Hacking, along with lockpicking, is a great way to take advantage of the world in Fallout 4. This skill can be used to open doors, gain access to stashes, control enemy defense systems, and much more

There are 4 difficulty levels of hacking in Fallout 4 which are Novice, Advanced, Expert, and Master. You can hack Novice terminals right from the start of the game. To unlock access to the more complicated terminals, you will need an intelligence of at least 4.

There are 4 ranks to the Hacker skill. Rank 1, which can be accessed at any level, allows you to hack advanced locks. At level 9, you will be able to move to rank 2 and hack expert terminals. Rank 3, which becomes available at level 21, will grant you access to Master terminals. Rank 4 will give you unlimited hacking attempts although, as you’ll see below, I do not think this rank is necessary.

Once you find a terminal that is locked, you will have to activate it to initiate the hacking minigame. You will see a list of words with random characters in between. One of the words will be the correct password. The hacking minigame is essentially a process of elimination. When you select a word, it will tell you how many letters in that word line up with the correct word. You only have 4 chances to select the correct one, so you will have to figure it out.

Step-By-Step Guide

Before you begin searching for words, you can eliminate some incorrect choices. Look through line by line for any group of characters encapsulated by {…} (…) or […]. If you select one of these groups, an incorrect choice, or a “dud”, will be removed from the screen. Above, you’ll see an example using { } symbols. They must be the same symbol, facing each other, and all on one line of text.

Also, if you see one with , you can select it to reset your tries back to 4.

Start off by selecting any random word. In this case, it was “looks”. At the bottom right of the screen, it tells us “Entry Denied” with a likeness of 1. That means that 1 letter in “looks” matches up with the correct word.

Now, we need to search for the next word that has 1, and only 1, letter in common with “looks”. In this case, it was “swords” sharing the O in the center of each word. Once again, it has a likeness of 1. This could mean that O is in the center of the correct word, or it could mean that each word has a different letter that is in the correct word.

Now, we search for the next word that includes 1 letter in common with both “looks” and “sword”. The next word was along, sharing the O in the center with both “looks” and “sword”. This time we got a likeness of 0. This means that O is not in the center of the correct word and that the correct word includes a different letter in common with both looks and sword. This also mean that the password cannot have any letters in common with along.

Looking through the rest of the words, the only word that could be the password is “MOVED”. It has no letters in the same placement as “along”. The second O in “looks” lines up with the O in “moved”. The D in “sword” lines up the D in “moved”.

Here’s a little chart to better illustrate the process of elimination.

l(O)oks

swor(D)

along

m(O)ve(D)

Now, you can access the terminal with whatever information or loot you were after. The terminal used in this example was a Novice difficulty terminal. The only difference from Novice to Master is the number of characters in each word.

The reason I didn’t recommend getting rank 4 of the Hacker perk is because at any point you can exit the terminal and re-enter it. This will reset the word selection. So, if you only have 1 try left, and you’re not sure if you’ll get the answer right, you can simply exit and re-enter to start over. You may find the perk convenient, but it is not a necessity.