The Nearly Ultimate Fallout Guide

Version 1.1
Written and coded by Per Jorner

The main thing you will find in FO1 is there is less of everything. Of course, it should come as no surprise that the first game in the series would be smaller than the sequel. Less equipment choices, less quests, a smaller world map, less perks, less NPC control (but also less bugs). Having cut your teeth on FO2, you may sometimes feel a little restricted in FO1. Still, the gameplay and story are just as strong, and except for a few control (interface) issues that were improved for FO2, you are going to love FO1 just as much. One aspect in which FO1 is not smaller than FO2 is in it's overall level of kickass-ness.
--Gimp00

Table of contents

1. Introduction

2. Preparations

3. Character design

4. Area walkthrough

   1. Vault 13

   2. Shady Sands

   3. Vault 15

   4. Raiders

   5. Junktown

   6. The Hub

   7. Necropolis

   8. The Glow

   9. Brotherhood

   10. Boneyard

   11. Military Base

   12. Cathedral

5. Endings

6. Encounters

7. NPCs

8. Stupid

9. Combat

10. Items

11. Addenda

Introduction

"I must digest this information."
--The Master

It began with the making of a very thorough Fallout 2 guide, and though I hadn't intended it from the start, I realized towards the end that I would be doing the same thing with Fallout. Although I did finish the latter game first, it was the sequel that captured my heart and prompted all this guide-writing. For this reason my perspective on Fallout in this guide will most often be that the sequel sets the standard and whatever is different in the original is the anomaly. This may be a little odd to veterans who lived a year or so with Fallout before the sequel was released, but that's the way it is for many players today, and in any case the popularity of Fallout 2 today far outstrips that of its predecessor.

At first I wasn't sure if this new undertaking would add as much to existing walkthroughs (the game having been out a bit longer than the sequel, though probably not significantly so any more), but I soon found that I would in fact be able to add another layer of research and detail to what was already written down. Sure enough there were guides encouraging people to tag Gambling and Barter, guides lacking substantial information about most anything, and guides written by self-styled experts containing vague, over-obvious or incorrect "expert" hints. (In fact I didn't find any guide that didn't contain various incorrect statements, many of which have obviously been passed on or even ripped verbatim from one walkthrough to another.)

I would recommend Steve Metzler's Steve's Guide to Fallout for being clear and well written (though lacking in detail); Chris Smith's Fallout FAQ for being nice and written as far back as 1997 (though as the title suggests it's not a walkthrough); and Omkar Namjoshi's Fallout Game Guide for being ambitious almost to the point of being a second manual (though it has a high redundancy factor). Thanks to the No Mutants Allowed administration and visitors for past and future help and for hosting the guides.

I've been playing the English v1.2 (UK) version of the game, using the Falche 1.20 character editor for experimentation and adding children with Skynet's Fallout 1 Children Patch. I've made good use of the script decompiler by TeamX and the Fallout 1 DAT-file extractor v1.2, and even better use of the script decompiler by Noid. I don't think there should be any significant difference from the US version except for the children thing.

Please note that spoilers abound. The first time you play a game like this, you really shouldn't be using any kind of walkthrough whatsoever. If you don't care enough about the unique experience of finding out and doing things on your own to abstain from spoiling it, you probably have better things to do with your time than play the game at all. So, in case this is your first game, don't read beyond Preparations. Of course you will anyway if you want to, so I don't know why I'm writing this.