At some point I may want to try out a character who uses Power Armor a lot, but I first would like some tips and advice. I realize that a lot of Fusion Cores would be needed, and the ability to make good mods for each piece of armor, but are there also any specific SPECIAL stats and perks that would be beneficial? This is a hypothetical situation, especially since I would only do this type of character later.

You just need science and armourer. I've done the whole game in T45 armour. You can get it to able C with no training and need about 3 points in each for the highest level of armour. If you decide to complete the look with heavy weapons then your minimum strength needs to be high enough as well.

I've had no trouble with cores on a normal playthrough with fairly rigorous exploring, and always had 5+ spares until about level 10 then it started to balloon out to about 30+ on the lower part of the map. You can always buy cores with farmed water if you need more.

It's a painless process really to do a PA build.

Mid tier Strength, Intelligence, and Charisma are what I'd suggest. Knowing what it takes to repair and maintain armor and how many resources you have coming in to cover that is also vital.

My current character is a PA specialist. Once I got the T-45 from Concord, I got the various Fusion Cores (FCs) from the easy to get places and starting with Lexington and Super Duper Mart, it was all Power Armor, all the time. I put some miles on that T-45 set before I found my first T-51.

Strength is important because - Armorer is essential to upgrading your armor, and Strong Back is needed to bring home the resources that upgrading everything can cost.

Intelligence is important because - Science! is vital to power armor use. Without it, you will never have the extra systems and will remain a low letter grade variant. If you want to really spiff out a suit of T-60 or X-01, you will really need it. Scrapper is hugely important to making sure you get the materials you need from saluaging.

Charisma is important because - Local Leader helps you build up the network of settlements to keep the resources flowing. With multiple water purifiers (industrial sized) in one settlement you can use the purified water it creates to trade for either a) expensive heavy gunner ammo or rare crafting materials like circuitry and copper (heavily used in armor upgrades and repair).

Endurance is not bad to have either, as Aquaboy/girl synergizes well with your ability to walk along the bottom of standing water areas and even just walk out to Spectacle Island.

Once you get your T-45 from Concord and get back to Sanctuary, get it fully repaired. It requires only Steel to repair aside from the Torso (which requires 1 Circuitry), so scrapping the environmental stuff in Sanctuary should give you enough. Use your Pip Boy to mark the following components (switch to the component view of your junk tab in inventory before emptying your load of stuff from the History museum): Circuitry, Fiber Optics, Copper, Nuclear Material, Adhesive, Aluminum. Ceramic is a good idea, too, as is Crystal.

You will eat a ton of Aluminum throughout using your PA. It is vital to gather as much as you can. The best things to get it from (due to low carry weight) are: Aluminum Cans, TV Dinner Trays, Surgical Trays, Aluminum Trays, Trays, Aluminum Cannisters, and Toy Rockets.

Grab all the FCs you can before you go down to Lexington. You'll be out of your armor and likely just wearing leather scavenged off Raiders and using whatever guns you have. That's fine. Here are some easy to grab ones:

1. Museum -- You should already have it by doing the quest.

2. Mole Rat Den beneath the Red Rocket -- Go in back of the Red Rocket outside Sanctuary and there's a den. Clear it of mole rats and it should be on the ground down one direction.

3. Concord Civic Access -- The hole that the Deathclaw jumped out of? Yeah. There are some radroaches, molerats, and a couple lowbie mirelurks down there. Kill them, pick up everything, near the end is a fusion core on the ground.

4. Abernathy Farm -> USAF Station Olivia -- Head W/SW from Red Rocket and talk to the Abernathys. Get the quest to get their daughter's locket and then go up the radar station. Kill your way through it (being careful of Ack-Ack's minigun) and get the Fusion Core at the lowest level. There are like 10 raiders in the whole place. Easy.

5. Robotic Salvage Yard -- On the way to Station Olivia, follow the lake/river that separates Sanctuary from the rest of the map. You'll find the salvage yard. There's a shut down Sentrybot and a small building with some loot. Get the magazine on the table for a slick flames paint job for your power armor (Full suit painted is +1 Agility and costs no resources -- great starting paint job). Go to the sentrybot and loot the steamer trunk next to him of gear and then grab the programming holotape. Run the program on your Pip Boy and order it to self destruct (stand back for this). Loot the wreckage -- Missiles, Fusion Cores, Steel, Aluminum. Everything that makes a growing Power Armor big and strong.

6. Federal Ration Stockpile -- Turn in your quest from Station Olivia at the Abernathy's and then go west/southwest. Look for a church. There's a hatch into the Federal Ration Stockpile there. You don't have to go in, though. Go SE of the church and you'll see the stockpile. It's covered in raiders and, but behind an outlying building is an FC generator. You can, with caution, sneak up and nab it as it faces away from the encampment. You can also murder everything there and enjoy your loot and XP.

As a note, for these locales there are two suits of power armor additional you can grab if you want. West of Station Olivia (almost directly between the Robotic Salvage Yard and the Station is a crashed vertibird. There will be a partial suit standing next to it. Loot the armor off it, or insert a core and fast travel it back to Sanctuary and bank it. West of the Federal Ration Stockpile is a semi box trailer and inside is another suit. You have to be sneaky to grab it, as the raiders know about it and will grab it if alerted. This one has a core in it, but the other near the vertibird does not.

After that, you have several Fusion Cores and a spiffy suit of T-45 with a sweet as heck red flames paint job. Do the quest that Preston gives you to help Tenpines. They'll send you to Corvega. Grab the armor, head to Lexington and first go into the Super Duper Mart. Do some feral ghoul stomping and then grab the FC out of the generator in the back room.

Avoid the raider with the Fat Man in mid town until you can get a killshot on him, and then grab his Fatman for later in the game and any gear/ammo he and his buddy had. Head to Corvega and start busting skulls (and don't forget to grab the FC from the generator inside).

T-45 lasted me till level 20 doing this. Upgrade it as much as you can and don't be afraid to expend resources on it. It's keeping you alive after all. As soon as you can grab a full T-51 suit from somewhere, do so. The T-45 armor suit is about 75% as much protection as T-51 offers, so it's a big upgrade (T-51 to T-60 isn't as big an upgrade, but X-01 is). There should be a full suit of that by the time you get to the National Guard Training Yard if you stick to the North side of the map (Cambridge and up), and if you venture out to Nahant, there's a barge guarded by robots that will require you to have Expert lockpicking to open and it should spawn as T-51.

Good luck!

Also, most of the vendors sell fusion cores so if you have your settlements producing money for you then you can buy them and never run out.

"Hi, Arturo, here's 70 pounds of bottled water. I'll take those five fusion cores and all the 5mm ammo you can spare, please!"

As I understand it, you'll eventually want Strength 10, Charisma 6 and Intelligence 9 at least for the glorious Pain Train Perk and to extend the life-span of your Fusion Cores. Adjust your other stats for your desired play-style.

Settlement building with an eye to getting as much fertilizer from the mutant cattle, as well as Settlements devoted to the creation of Mutfruit, Corn and Tatos for Adhesive, and a few Settlements designed to produce huge amounts of Purified Water. Make sure to collect as much plastic from the world as you can as well.

Spare Settlers should be sent to either Scavenging Stations to gather supplies for bartering or traders to create a network of interconnected Settlements, and try to ensure as many provisioners you create all head to one Settlement if possible, and here's why.

Build as many high-level shops as you can in the 'Core' Settlement. Combined with the focus of traffic, you will see a surge of caps being deposited into your Settlement's coffers if there's a large number of Provisioners heading to one area, and connected as they are, you might even be able to send the Legendary Traders to that Settlement in time, if you can track them down and you've got space in your Settlement for them.

The Perks for additional caps and ammo to be found in containers are also a plus for this kind of build. Grab the 'Junktown Vendor' magazines and the one Wastelander Survival Guide to ensure you can really put the screws to the traders, and keep a high-charisma set of clothing, hat and black-rimmed glasses to give you a +4 Charisma bonus during trading, and if you can craft yourself some Graqe Mentats, even better (that and you'll have a very high charisma with the above-mentioned outfit, possibly a total of 19 or 20 if you maxed out Charisma and then used the Charisma Bobblehead) for your bartering needs.

How to pay for the materials required to upgrade/repair your Power Armor? All those Brahmin, all that plastic you're collecting? Go to a Chem-Crafting Table and make as much Jet as you can. Grab your surplus Purified Water from as many Settlements as you can carry the stuff to and from, and don't forget to have at least a basic general trader's stand in every Settlement to help generate caps, then hit up KL-E-O, the Weapon and General Trader in Diamond City and possibly Tinker Tom/BoS Quartermaster if you've opened up those factions and ensure you stockpile as much circuitry and aluminium from them as possible, because believe me, you'll need a lot of the stuff as well as adhesive.

Honestly, there are few things as hilariously fun as hitting sprint in Power Armor and doing a foe-tossing charge through a mob of Super Mutants or Synths or Raiders and sending them flying, if not outright killing weaker members of the group. As they're getting to their feet, a close-range weapon like a Combat Shotgun, Flamethrower or even just the armored fists of your Power Armor can do ludicrous amounts of damage since, as the NPCs are staggering up onto their feet, THEY WON'T BE ABLE TO MOVE AWAY OR DODGE YOUR ATTACKS.

Best Moment: On top of a building in the Fens. Pain Training through two raiders, plowing them over the side of the building (along with myself) and then landing ON the raider at the bottom of the building who was looking up at the falling bodies. It was glorious.

Anytime I see someone against a railing, I Pain Train them if I can. I wave at them on the way down.

If you decide to combine Power Armor with heavy Chem use (get Chem Resistant!), the Pain Train is marvelously ridiculous damage.

Fury + Psychobuff + Psychojet + (if it doesn't bug out) Mysterious Serum = Brutal amounts of damage.

Combine that with a 'Powerful' Super Sledge (+25% damage), Big Leagues 5, Motion Assist Servos in the Torso (+2 strength), and a Military or Brotherhood paint scheme..... yeah.

And if that wasn't sufficient, there's always the Explosive Minigun. Every. Single. Bullet. Explodes.

It's like putting raiders through a blender.

An explosive blender. That rains body parts.

Thanks for the advice, guys! So based on what I've read, there are specific SPECIAL perks that are useful for getting the most out of maintaining such a build, but beyond that it sounds like it's not going to be too much of a problem. I'm thinking about using this kind of setup with a character who, in my imagination, was an ideal, gungho soldier pre-war and therefore connects with the BoS the most - meaning he'd probably go through with their main story ending. So far, based on what I've found on my current character, T-60 armor looks the most appealing, especially with BoS paint.

Just keep in mind that you need resources to repair the armour. T45 needs 27 steel and a circuit board, which you can carry around easy enough. Other armours require more exotic materials so you will need to keep an eye out for them. I couldn't use my X-01 armour for ages in one playthrough because I'd run out of aluminum, after looting everything not nailed down up to that point.

I don't remember what it takes to repair T60 but work that out early and make sure you have lots of it, as armour degrades reasonably fast in a big fight.

How to find minerals/metals; Scrap weapons and armor, collect everything (I don't know about (paper-)folders, seems like they are pretty useless, worth 1 cap). Shipments of goods traders in Diamond City (inclusive the swatter man) - at night there is a robot also selling shipments of minerals/metals, caravan traders, Mr. Green at Graygarden, Connie Abernathy at Abernathy farm and some traders at Bunker Hill (Caravan folks use this as a base). Nuclear material can be found on some mutants and glowing animals. Turrets and robots also drop nice stuffs after blowing them up. Cans of paint gives oil, pencils gives wood so pick up everything. "Luck" do counts when finding stuffs in containers, safe and drop from npcs.

Cheers,

-Klevs

The nuclear physicist perk is a good one. It makes fusion cores last longer. The strength portion of your SPECIAL stats is largely irrelevant, because power armor gives you maxed out strength automatically. The Science, Armorer, and Blacksmith perks are the important ones for actually building the mods for power armor.

As the poster above said. Earlier I did not know what perks to choose everytime I leveled up, but I kept the "points" unused until I really needed them. Once used "point" on a perk, you cannot undo unless reload an earlier saved game.

Cheers,

-Klevs

One more question/thought: If I used PA for a good chunk of the time, is it then still necessary to wear the best armor (not PA) I can get? I almost feel like going more for aesthetics on this new character, when he's not in his PA, but don't want to sacrifice defense and other resistances.

When you're in Power Armor, none of the stats on the nin-power armor gear applies. So wear whatever you want underneath.

Awesome, great to hear! It's too bad that some outfits/clothing I'd want would require me to kill individuals, and I don't own the game on PC to mod it.

Pain Train is a must.

You need 10 strength for pain train and that is a must for a PA build.

It adds a lot of fun to it.

Ah. Good point, I forgot about that one. That's one of the perks that I've never gotten yet. I'm more of a stealth/sniper kind of character though, so I tend not to invest much in those types of perks.

My problem with Pain Train is that it requires you to Sprint, which consumes AP. Anything that consumes AP also causes your Cores to drain more quickly. Therefore, making regular use of Pain Train will cause you to chew through Cores at a much faster rate. End-game, when you've got a lot of cores, that's fine, but in the early game, you don't have a massive amount. If you're going to use this perk, I'd save it for later, rather than making it an early priority.

Strong Back is a great perk, but it's 3rd rank can be problematic. While being able to move at normal speed while over-encumbered is great, it consumes AP to do so, and as I said before, anything that consumes AP also drains cores more quickly. I am always picking up everything, so even with two Calibrated Legs and an extra 50 Carry Weight, I'd still be over-encumbered all the time. I'd therefore be eating cores quite often. As with Pain Train, consider the third rank of this as a later focus instead of an early-game perk.

Also worth noting: if you're not doing things that consume AP, you don't need Nuclear Physicist. It's nice to have, but I can count 4-5 Fusion Cores you can get just near Sanctuary. If you need more, just head to Diamond City and buy them from Arturo; he regularly stocks about 4 or so. My current Laser Commander is using Power Armor, and has no problems with power despite having no ranks in Nuclear Physicist. However, the character in question doesn't use VATS, doesn't Sprint, and doesn't have the Strength for Strong Back (though I may restart the character and shift 3 points away from INT to STR to pick up the first two ranks of Strong Back, just for Quality of Life purposes). On the other hand, if you're going to be making regular use of Pain Train and VATS, you're pretty much going to want Nuclear Physicist.

With nuclear, you really don't need to worry about AP drain.

I really enjoy the Power Armor and I'm glad that the game kinda "shoved it in my face" because I played with a bit for the first time in any Fallout game going back to FO2.

I have one level 74 toon with a Mark VI set of X-01 she has used quite a bit and it was fun. But I am at heart a sneaky sniper and I'd just decide to 'leave it behind' for the next sortie.

So I'm curious you folks who use it a lot, do you just not sneak and does it not matter to you? It feels funny for my toon to not be squatting and duck walking . . . and its preposterous to watch in PA.

On the PC, you can hit the Caps Lock and toggle between walking and running - so you can just slowly walk even when not encumbered. When I loot a new Power Armor frame I usually just switch to walking and save on power while looting the area. I have no idea how to do this on the consoles, though.

Stealth Boy Torso Mod. All your problems are solved.


As for me, I don't sneak unless it's for a quick crit before bum rushing or I'm going with a spy or agent role play. I prefer Leroy Jenkinsing it myself, especially in power armor.

You can sneak pretty decent in power armor too, tend to do it in glowing sea to be able to snipe hard enemies.

Mostly an sniper but uses it for glowing sea and some high intensity missions.

Was in power armor then I portet into the institute, wonder how many other who did that too

I sneak pretty frequently in PA, even with my main character currently being a Strength build for Pain Train.

Sneaking with PA is, IMO, mostly about getting into position or getting a ranged alpha strike off before breaching.

I may sneak up to the edge of an enemy camp, use my Gauss Rifle to pop one or two (it is suppressed) enemies way in the back that I can see -- MG Turrets if those are an option instead, then stand and mow down the front wave of enemy characters with my minigun.

If I am first to see a Deathclaw or Behemoth (instead of them seeing me first), I'll crouch and whip out the missile launcher. There's no reason not to get that sneak attack bonus, and your aim is steadier.

PA allows for much more aggressive play once you go loud, though. I can barrel right in whereas someone even in heavy combat armor might get chewed up and spit out.

On my sniper play through, I eventually got a suit of X-01.6 with a Stealth Boy (and used it for important missions, but not for everything). High stealth can overcome the PA's inherent unstealthyness, and the Stealth Boy makes it so that even when detected enemies have a difficult time pegging exactly where you are. I've had even mutant hounds just stop and start looking around right in front of me due to the stealth boy. I think the key to it is that when you're so heavily armored, being unable to land a telling blow on you due to the stealth boy (just some glances or AOE splash) makes it near impossibly to truly hurt you. X-01.6 only really fears long term sustained fire (lots of enemies at once or a few enemies that can't be stopped from hitting you over a period of time) or massive anti-armor attacks (like a missile launcher's direct hit, or a mini-nuke, or a behemoth's melee attack). Without any real chance that those can impact you, it's very easy to stay alive.