How much do companion's affect stealth? I play with a stealth based character and I like playing with a companion. But ive been thinking of going solo bc I think they affect my stealth to much. And I heard you can adjust some character's aggressiveness such as dog meat to wait until enemies start attacking me to attack. Don't know if this is true.

They can make it tough. If you plan to use one tell them stay while you go snipe.

I've only used Dogmeat and Preston. You can order companions to Stay, but it's annoying babysitting, and there are always going to be times when they ruin stealth for you. Some claim you can use Lone Wanderer WITH Dogmeat, because he's not technically a Companion, but I find this is not true. In fact there's even a load screen tip showing Dogmeat and it talks about using Stimpacks to heal wounded companions.

I've been going it solo from about level 10 through level 30 something, and it's a LOT less stress. Plus I started out applying 10 points to Strength, and now have level 2 Lone Wanderer and level 1 Strong back, so I can carry 425 weight by myself, and take 30% less damage.

They make good meat shields if you get caught.

I forgot to say, one cool thing about Dogmeat, esp early on in the game, is he can find important items via the Fetch command. Enemies too, if you want to use him to distract or grab them while you use VATS.

Only one companion has sneak and doesn't trigger traps, all the rest will always get caught/seen. That doesn't affect YOUR stealth though, just the companion that will get attacked.

Any time enemies are alerted it afects your stealth. One of the main components of good stealth work is keeping the enemy unalerted for 2x damage on shots. It's pretty hard to do that when they're frantically running around alerted by your companion, and they're also more likely to go searching and find you as well.