With diligence in finding skill books/recipes (all well-documented on this wikia) and a bit of reloading in Honest Hearts to generate all 8, you can max out all skills without any other special character effort.Ī character with Intelligence of 10 with Educated at level 4 and starting off with Skilled will be short only 408 skill points, not including skill points from initial character creation (which will yield at least 111: 45 from three Tag! skills and 22 from Repair/Medicine/Science, ignoring Luck). As a note, the base game contains 53 skill book Old World blues contains 16 skill books/recipes Dead Money also contains 12 and Honest Hearts can contain anywhere from 0 to 8, 0 to 2 per workbench (and may require a bit of saving and reloading before entering caves). Taking Comprehension at level 6 (and saving skill books until then) means that reading 89 skill books is enough to net you the remaining skill points (so long as you adapt your per-level skill points to the remaining skill books). Simply by taking Educated at level 4 leaves us with 356 skill points remaining to completely max out.

Just with these base stats, this is enough to get all but 6 skills completely maxed out (remaining 448 / 85, rounding up).

This reduces the amount of skill points you need to 1060 (1300 - (45 + 15 x 13)).įor 49 levels at average intelligence, you get 612 skill points (12.5 x 49). At level 1, you get 45 skill points for free (from your 3 Tag! skills), and an average character (5 in all SPECIAL stats) will have 15 as a base for all skills. Luck is fantastic as it increases your crit and thanks to the way armor is dealt with in this vs fallout 3 it will often more than double your damage output on a critical hit.Īt the base level, you need 1300 skill points for complete maximization (100 points for 13 skills). As far as the base stats go I just look at the perks I want and go from there, keep in mind you can pay to increase every stat by 1 point later on. There are something like 6 skill books for each skill in the dlc + original game which is 18-24 points for each skill, in your travels you will at least visit the locations of most of these books, whether you find them or not is another thing. You should not have any issue maxing out every skill to 100 by level 50 with int around 7ish or higher, I don't think educated or comprehension are needed but IIRC I usually get one or the other for lack of good alternatives. Survival skill increases the amount of health you get from food and the amount of hydration you get from water(you will get more health from food and drink than anywhere else unlike fallout 3 where you are in stimpak heaven), it is pretty useful imo but more of a quality of life thing if you want to be harsh about it.

New vegas hardcore mode