I have a question about the purpose of these bobbleheads. If you have a maxed stat already, like 10 Intelligence, will the bobblehead be useless to find at this point or does it actually somehow give you 11?

puts you to 11. so wait till you have a 10 natural ( make sure you dont have any item bonuses ) then grab it and whoila 11

It will give you 11. Technically if a bit insane for the absolute max you could wait until every special is at 10 before getting it's bobble head for the best end game character by a tiny margin.

if you don't expect to play a single character the 500 or so hours it takes to get to level 266 so that becomes an issue then just wait on the special stats you plan to raise to 10.

Thanks. Also would you happen to know if the radio effects stealth?

The radio does not but the light does.

Thanks again

I believe SPECIAL stats can technically be buffed up to a cap of 20. You won't benefit for perks, but it will affect others things: STR will still improve your carry weight, INT keep affecting experience gain... the only ones that don't really benefit are PER and CHR. You need 11 CHR to guarentee a red speech success (otherwise you have 14% change of failure at CHR 10), but CHR 10+ only affects barter prizes at a negligible amount. And PER doesn't seem to be overly effective at anything but unlocking perks, since you can't track enemies outside of combat anymore.

I'll test when I get home on my character with 17 charisma to see about that 20 cap.

Charisma seems to have a small effect on intimidate, wasteland whisperer, and animal friend success rates, it effects charisma checks, it effects prices ALOT, it also controller settler soft caps. (10+modified charisma is the most you can move to a settlement even though some to get more people with natural radio tower methods they seem to come in slower)

Perception effects accuracy in VATs, base pickpocket chance.

Int in addition to giving extra experience also causes you to have less results to sift through when hacking terminals.

Str isn't just carry weight it has a huge effect on melee damage.

the specials do a lot more then we give them credit for in general.

Since all perks only require a 10 in each special...you can grab them whenever you come across them...only ones I see mattering are strength and maybe charisma...besides who is going to pass up a Bobblehead just to wait until they can make that special perk 11? Not me.

Since no one has made the joke...we can take it all the way up to 11 baby.

Ooh, good points. I don't really use VATS so I wouldn't have noticed PER (and I'm rich enough I've opted out of looting things purely for financial reasons), but CHR most definitely affects settlements - even if that CHR is from equipment buffs. (Presumably from drug buffs then, too.)

Does STR seriously affect melee damage then? Does anyone know the scaling, and does 'melee' include fist weapons/unarmed? I haven't noticed anything, personally. That isn't to say that it doesn't make a difference, but I got the impression that the difference would be quite negligible. Maybe Buffout would be worth something to me, after all...

It's pretty huge. I compared buffout and STR boosting gear but I don't know the console stuff to get actual damage numbers. I was doing easily more then double damage.

Also I tested and 17 charisma + graqe mentates with 22 charisma so 20 isn't a soft cap.

You can, but there's not much point unless you really feel like maxing it out for the derived statistics.

Doe Agility in itself affect to how easy you are to spot when sneaking?

According to the wiki, Strength gives +10% Melee damage per point. That means you do 2x damage at 10 Strength, and 3x damage at 20 Strength. Very important for Melee characters. You also get +10 Carry Weight per point, so that's nice, too.

The wiki says that Perception affects Lockpicking, pickpocketing, and VATS accuracy, but has no information on how.

Endurance increases max health. Thankfully, it's retroactive; two characters with 10 Endurance will have the same health, even if they got their Endurance to 10 at different times. To contrast, in Oblivion Endurance wasn't retroactive, so a character who maxed their Endurance at the start of the game would have more health than someone who maxed it later, even if both characters had 100 Endurance.

Charisma increases prices when selling items, and decreases prices when buying items. However, these values are capped at 0.8x base value and 1.2x base value, respectively. Charisma on it's own hits these caps at 16, but collectables and the Cap Collector perk push this as low as 10. So for anything your character needs to do themselves, 11 is the end-game cap, with higher values really only useful for people who are heavily involved in the Settlement system.

Intelligence gives +3% XP per point. Other effects aren't documented in the wiki.

Agility gives +10 AP per point, and also adds 1% to pickpocket chance.

Luck affects crits, rate at which the crit meter fills, and apparently also loot, but no further information has been documented. Just a single small blurb.