I've recently started over the game on survival mode. To make things more interesting I put 8 starting points in charisma. Very hard but a lot of fun. The only part I had to cheat and turn it down as the first death claw part (don't know how that's possible on survival) but beyond that it isn't going back down.

What advice do any survival level players have? Should I work on settlements or go straight to diamond city? I'm very aware of my mortality although unlike max difficulty on say oblivion it isn't impossible. What was your experience and what do you think is the most efficient way to play?

Unfortunately I spent too much time building Sancturary hills and I'm level 6 with the same basic gear so that kind of hurts.

I started a game on Survival difficulty. The DC in Concord was actually easy to defeat, just sat inside a building (he can't fit through the doorways) and sniped him with the minigun in Vats until dead.

Far harder is the fact that for the first part of the game you're basically forced to sneak around and avoid certain enemies and not proceed with certain quests that confront those enemies. For instance, I ran into two groups...Gunners and Super Mutants...where I basically had to load an earlier save and go around. As I understand it, LATER you'll have enough life and weaponry that you can take them.

The hardest part for me is that it seems like random loot is EXTREMELY nerfed on Survival. I'm sure I'll get a lot of "random is random," but I have four fusion cores that I've found or bought from Vendors in the same time frame that I had 21 on my Normal character, not to mention a huge shortage of uncommon and rare crafting mats, ammunition and caps. That and the dramatically increased life that enemies have.

You'll also notice on Survival that where YOU are punished with extremely slow heal rates (stimpacks are just as slow as food for some reason) enemies are NOT punished, and if a raider stims they will heal at the same fast rate as normal. Legendaries of course still heal to full after mutating. Since enemies have like 4 times the life as before, this can be excruciating.

There also seems to be an issue with the "Legendary" appearance generator, since increased difficulty is supposed to increase the number of legendaries that appear, and so far there doesn't seem to be any difference between Normal and Survivalist difficulty.

-Get creative with explosives. Guesstimate where enemies will go or funnel through during a fire fight and set up 1-3 mines. You should find a lot of mines in your travels.

-Get ammo scavenging perks early on.

-Invest into your settlement. You should have local leader maxed out as soon as it's available and start establishing shops.

-I prefer automatic guns for survival. If you're lucky enough to find an auto weapon with bleed on it, use it. Currently, the bleed effect is applied per bullet so you can have stacking instances of bleed on a single target. Mirelurk queens go down in < 3 seconds. Otherwise, get Spray n Pray from that tweaked out trader and use that. Pretty much comes maxed out with all the latest and greatest mods.

(People are probably split on the semi-auto/full-auto debate, but in my experience I haven't found either to be better than the other. I still had ammo issues regardless of which type of gun I was using.)

-Make drugs. Sell drugs. Become Pablo Escobar of the Commonwealth. You can produce enough Jet to clean out every vendor in the game. It's hilarious waltzing into the Drumlin Diner and selling Trudy a surplus of drugs.

-Invest into and use sneak.

Don't sell the drugs. Use them. Combine your psycho and your jet and use them, it's an incredibly OP combination.

Caps don't matter anyway, being 90% self-sufficient is completely possible.