Are you tired of clicking random words on fallout’s computers? well, let’s make hacking easier and a lot faster. There are some secrets and tricks you will want to know.
How much is Hacking useful and important?
Usefulness?
You can find various terminals while wandering through Washington D.C. in Fallout 3, these usually open doors/safes or even better, you can get some lore out of them. Without knowing how to hack properly you would be missing out on some of the best loot, the best weapons, the most fun secrets, and a big piece of the story, and trust me, vault backstories are really interesting.
Is it really THAT important?
Well, yes and no, it’s not required to beat the game, but it sure makes it easier, and if you care about lore this is a skill you’ll want to max out.
How do I hack?
When you interact with a terminal you will be greeted by a screen with random characters and words in it, the higher the difficulty of the terminal the more words there will be.
The Screen:
Now how do I do it?
It’s simple, when you click on a word on you will see on the low corner on the right how many letters are in the right place in the password, IT DOES NOT MEAN that if all the words have an A in their words it’s impossible to hack, it means that there is an A in the password, just not in the right place. It’s complicated to read but easy when you get the hang out of it. Trust me.
IN THIS CASE the password was “Sides” how did he figure it out? he first clicked “Lines” and the terminal told him that 3/5 words were right, but he didn’t know which ones, so he clicked a word that was very similar to it, “Likes” he could easily figure which were the right letters, see for youself.
L I N E S
L I K E S
So I E S were the right letters in the right place, going by exclusion the password was “Sides” maybe you would think that it could have been the L too but by inspecting the words there was no word that would meet the requirements if L was included.
How does the interface work?
Attempts: These will determine how many times you can click a word and see if it’s the correct password, don’t finish the attempts or it’s over, you will not be able to retry to hack the terminal, if you have 1 left attempt it’s best to reset the terminal by pressing the off button (big red one in the low right corner) this will reset the attempts too. IF you do run out of attempts the terminal will be locked, but don’t panic, you can try finding the password (in closets etc…) but it’s not always available or if you get the “Computer Whiz” perk you can retry to hack the computer again… just don’t screw up again or it’s over forever (unless you wanna use console commands).
The Words on screen: This is the big chunk of random characters and words that fill up the majority of the screen. In this block somewhere is the correct password, our job is to find out which one it is by process of elimination. There are also some special sections of the code that can either give you back a mistaken attempt or remove a password choice from the block completely, but we’ll see this later.
The… Thing that tells you how close you were to the solution.
This little part of the code tells you how close you were to the solution 4/12 letters for example, it will not tell you which of the letters are right, you gotta use your brain and figure it out.
The Power Button The red button on the bottom right of the screen exits you out of the terminal. It’s used to shut down the terminal (duh) when you don’t have enough attempts it will automatically throw you out. It’s best to shut down the terminal when you have 1 left attempt, because if you reach 0 the terminal will lock itself.
Tips and Tricks
Choosing the right word: when choosing the first-word search for similar words or words that end in “ING “ATION” “TION” and others that won’t come to mind now.
Go by elimination What I said in the “How do I do it” section, you should think when hacking, not click random words.
Secrets of the code
…this is where the guide gets juicy.
Hidden in the code block you may be able to find what I like to refer to as a “Bracket Trick.” A Bracket Trick is a collection of those random punctuation marks that appear between the words that are encased in a bracket of any kind. In the code block above, there is one hidden in there. Every terminal has a chance to produce bracket tricks, but not every terminal will have one. Some may even have multiple tricks. To tell if you have found a Bracket Trick all you have to do is hover the cursor over the opening bracket. If the entire thing lights up, congratulations, you found it. Click it and there are 2 possible outcomes.
(i took these last 7 lines of the guide from a note I used to keep on my desktop so somewhere out there on the internet credit to some guy).
Outcome 1 The computer will remove a word that was not the password.
Outcome 2: the computer will replenish your attempts to 4.
(Credit to Buzzard) If the duds have all been removed and a bracket is selected, the message “Entry Denied” will be displayed. (No more words to delete).
(Credit to Bort)
With regards to the bracket tricks, they can be applied to the following:
- <>
- []
- {}
- ()
Having multiple opening brackets on a line means that there are multiple tricks on that line.
Example: <34h<gfuihsd>
Conclusion
Thanks for reading my first guide, this hacking method also applies to Fallout new vegas and Fallout 4, even if i didn’t manage to find any “bracket tricks” in Fallout 4.
Original Link – Continuation of discussion
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