7 non-spoiler tips to get started in Fallout: New Vegas

If you're booting up Fallout: New Vegas for the first time, you may need some tips to help you out; it can seem daunting knowing exactly what choices to make at the beginning of the game, especially when it comes to creating your character. 

While it's not a punishing game for newbies, you naturally won't know how to get the most out of your experience when going in blind, so it's worth checking out some spoiler-free tips to both maximise your enjoyment and learn how to make a character that isn't completely useless.

With hundreds of hours in Fallout: New Vegas, I have a lot of advice on how to get started for your first time. Let's get to the tips!

Non-spoiler tips

Save often

Even if you've modded New Vegas to become a much smoother and more consistent experience, I always recommend saving frequently. If you're on PC, learn to hit that F5 key every few minutes, and whenever you perform a manual save, put it in a different slot to your previous one.

While the game has autosaves (typically when entering/exiting a building, levelling up, or completing a quest) you should be relying on your own saves just in case you die or the game crashes. You should be doing this in most RPG games anyway, but it's especially important in FNV.

Level Speech 

Dialogue is a big part of role-playing games, and the writing in New Vegas is one of its best qualities, so you should try to see as much of it as possible - especially on your first playthrough.

Levelling Speech so you can pass the crazy amount of checks available in the game will help you learn more about the world of Fallout and its setting. It's also a super useful skill for a tonne of quests, giving you new ways to progress that don't just involve shooting everything you see.

Level Science or Lockpick

On the topic of skills, you should prioritise either Science or Lockpick during the earlier parts of the game. Science lets you hack computers, and Lockpick lets you pick locks.

Both of these skills are vital for accessing locked containers, safes, doors, and new locations, and a lot of the time you will have the option of one or the other. On the whole, Lockpick is just a bit more useful due to more places requiring it than Science, but you can get very far with either. 

Once you get one of these to 100, you can begin putting points into the other and have both options available whenever.

Don't use skill books until you get the Comprehension perk

You can find a lot of skill books around the game that give you a flat, permanent boost to your skills. For example, if you find a Big Book of Science somewhere in the game, consuming it from your PipBoy will raise your Science skill by 3.

However, with the Comprehension perk (unlocked at level 4 and requires 4 Intelligence) you can gain additional skill point for reading skill books. Over the course of the game, this really adds up, and you can become a powerhouse with high skills across the board.

Use Charisma as your dump stat

When you create your character at the start of the game, you'll be asked to use a machine called the Vit-o-matic Vigor Tester to choose your S.P.E.C.I.A.L stats. These are your primary statistics, represented by:

• Strength
• Perception
• Endurance
• Charisma
• Intelligence
• Agility
• Luck

Each of these has some effect on your character and the game, but not all stats are created equal, and Charisma is the black sheep in this particular game. 

I recommend using it as your dump stat, essentially meaning you can lower the number of points in this down to 1 to then put more points into your other stats. Even if you want to go for a Speech build, lowering your Charisma only affects your beginner Speech level, and with a few level-ups you can easily negate this effect while having a more powerful character overall.

The only time I don't recommend this is if you play on Hardcore mode, as Charisma affects the health of companions here, meaning they can permanently die much more easily.

Don't head straight for New Vegas

It can be tempting to go straight to New Vegas by heading north-east from where you start in Goodsprings. Do not do this unless you are a seasoned veteran of the game!

Not only is the journey very difficult, as the devs placed a lot of tough enemies along the way, but you'll miss out on a lot of loot, quests, and levelling by skipping the traditional route of heading south and following the highway.

Patience is a virtue here, and you'll have a much better sense of progression by following the normal route on your first trip to the Mojave Wasteland.

Buy a shovel from Chet

When you get out into the town of Goodsprings at the start of the game, head to the general store owned by Chet, just next to the saloon. Purchase or sell whatever you want to when you're here, but I recommend ensuring you have enough to buy a shovel.

This allows you to interact with shallow graves you find and loot them. There are a fair few across the game and you can get a lot of useful loot from this. For your first taste of this, head to the Goodsprings Cemetery on the hill behind the saloon to dig up a few graves right at the beginning. 

Check out our Fallout homepage for more guides like this. We've also covered the best New Vegas mods, the New Vegas console commands, the best Fallout games ranked, and the canon Fallout timeline.