Fallout 4 Survival Mode Details Revealed
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Fallout 4 Survival Mode Details Revealed

Bethesda has confirmed via Twitter that the Fallout 4 Survival Mode info gleaned from a reddit user scanning the game’s files are in fact legitimate. While not finalized, Bethesda has said it’s an early look at what to expect from the mode when Bethesda ultimately dispenses it to the wasteland masses.

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The in-game text reads:

Is the struggle of this world merely a pleasant game for you? Do you long for a more brutal take on a life lived post apocalypse? If you answered “Yes and yes!”, then Survival difficulty is for you! Survival upends many of the rules of life in the Commonwealth for maximum challenge.

Here is a list of the changes that the mode will trigger:

Fallout 4 Survival Mode Details

Saving

  • Manual and quicksaving are disabled. To save your game, you’ll need to find a bed and sleep for at least an hour.

Combat

  • Combat is more lethal for everyone. You now deal, but also take, more damage. You can increase the damage you deal even further with “Adrenaline” (see below).

Fast Travel

  • Fast Travel is disabled. If you wish to be somewhere, you’ll have to physically travel there.

Weighted Ammo

  • Bullets and shells now all have a small amount of weight, which varies by caliber. Heavier items such as fusion cores, rockets, and mini-nukes can really drag you down.

Compass

  • Be sure to keep your eyes peeled, as enemies will no longer appear on your compass. As well, the distance at which locations of interest will appear has been significantly shortened.

Adrenaline

  • Survival automatically grants the Adrenaline perk, which provides a bonus to your damage output. Unlike other perks, the only way to increase your rank of the Adrenaline perk is by getting kills (hostile or otherwise). The higher your Adrenaline rank, the higher the damage bonus. Sleeping for more than an hour, however, will cause your Adrenaline rank to lower. You can check your current Adrenaline rank at any time in the Perks section on the Stat tab in your Pip-Boy.

Wellness

  • You’ll find it difficult to survive without taking proper care of yourself. You must stay hydrated, fed, and rested to remain combat-ready. Going for extended periods of time without food, water, or sleep will begin to adversely affect your health, hurting your SPECIAL stats, adding to your Fatigue (see “Fatigue” below), lowering your immunity (see “Sickness” below), and eventually even dealing physical damage to you.

Fatigue

  • Fatigue works like radiation but affects your Action Points (AP) rather than your Hit Points (HP). The more Fatigue you’ve built up, the less AP you’ll have for other actions. The amount of Fatigue you’ve accumulated is displayed in red on your AP bar.

Sickness

  • A comprised immune system and a few questionable decisions can end up getting you killed. Eating uncooked meat, drinking unpurified water, taking damage from disease-ridden sources, such as ghouls and bugs, or using harmful Chems all put your body at increased risk for various ill effects. When you are afflicted with an illness, a message will appear onscreen. You can view specifics about your current illnesses by navigating to the Status section on your Pip-Boy’s Data tab and pressing [RShoulder] to view your active effects.

Antibiotics

  • Antibiotics, which can be crafted at Chem Stations or purchased from doctors, heal the various effects of sickness.

Bed Types

  • The type of bed you’re sleeping in determines the length of time you are able to stay asleep. A sleeping bag will save your game and may help save your life when you’re desperate, but it will never allow for a full night’s rest and the benefits that come with it.

Crippled Limbs

  • Crippled limbs will no longer auto-heal after combat and will remain crippled until healed by a Stimpak.

Carry Weight

  • Exceeding your carry weight reduces your Endurance and Agility stats and periodically damages your legs and health. Think of your back!

Companions

  • Companions will no longer automatically get back up if downed during combat and will return home if abandoned without being healed.

Enemy and Loot Repopulation

  • Locations you’ve cleared will now repopulate enemies and loot at a significantly slower rate.

fallout dlc

This game isn’t done yet, so if you’ve tired of the same ol’ same ol’ a revamped Survival Mode may give you the challenge you’re looking for. Coupled with the upcoming string of new DLC and Fallout 4 is looking like it will be getting refreshed during the course of the year. As always, we’ll continue to bring you all the latest and greatest.


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20 responses to “Fallout 4 Survival Mode Details Revealed”


  1. I wish Beth would take a page from the playbook for that game “Theif”. When choosing difficulty in that game they basically threw a bunch of options for you to toggle on or off, and collectively they formed a sort of difficulty score. If you chose enough modifiers to go over 700, then you were on their true “hardest” mode (and eligible for trophies/cheevos). But you could turn off things you felt would be too brutalizing, and find middle ground.

    Hardcore Fallout would be perfect for this. You could turn on ammo weight, the need to eat and sleep, etc, but leave fast travel on if you really wanted to be able to do this.

  2. Fast travel is a cancer, at least the way it’s been done lately, with being able to go anywhere at anytine. Morrowind got it right, as stated above. Anyway, with it, I feel the game becomes rather monotonous. Teleport from A to B, to C, then back to A, then to D, and so on and so forth . I spent almost as much time looking at loading screens because of fast travel than I did actually playing the game. I’ve missed out on many magnificent sights and encounters because of it I’m sure. That’s why I always download a mod to remove it from the game, when possible. Glad that I no longer have to.

  3. >

    The only bad thing here is not being able to fast travel. I just want it exactly how New Vegas did it. It was perfect in that game for me. Not soul crushingly hard but made things difficult enough to play the game differently. There was micromanaging here and there but not to the tedium of not being able to fast travel.

  4. I did like how Morrowind handled fast travel… Towns with transports. No map points to go to then warp right to, just a massive silt strider.

    Although I spent 99% of my time in Morrowind lost as hell, it was far more enjoyable than having a good map with any location on it.

  5. > The TL;DR varsion is:

    Forcing the player to navigate the world as people in the world would forces devs to know how people would actually navigate the world, which means they actually have to design the thing in at least a semi rational manner. While a few devs (ie Obsidian) do this anyways, in my experience most don’t (after all, when the player can teleport at will it’s a minor detail most players will neither notice nor care about.)

  6. I’m curious about the new damage parameters (doing more, but receiving more)…does this mean Survival mode has it’s own difficulty setting which excludes the others? Or will people be able to drop the difficulty to “easy” but still used the restrictions of Survival Mode?

  7. Seems like they’re just finding ways to make this game more of a chore.

    Meh I’ll pass. I haven’t even touched it since I beat it on it’s release week anyway.

  8. Fast travel is cancer. Specifically, the “teleport everywhere I’ve already been” version of fast travel is cancer. It actively harms world design.

    Health degrading over the distance wouldn’t do anything. HP is easily recovered and chances are you’d use more ammo walking there than you would fast traveling.

  9. Looks fun for the most part, especially with combat being more dangerous for the player I think it would really encourage the use of the V.AT.S. more often in the game. I’m really looking forward to trying this out when it finally comes about now.

    >

    This sounds a lot better than no fast travel at all, since it would simply add a downside to using fast travel and probably encourage use of it in a more strategic sense.

  10. >
    Except you can’t fast travel and these things have weight. You can make it a non-issue by lugging around a ton, but that’s weight you don’t have for ammo, loot, ect, which is going to make keeping supplied (ie buying ammo and sometimes scrap) really hard.

    Extraoplating from how it worked in NV, obviously.

  11. Funny thing is on this game, the water and food should be a non issue.. Considering you can literally make on giant supply settlement of you want for food and water, that’s really moot.

    If the additions are more interesting than simply eat drink sleep and walk everywhere then I have hope that this will make me want to return for another round to the commonwealth

  12. As long as it’s only the survival mode, it’s fine. Not like they are adding it to every difficulty

  13. >

    Yes, the anti-biotics is awesome, so is the new saving mechanism, how could I forget about them?
    I have issues (couldn’t find a better word) with HSD (Hunger, Sleeping deprivation, and Dehydration) for Fallout 4…

  14. What I’m wondering is why not keep fast travel and just institute a reasonable automatic degradation of health and ammo based on the distance fast traveled that would be in line with what you’d encounter during a normal walk.

  15. Finally, looks good. They should get rid of no fast travel, more than an annoyance than true survival fun. Gonna wait for the GOTY edition though.

  16. >

    Honestly I quite like all of those changes and I’ve wanted a more in-depth set of mechanics since New Vegas introduced its Hardcore mode.

    The idea of having to craft anti-biotics to combat sicknesses or simply endure them, having your hunger and thirst affect your AP, even stuff like the changes to saves that require you to sleep for a few hours to save and the need to provision before you leave a town sounds really cool to me.

  17. >

    Indeed. That means I cannot play the game, till I have a better rig. (There are alternate ways, so it’s quite fixable.)

  18. >

    At least they listened to people when they said they wanted a survival mode more like New Vegas. It really wasn’t much of a hassle in New Vegas to stay hydrated, fed, and rested, ava the meters didn’t fill very fast. Now that you have a settlement that can have food and water generated by the thousands, you don’t have to gather stuff from the wild as much, or rely on looting. Having a good settlement will almost trivialize the meters.

    They should also reduce the amount of carry weight strength grants, and make the meters rise fast enough that you need to eat 3 times a game day, sleep at least 4 hours per day, and drink water every few hours. Maybe add a bedroll item too.

    I don’t really like that they took out fast travel, but I’ll give it a shot.

  19. Very Good: Carrying beyond weight limit cripples legs
    Good: Ammunition have weight
    Neutral: The new ‘Adrenaline’ feature.
    Bad: Hunger, Sleeping deprivation, and Dehydration
    Very Bad: No fast travelling

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