Hacking has been in the Fallout franchise for a while now. It was in Fallout 3, New Vegas and is in Fallout 4. It’s a staple part of surviving the harshest of radioactive wastelands. Hacking is, as you would probably expect, used for hacking the various terminals dotted around what is left of Boston. It is these terminals that are often responsible for activating defence robots, deactivating turrets, opening safes or just finding out information.
Although In Fallout 4, you can’t get locked out of a computer forever you do still have to wait for the terminal to reset before you can give it another go, and for the busy wasteland scavenger it’s seconds you may not want to waste.
So, how do I hack terminals in Fallout 4? Read on.
Hacking – The Basics
When you attempt to hack a terminal you will be shown a screen filled with letters and characters. Hidden among these characters are words. One of these words is the password you’ll need to hack the system. If you’re lucky and you choose the right one, the terminal will unlock. If not, then you will be given a likeness score. A likeness score tells you how many letters match in the word you chose match the password, and you’re tries goes down by one.
So for example, if you click on the word peal, and get a Likeness of 2, It would be better to choose bEAt that shares two letters than Pour or PEAr that share one and three letters respectively.
You have four goes to try to get the password before the system temporarily locks you out and you have to wait several seconds before you can try again, giving you a whole new set of words when you try again. The number of tries remaining are shown by squares at the top of the terminal screen.
Dud Removal and Try Reset
Hidden among all the characters and letters are brackets, if you find a matching pair of brackets ( (), [], {}, <>) on a row, regardless if there are any other characters in between and select it, one of two things will happen. Either you will have a dud password removed, or your number of tries will be reset, which ultimately gives you more goes to get it right.
I would suggest using three of your four tries trying to get the password, and if you need more chances after that, scan for and click on all the bracket pairs. There is normally no more than one try reset per terminal, and it’s still not guaranteed there’s that many, but this approach gives you a better chance of getting the password correct.
Hacking Takes Skill
”¦or to be more precise Hacking in Fallout 4 takes the right perks. Everyone starts off with the ability to hack novice level terminals, but if you want to hack Master Terminals then you better make sure you have enough points in the hacking perk, and you’ll have to get to level 21 before you can learn how to hack Master terminals. Putting an extra point in hacking at 33 removes the number of tries, and quite frankly is probably a bit of a waste of a perk point.
Stop! Hacking Time
Hacking freezes time. So long as you can get to the terminal, activate it and complete the sitting down animation, everything will stop. You could have 15 of the largest Super Mutant Brutes on your tail, but get to a terminal and it at least gives you some breathing room. If you’re lucky the terminal will give access to a defence robot or turret system which can certainly make things easier. Maybe not if you’re against 15 Super-Mutant brutes but you get the idea. Of course, everything will resume once you’ve done so it may not be a ‘Get out of Jail Free Card’ for you.
