Section 3 – Recommended Quests

These quests I recommend doing before you start getting really far into your build.

1.  Those!  Get the Ant Might Perk (or Ant Sight if you gimped Perception instead of Str).

2. Big Trouble in Big Town.  Save the town, Heal Time Bomb, then Get the lucky 8 ball.

3. Oasis.  Pass the speech check, kill harold (without fire) and get Yew’s Bear Charm.  You can drop it as soon as you get it (I sat mine up in the chair in my corner, it plays chess with one of my lawn gnomes). But it adds 10 points to your speech (just like a bobblehead.)

4.  Covert Ops (requires Operation Anchorage).  This perk adds 3 points to Science, small guns, and Lockpick.

Section 4 – The Importance of Bobbleheads and skills explained.

DO NOT GET ANY STAT BOBBLEHEADS EXCEPT FOR INTELLIGENCE. The stat bobbleheads raise your stats by 1, and if you get the bobblehead before the almost perfect perk, you will not get any stats to 10.  You can get the intelligence bobblehead, because your intelligence should be 9 (unless you like working harder) and the perk does not lower any stats.

Getting all the skill bobbleheads will kick up the said skill by 10 points.  So lets do some Math Shall we.  There are 1300 Points worth of skills in the game.
You will level 26 times with 26 Levels at 23 points gives you 598 (10 Int + Educated). Add 40 for leveling from 2 to 3 and 3 to 4, and 19 for leveling 1 to 2, and we get 657.  When we get our stats to level 10, the skills that the stat affects will be a base of 27 points per skill. 27*13=351. Each Bobblehead will give you 130 more points.  2 useful perks add to skills (silent running, Cyborg, my build used both of these).  3 tag skills at the beginning of the game = 45.  The Covert Ops perk from the Op Anchorage = 9.  Add Yews Bear Charm for another 10.  This total 1202 (1222 if you got both of those perks up there). This will get all your skills to about 92 or and even 94 points respectivly (if you get silent running and Cyborg).  This means you need to find 3 books for each skill (with the comprehension perk, 6 without) to top them out to 100 (you won’t notice it until you get almost perfect which will give you 9 in all stats, and then get the remaining 6 stat bobbleheads).

As you can see by the math, if you choose to not get the educated perk early on, thats 78 points (39 more books you have to read, 78 without comprehension perk).  If you did not get the comprehension perk then you need to read twice as many books. Gimping your intelligence costs you 30 points (15 books or 30 without comprehension) per int stat you dont add 1 to.  There is approximatelly 325 books in the game (about 25 for each skill).  If you want to go find more of them than necessary be my guest.  If you gimp int below 9, then DO NOT GET THE INT BOBBLEHEAD until you get almost perfect (or until you intense train Int to 9).  Your choice.

So when you start your char, Go get int bobblehead first (you will level to 2 when you get out of the vault, just don’t do anything else, go straight to rivit city). Then go get your SKILL (NOT STAT) bobbleaheads.  Then do the skill raising quests.  As you level make sure your skills will reach the perk requirements of what you want.  Raise your skills semi-Evenly.  I like to add them in groups of 10 after all my perk-skill requirements are met until they are all the same.  At 80 (Assuming you got all the skill bobbleheads and yews bear charm, covert ops, kept silent running and cyborg in mind (+10 sneak and energy weapons, respectivly), then calculate what adding stats will do to certain skills.  The equation is 2+ (stat*2)+(luck/2 rounded up). So a strengh of 5 and luck of 5 yields a meelee weapons skill of 15.  A str of 10 and luck of 10 yields meelee weapons skill of 27.  When you get almost perfect and then get the remaining bobbleheads, then it will be like your skills started out at 27 a piece.  Keep that in mind as you level.

Stat Equation: 2+(Stat*2)+(Luck/2 rounded up) (2.5 points becomes 3 points etc)
Stat: Skill Affected
Strength: Melee Weapons 
Perception: Energy Weapons, Explosives, Lockpick 
Endurance: Big Guns, Unarmed
Charisma: Barter, Speech 
Intelligence: Medicine, Repair, Science.  Keep in mind when you level that these skills will only go up 2 or 3 points when your luck tops out, as intelligence should already be topped out.
Agility: Small Guns, Sneak 
Luck: Affects Everything.  At level 10 it adds 5 points to everything.

Adding 1 point to a stat will add 2 points to each skill it affects.  Luck adds half the value rounded up.  1-2 L = 1 Skill point in all of them. 3-4 = 2, 5-6 = 3, 7-8=4, and 9-10 = 5.

Understand stats now?  Good.  Remember, keep some slightly lower than others as when you up the stats, the skills associated will raise as well.  If you don’t want to get the Comprehension perk, make sure your lowest skill is 75 or more so you can collect the 25 books necessary to get it to 100.  if you don’t want to get the educated perk, you are going to be out 78 points (39 books, 78 without comprehension).  If you don’t get either you can still top everything out, you just have to search for a lot more books.

NOTE: You cannot get the Energy weapons bobblehead until you get to raven rock as part of the main quest.  I just did without and did my math to reflect that so I could do those quests from a level 30 perspective.  I topped out energy weapons with books anyways without getting the bobblehead.  If you want to do the main quest to get it early that is your decision.

Next: Section 5 – Books and Section 6 – Summary