I remember a long time ago seeing a post on reddit of someone doing something like this and ending up still being super strong late game, so I wanted to try something like this myself for fun to see how stong you can get with a super weak vanilla starting build.
The general set up is just to go 4 in all stats, choose regular survivor / evac shelter as the starting class and scenario, don’t pick ANY positive or negative starting perks, and leave all starting stats at zero. The game settings are pretty much vanilla too (no mods like PK rebalancing to make things harder, or stats through skills to make things easier, npcs are enabled as well as hordes).
Any general tips or thoughts for how to go about making this work? Obviously early game is going to be suuuuuuper hard with only 4 in all stats, so you will need to do something like drag zombies through a landfill or construction house with pits to get kills / loot. Late game will be hard too since at 4 int installing bionics and recruiting NPCs. If you get really lucky and get a doctor NPC then bionics are still in the question, but without robust genetics mutations would be tricky, and also low strength for power armor.
Anyway, what would be your strategy for running this scenario?
I’d probably just turtle and build up my skills and equipment as much as possible, with as little raiding as possible, and play more conservatively than I normally do until I can handle myself in combat. Which is what I already do. Honestly I don’t think it would be much different from a normal character, just use all the typical early-game tactics, pull smaller groups, rest more frequently between fights until you’ve got a working car and/or survivor armor, then it’s all downhill from there.
You can still recruit NPCs by doing jobs, you can install CBMs with NPC assistance, power armor isn’t necessary for a strong late-game character, and I am going to lose my mind if I see one more person imply that not starting with Robust Genetics holds you back in the mutation department. Robust Genetics can be gained safely from fish mutagen, Robust Genetics does literally nothing from early to mid-game and can be gained easily in late-game, it is a waste of character points.
Mhm, in hindsight it would probably have been better to say that early game would be super slow instead of super hard since you would have to be more careful and take more time to prepare.
Since a lot of people obsess about min-maxing their character builds (myself included) from the very beginning of the game I just really liked the idea of starting from no perks, stats or skills and still coming out with a good character. I’m sure there are tons of much much harder starts, but I thought this would be a nice one to go with as a first purposefully weak character start.
the trick would be that, and be lucky to start in a small city, and clear it with throwing rocks, that way you get a handful of resources to grind you other skills
It’s basically a character made for going down the alpha line, literally no draw backs to mutating and purging until you get the Prime stat bonuses. Alpha gets robust genetics too, though honestly I prefer making use of medical for that since it’s less resource heavy and has traits that play well with other lines.
“Wander spawns” are off by default, though. Since at least 0.C.
And I’m thinking very slow and isolated start as well. Although, surprisingly, even Perception this shitty isn’t bad enough to make mi-go and other early game character killers too big a threat for a careful player. I even found a wrench just now laying near some car so this scenario might go much better than seems at first glance.
UPD: And just easily (0 damage) ran away from a giant wasp lurking on a third “floor” of grain silo stairs. And in the next ~30 turns found an electric car with intact 4 wheels and engine, leaking but still not destroyed 2 (two!!!) storage batteries and yet a destroyed security system too. Fascinating run.
If I’m going to be that weak I’ll usually play an engineer/tech specialist or recruiter run.
The engineer eventually has a deathmobile or a bunch of bots and usually has some sort of innovative way to solve problems, although it’ll be hard-going until you find a way to raise your strength a little unless you make yourself a workaround to that.
The recruiter has a following of NPCs that do basically all of the work. Bonus RP points if they happen to be fishy and me squidy. You’ll eventually have a guy that butchers, a couple of people who are guards specifically, others are packmules, etc. Can’t do it yourself? Find someone who can and make them work for you!
Iirc, before, the specific serum/mutagen only gave you the mutations corresponding to its tree, now, the specific serum/mutagen gives more chances to get a mutation of that tree, so now you can get something bad from another mutation tree if you have bad luck.
Maybe you’ll get lucky and come across a friendly neighborhood bone seer to carry you through the early game. I’ve never tried how hard it is to recruit NPCs with 4 int, but the ones that are guaranteed after you do their task are nice.
Oh my god, about an hour into this playthrough I found a usb stick with hackpro. I was literally wanting this so badly for ~20 hours of the run with my 14 INT character and now I have it on my 4 all stats character…
Welp, got me some brains. muscle, and sharpshooters in my low stat no perk recruiter run.
Two mutants as the muscle, one bear and the other a cow who come with me on raids and building of basically anything, some NPC with crazy INT that I’ve set to cooking and chem making and electronic stuff, one bow user that I take with for hunting and one sniper guy I’ve set on guard duty that acts as an early warning for most things. One change of rules and he starts picking things off in the distance.
All I hope for is that the enemies don’t go for me first. I’m kinda squishy compared to my friends. I think they feel sorry for me and it’s the only reason I’ve gotten them to follow me.