Heavy survivor armor
Survivor helmet
100% coverage armored boots and gloves
A tiny gun, preferably accurized pistol
Sewing kit, soldering iron, all drugs that don’t take space
Tiny amount of food, there’s enough in houses. A bottle of atomic coffee in case of tiredness.
By early midgame, I start using fists or unarmed weapons rather than huge axes and nodachis, because by then I can punch hulks to death just fine.
My very early game loadout is similar, but I will as soon as I have food for a few days, a few tools, a few books, and at least a temporary base, I’ll switch to a ranged build. I tend to find that going with a primarily melee loadout (even a throwing-focused one) is too risky until you get some better armor (some flavor of survivor.) YMMV, of course.
Which type of ranged build I switch to depends on what I’ve found. If I have very little in the way of tools/skill books, I’ll go to an archery build. You’ll need to grind up your archery skill before it’s even remotely useful, but it is worth it. Even if you’re stuck in a very resource-poor portion of town with no skill books and no hacksaw, if you can work up to a longbow and heavy wooden arrows you’re in pretty good shape. If you have a hacksaw and can find a certain skill book or two, you can rock a reflex recurve bow with metal arrows, which are pretty formidable.
However, if I’ve found a wrench, a hacksaw, a welder, and a copy of Under the Hood, I will go in a different direction. See, once you have Mechanics at 2, you can disassemble cars to train mechanics up further. Once you get to a fairly high level in your Mechanics and Fabrication skills, there are some very nice weapons that you can craft with infinitely craftable ammunition. This means that you can train up your rifle (and handgun) skills a little before heading out to use them in actual combat. Moreover, a lot of the fancy end-game weapons use the rifle skill, so it’s nice if you’ve been practicing for a while by the time you find them.
By midgame I’ll sometimes switch back to a melee loadout just to boost my various melee skills. (Of course, this is pointless if you play with normal skill rust. I usually go with IntCap.) As Coolthulhu mentioned, once you get good armor with 100% coverage, your loadout against garden-variety Z’s doesn’t matter as much.