Fallout 3/Hacking Guide
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Contents |
Introduction
In Fallout 3 you encounter many places where hacking is useful. Usually it's one of the many terminals you will find throughout the world but it can also be a mainframe or the likes. The wall mounted or desk stand terminal are the ones you will find most frequently. These terminals contain information, control doors, safes but also turrets in some instances. Hacking will allow you to gain access, get information or turn turrets against your enemies. It also gives experience points for each successful hack, so it's a good way to advance in the game.
Levels of hacking
Hacking is directly related to your Science Skill. Depending on the skill, you are allowed to hack certain difficulties of terminals.
- Very Easy: 0 Science Skill
- Easy: 25 Science Skill
- Average: 50 Science Skill
- Hard: 75 Science Skill
- Very Hard: 100 Science Skill
If you do not have the skill, the game wont let you even attempt it.
Higher skill also reduces the numbers of possible passwords, making hacking a lot easier.
Hot to hack
The first thing I suggest to anyone, is simply save before you even start using the terminal. If you fail, you can just load the game and retry. Specially at the beginning of your hacker career this might come in handy, but even later, you can always trust in this trick to keep you save.
When you open a terminal, you get a screen like the one shown in the picture below:
Picture coming soon...
Now you see words sprinkled in there. One of the is the password. You have 4 guesses to find the correct one. Just click one and it will tell you if you got the right one. It will also display a number, telling you if you got a letter right. Right here means that it is the correct letter in the correct place.
Lets assume that the correct password is DREAMS. Now if you tried DARKEN you will see it has only one letter at the right spot. If there was a DRINKS, 3 letters would be correct.
Your best strategy is to find the most similar words, like having a common start or ending. If they have all the same 3 letters in the end and you try one with the result of one letter correct, you know all these other ones can't be correct because they got letters in common with the current one. Say there is DRINK and THINK and you got less than 3 letters right, this means it can't be the other if you chosen one of them.
If you run low on tries but are close to the solution, try the brackets trick.
The brackets trick
In between the words are a lot of brackets. There are { [ < and ( brackets and their closing counter part. Now if you hover over a starting bracket and it will highlight a matching closing bracket, you found a loophole (or the bracket trick). Click it like a password and then it does one of two things. It either removes a dud from the passwords or it will give you back all tries. You might see now how handy these can be.
Most of the time there are 3 - 5 of these sprinkled in, but there is no guarantee that you get a trial reset one at all, it's completely random.
That said, I still suggest savong before opening the console and then try it, so you can reload in case it goes horribly wrong.
