in an army of synths to destroy it and massacre any people there before anyone knows what they've found.
• Continuity Nod: The Brotherhood having a Cool Airship is one to the opening of Fallout Tactics, where the Brotherhood sends members with undesirable opinions east in them to hunt Super Mutants. In fact, Lancer Captain Kells even mentions that they had less advanced airships built in the past but was unsure of their fate, a nod to the Broad Strokes canon of Tactics.
  • Kellogg's memories reveal that he was a former citizen of the NCR and ran security for the Shi.
  • The baby's crib mobile plays the same tune that was played for the infant protagonist of Fallout 3. On a dresser nearby is a baby book, "You're SPECIAL!", the book you selected your stats from in Fallout 3. Even better, picking up that book 210 years later gives you one free point in any stat up to 10.
  • The Children of Atom, who were last seen in Fallout 3, make a return, having expanded far beyond the Capital Wasteland.
  • Also coming back from Fallout 3? LIBERTY PRIME!
  • It's also revealed that Dunwich Borers, the same folks behind the infamous Dunwich Building in the Capital Wasteland, had a branch in Boston.
  • The East Coast Brotherhood of Steel is led by a now-adult Arthur Maxson, previously seen as the young ward of Elder Lyons in Fallout 3.
  • On the topic of now-grown characters, one of the companions is MacCready, a.k.a. Mayor MacCready of Little Lamplight. One of his random comments is "Tunnel Snakes Rule" which he says he heard somewhere and it felt appropriate, implying Butch never made the Tunnel Snakes amount to much.
  • Another one to Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel. Cherry Nuka-Cola wasn't much of a commercial success, and general opinion was that it was fairly mediocre. Apparently, Cherry Nuka-Cola is actually liked in The Commonwealth. Also serves as a callback to New Vegas, where Sunset Sarsaparilla is immensely popular in the Mojave, but was a commercial failure on the East Coast.
  • The Institute is in many ways what Big MT from Old World Blues would be like if the Think Tank got their act together and weren't a bunch of insane lunatics. Which, echoing Dr. Mobius's warnings, makes the Institute even more dangerous.
  • One of the skill magazines, an issue of Astoundingly Awesome Tales, is advertised to be about a man falling in love with his own brain. The Courier can attempt to seduce their own brain if they have the right perk in New Vegas.
  • The East Coast Brotherhood of Steel now has an attitude extremely similar (if not identical) to the Midwestern one. While Arthur Maxson himself is mentioned as being made Elder by the original West Coast ones back in the Lost Hills, who haven't been seen since Fallout 2.
  • The family TV in the Pre-War prologue will occasionally play some of the Retraux viral commercials for Fallout 3 before returning to the news broadcast.
  • Similar to the Boomers in New Vegas, the Minutemen can gain access to some heavy ordinance in the form of WW2-style artillery. Which they can use to shell the Brotherhood and Institute.
  • The terminal files of Vault 75 mention Dr. Stanislaus Braun from Fallout 3 as one of the pioneers behind that vault's particular project. Sounds about right. He's also frequently mentioned by Overseer Valery Barstow in the Vault-Tec Workshop DLC, with him even having added some personal remarks onto the research notes for the Vault's experiments.
  • The S.A.F.E. test administered to visitors of Covenant is actually the G.O.A.T. from Fallout 3.
  • A Pre-War newspaper discusses the fact that the U.S. President had evacuated the White House prior to the nuclear strikes and fled to a Poseidon Energy oil platform off the California coast, which is where the Chosen One would encounter the Enclave during Fallout 2. It's also a nod to Chris Avellone's Broad Strokes Universe Bible for the series, which included this event in its timeline.
  • Deacon claims to have won the override codes of Robert House in a poker game. However, he tries to use them on a Mr. Handy, forgetting that those codes only work for RobCo robots and not General Atomics.
  • The Automatron DLC brings back The Mechanist, who still has a love of ridiculously dramatic doors even if its not the same guy from Fallout 3. Also. the history of the Robobrain namely, brains of criminals being forcibly extracted for them closely mirrors the history given out by Fallout 1 lead designer Chris Taylor in an old interview, plus the info given in J.E. Sawyer's tabletop RPG.
  • The Nuka-World DLC states that Nuka-Cola Wild was created to compete with Sunset Sarsaparilla after the Nuka-Cola Corporation failed to buy out the rival drink. Likewise, Vim! Pop in Far Harbor is in a similar niche to Sunset Sarsparilla in the previous game, what with it being a regional alternative to the more common Nuka-Cola.
  • A Robobrain in Maine built from a former actress is still upset about losing a role to Vera Keyes, who has by this point been dead in the Sierra Madre Casino for 210 years.
  • The Vault-Tec: Among The Stars seems to serve as a nod to the old piece of lore stating that the Vaults were meant as experiments in what could go wrong in a Generation Ship that the Enclave intended to use to colonize other planets once Earth was used up
• Continuity Snarl: Power Armor in general. Older flavor text said they were powered by Electron Charge Packs and only the T-45s were power hogs, and Power Armor was an all-in-one suit. Here, Power Armor runs on Fusion Cores, all the Power Armor variants are modular pieces that are swapped out on a central frame, and all variants consume the same amount of power. It was also said that T-51 Power Armor was the pinnacle of the technology before the war and the Enclave's Advanced Power Armor (here called the X-01) was not invented until after the war, but here it is said that between the liberation of Anchorage and the Great War, the military created and rolled out T-60c armor as the next generation of Power Armor, and the X-01 armor is also present. The game tries to Hand Wave the latter by saying the X-01 was still in prototyping stage and the suit sent to Nuka-World was for experimentation, and the Enclave refined the design after the Great War, but nothing explains the T-60c's existence. Further, with enough Level Scaling, it's possible to find suits of T-60c and X-01 all over the wasteland at military outposts.
• Controllable Helplessness: When you first get awakened in your cryo-pod, you can do nothing except move the camera around and watch the events before you unfold.
• Cool Airship: The Brotherhood of Steel has a Zeppelin-esque airship dubbed the Prydwen. ^note This is a Genius Bonus, referring to the ship King Arthur and his retinue used in questing for a set of mythic relics. It took four years to gather the materials and another four to make it.
• Cool Car: The Pre-War flashbacks show retro-futuristic cars. Previous Fallout lore establishes that they are nuclear powered.
• Cool Plane: You can fly around in Vertibirds and shoot enemies with the minigun on the side.
• Cool Versus Awesome: You can lead futuristic knights with an American Humongous Mecha into battle against a cabal of evil scientists with their own army of Terminators, or vice versa. Or, you can smack down both factions with your own army of American revolutionaries with wind-up laser muskets and old howitzers, possibly teaming up with a secret spy agency-style Underground Railroad organization in the process.
  • Outside of the main storyline, it's possible to run into conflicts between the Children of Atom (a dangerous Lovecraft-style cult obsessed with radiation) and the Gunners (a powerful band of Private Military Contractors armed with Pre-War U.S. military equipment).
• Cope by Pretending: Codsworth, when you first find him after leaving the vault, acts as if nothing at all is wrong. After talking to him some you can ask if everything is alright with him, at which point he breaks down telling you how he's tried to keep up the house despite all of the large problems.
• Corporate Warfare: A favored method of Nuka Cola for dealing with difficult competitors, if terminals found around the Vim corporate offices are any indication. Nuka Cola was interested in acquiring Vim, but the latter was buoyed by a combination of local success, hometown pride and sheer spite to resist the buyout. So determined was Nuka to eliminate one of their last obstacles to corporate hegemony that by the time the bombs fell, they had resorted to hiring armed thugs to ambush and destroy Vim shipments leaving the factory.
• Crapsaccharine World:
  • In keeping with franchise tradition, the Pre-War era is shown as a bright, vibrant, 1950s-esque period, where everything is seemingly perfect and normal. Anyone who is even remotely familiar with the series' backstory knows this isn't the case. Even if a nuclear war hadn't erupted, civilization was still going to collapse anyways thanks to the new plague and a world-wide oil shortage. Not to mention the near constant rioting, martial law, and general corruption of every facet of society, as well as the Enclave's original plans of leaving Earth behind. The United States and China were among just a handful of nations who even still existed — the European Commonwealth and the nation-states of the Middle East were just straight-up gone, having either collapsed into anarchy or blown themselves up years before the bombs fell.
    • Despite this, the trope is Deconstructed as the depiction of the Pre-War era includes people who were genuinely happy, interracially mixed, and possessed women in high-powered positions like law. It seemed the perpetual 1950s and fascist government didn't keep people from living their lives and improving society in small ways.
  • The Institute is this. It's a Raygun Gothic paradise on the surface, looking a bit like Mass Effect's Citadel. Everyone is devoted to studying science, chemistry, and using their knowledge for the betterment of mankind. The Synths wandering around are mostly fawning and subservient... and utterly terrified. Inhabitants frequently make comments which indicate the Synths flee or behave in manners which show their intelligence, yet aside from a few Internal Reformists, they get dismissed brutally. The Institute also dabbles in darker pursuits, as shown by a hidden FEV lab, stocked by kidnapped Wastelanders experimented on only For Science!.
    • Their technological superiority also does not make them nearly as powerful as they claim. They do have an enormous edge in bioscience, being able to essentially build biological Synths from scratch, all of whom are superior to baseline humans in every way. They also have the edge in the exotic sciences, developing teleportation, which is unlike anything seen even before the Great War. They also have developed an advanced hydroponics system that can comfortably feed at least a few hundred people, and have the best medical treatment on the entire East Coast. Where their tech falls down, however, is in the all-around inferiority of their laser weapons and their lack of Power Armor which is a proven battlefield asset as demonstrated by the Brotherhood. Also, their initially inadequate power supply forces them to be too conservative to make bolder strides. These inadequacies mean they lag behind the Brotherhood of Steel in terms of military force and general ability to act in the Commonwealth.
    • In fact, when comparing the Institute to their closest counterpart in the Fallout Verse — the Think Tank — the Institute only comes across as more dangerous than them in the sense that the Think Tank are just a bunch of Lethal Joke Characters stuck in Creative Sterility that would just annihilate the entire Mojave Wasteland virtually on accident if they ever got out of the Big Empty. Meanwhile, the Institute may not be as incredibly powerful as "the gods of the Big Empty" (as Ulysses aptly put), but they're far more dangerous by being actually sane, able to actually create new things and not just destroy, and thusly have been able to control the entire Commonwealth for roughly 60 years while actively guiding it towards the world they want to build.
• Crapsack World: The Commonwealth, albeit to a slightly lesser degree than the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3 or the Mojave Wasteland in Fallout: New Vegas.
  • constant radiation storms are blowing in from the radioactive crater to the south. The water in the rivers and lakes is still highly radioactive, although you can become resistant to it. Any meat is radioactive unless you roast it into something that won't slowly kill you. All seed crops are also radioactive until cooked in some way.
  • The Commonwealth is full of hyper-aggressive hostile mutated creatures, from Mole Rats to Feral Ghouls, to Deathclaws who will all try to rip your face off on sight.
  • The vast majority of communities are composed of Raiders, trigger-happy mercs, and Super Mutants — each and every one of which will try to shoot you on sight. Creating your own peaceful settlements as a sanctuary from the hell outside will attract constant raiding parties from all of the above.
  • Despite being seen as the Commonwealth's largest and most luxurious surface settlement, Diamond City is closer to Rivet City than New Vegas on the scale of living standards. Its citizens still live in makeshift metal shacks built on top of the stands instead of the largely intact buildings outside. There's a school, a bar and a church, but these are the height of the luxuries on offer, and dredging the city water supply for garbage still yields the occasional human skull. The city appears at first glance to be safe from destruction despite the constant battle outside between its guards and the Raiders/Mutants, but this is a subversion; Diamond City once had a gaping hole in its defensive wall covered by nothing more than a bookcase until Piper Wright published an article about the danger to spur action to fix it. Generally, the city itself is much more vulnerable than its people or mayor are ready to admit.
  • The two largest factions both want to improve the Commonwealth in their own way, but both sides believe incredibly cruel methods including systematic oppression, terrorism, slavery (in the case of the Institute) and even genocide (in the case of the Brotherhood) are needed to make it happen.
  • The Island in Far Harbor is a Crapsack World all on its own. A constant radioactive Fog that had driven people insane blankets most of the Island and probably all of it, if the Fog Condensers hadn't been made to protect them from the other... inhabitants.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • The Hazmat Suit gives an impressive +1000 to radiation resistance and an additional hidden effect that further multiplicatively reduces radiation down to negligible, reducing all forms of radiation short of direct consumption to minimum. It outperforms even the heavy metal N-B-C protections and sealants on a full suit of power armor in terms of radiation shielding. It's indispensable in the Glowing Sea, which is pretty much radiation personified. It also has no ballistic or energy defense whatsoever, can't be modded, and is a full-body outfit, meaning it can't be worn with anything else. And considering the creatures that call the Glowing Sea home (Deathclaws, Stingwings, Radscorpions and other Demonic Spiders), you're really better off climbing into your Power Armor.
  • Metal armor has the highest ballistic damage resistance of all the normal armor types. It also has abysmal energy resistance in a game where anywhere from a third to half the things shooting at you have some sort of energy weapon. In addition, it's the heaviest type.
  • Radiation weapons and radiation damage in general. All mutants (animal and humanoid), robots, and ghouls are immune (the latter are actually healed by it). Furthermore, enemies in Powered Armor are also very resistant to radiation. The only ones vulnerable are normal humans and dogs. This isn't so bad if the radiation damage is a mod to a ballistic or laser weapon, but straight radiation weapons like the Gamma Gun are highly situational.
  • On the level of factions, both the Institute and Brotherhood of Steel come across as this.
    • The Institute specializes in espionage warfare; they have countless spies across the entire Commonwealth, their main agents — the Coursers — function as primarily assassins and saboteurs, and their teleportation technology allows them to move their forces in incredibly quick and sudden movements to weaken their opponents so they can later infiltrate them and tear themselves apart. But they have to act like this because their unique laser weapons are weaker than their Pre-War counteparts, their de facto soldiers (the countless Gen 2 synths) are easily destroyed outside of their armor, and their military tactics solely rely on superior numbers to turn the tide in battle.
    • The Brotherhood of Steel, conversely, specializes in direct warfare; their Power Armor-equipped Paladins are some of the most dangerous soldiers in the Commonwealth, and their use of Vertibirds gives them superior firepower compared to the Institute. However, the Brotherhood also are very easily subverted (even if by coincidence, like with Paladin Danse and — potentially — the Sole Survivor) by other forces, and their lack of multiple bases outside of just Boston Airport and Cambridge Police Station gives them weak supply lines that leave them open to Institute sabotage. The Brotherhood also doesn't have the Institute's manufacturing edge, meaning that their powerful weapons and armor (like their T-60c Power Armor and the Prydwen) are also hard to replace. In fact, the Railroad questline shows how even impoverished Wastelanders like them can infiltrate & sabotage the Brotherhood, crushing them with relative ease.
• Critical Hit: Back as usual, but now a sort of Limit Break instead of something that happens by chance: attacks in V.A.T.S. fill up a Critical gauge which you activate at will, also in V.A.T.S. They also now have the very nice effect of always hitting. The Critical Banker Luck perk even allows you to store/stack critical hits for later.
• Critical Hit Class: Many of the Luck Perks can make a build like this. Critical Banker allows you to store up to four Critical Hits, the final rank of Grim Reaper's Sprint replenishes Critical meter when it triggers, Four Leaf Clover can randomly build the critical meter just by hitting enemies, and Better Criticals makes the criticals hurt even more. And while weapons don't have crit chance multipliers anymore, mods can increase crit damage and some legendary weapons deal extra crit damage, charge the crit gauge faster, or have special effects when they crit (like causing frenzy or freezing).
• Critical Status Buff: A lot of items in the Far Harbor expansion (weapons, armor, and consumables) only work or work better when your health is low; either being based on how naturally low your health is, or how many rads you have.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Codsworth seems somewhat goofy and unworldly at first encounter- until he volunteers to help clean up Sanctuary for you, whips out a rotary saw and flamethrower, and curb-stomps some rad-roaches.
  Codsworth: I've got a circular saw with your name on it!!
• Cruelty Is the Only Option: While more lightly-applied than most examples, spurning a companion's romantic advances for good pretty much forces you to be a total asshole about it, because letting them down gently will only cause them to keep bringing it up over and over again. And you'll sometimes have to do it more than once.
  • There are at least three instances in the game proper:
    • To recruit Hancock, you have to join a heist by a lowlife called Bobbi No-Nose to rob from Hancock himself.
    • No matter what you do, if you side against the Institute, you can't carry out Father/Shaun, as due to a combination of his lifetime loyalty toward the Institute and his terminal cancer, he decided to Face Death with Dignity.
    • Alternatively, if you side with the Institute or the Railroad, you have to blow up the Prydwen, which also houses children. Thankfully unless you actively provoke the BOS, Minuteman vs BOS is completely optional.
• Crutch Character: Codsworth is the second earliest companion you can recruit, and his buzz blade and flamer will make short work of the weak early-game enemies you'll be facing. However, as he can't be equipped with armor or weapons like your other companions, his power and defense Can't Catch Up. With the Automaton DLC, however, Codsworth can be upgraded into a far more powerful fighting machine.
  • Dogmeat also counts, as despite he can distract (and when upgraded, easily kill) human enemies, he often has the tendency to run into traps, laser tripwire, and of course, your line of fire or your way.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The battle against Kellogg can become this. If you look around the building enough you'll come across the password to the fort's armory. Inside, along with relatively normal weapons and bullets, is the Fat-Man and a single shell. After talking to Kellogg you can back out the open door before the battle begins and fire the round at him as soon as he turns red, ending the battle before it even begins.
  • As a testament to just how awesomely powerful the rebuilt Liberty Prime is, it's possible for the thing to come up against a Super Mutant Behemoth. If that happens, Prime will pick the Behemoth up, squeeze the abomination in its hands until it goes limp, and then casually toss its lifeless body aside like trash. Needless to say, in the face of such destructive power, the Institute fare little better.
  • If you decide to ignore the main quest and explore the Wasteland in the early game, you can easily wind up facing much more powerful enemies than you can deal with at a low level. On the flip side, if you've already leveled up a few times before going to Concord, some of the early Minutemen quests can become Curb Stomp Battles in your favor. (For instance, showing up to the Museum of Freedom with much better Power Armor and Heavy Weapons than you can find on the roof, then mowing down all the Raiders and the Deathclaw with relative ease.)
  • If you get a little luck with the Legendary drops and go hard for the weapon mod perks early, you can turn what should be a trip to the last save point into a case of turning this trope on its head. Shooting a Deathclaw in its tender underbelly when you're barely leveled beyond the point where you fight the one in Concord is one of the game's most satisfying payoffs.
• Cutting Off the Branches:
  • Applies to both Fallout 3 endings (with or without expansions). Terminal logs in the Prydwen mention that Sarah Lyons was killed in battle soon after the death of her father, meaning that she survived the battle to retake the Purifier. Also, with the presence of the Eastern branch of the Brotherhood of Steel, it was obvious that the Lone Wanderer used Bradley-Hercules to destroy the Enclave's Mobile Base Crawler at Adams Air Force Base instead of betraying the Brotherhood by firing the remaining missile salvos at the Citadel. The Prydwen is even mentioned as being built at Adams Air Force Base, and at least partially from parts scavenged from the Mobile Base Crawler. Some of Deacon's random dialogue also mentions that the Capital Wasteland's water is drinkable, indicating that the Lone Wanderer didn't poison Project Purity. All in all, this game makes it clear that the Wanderer is a decent person.
  • Given how Sierra Petrovita appears in the Nuka World Expansion, killing her in 3 isn't canon.
• Cymbal-Banging Monkey: You find these things all over the place. They may or may not activate in your presence. You can't pick them up, but you can bash/shoot their heads off. Some have even been rigged up as trap triggers.
• Cyborg: Third generation Synths seem to be this in some form or other; most Coursers sport unemotional personalities, but Gen 3s having DNA and being indistinguishable from humans is mentioned more than once. Kellogg is also explicitly a cyborg, with one of his parts playing a significant role in the main story. This functions to prolong his life, distorting the Sole Survivor's perception of how long ago Shaun was kidnapped.

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