Thanks guys, I was a bit worried by bugs etc, and tbh I've never really had many friends so playing with others is a no go, more than happy by myself in games.
Oh, it's still very buggy. Which is a
huge improvement over what it was. After 19 patches, it's stable enough to expect to be able to usually play a session without being kicked from the server.
It would probably be a good idea for you to make sure you have pacifist mode on. That's supposed to prevent all PvP outside of the battle royale mode and seems to (surprisingly) almost entirely work. You can't do any damage from shooting someone (even by mistake) with pacifist mode on and outside of battle royale mode other players can't do you any damage until after you have damaged them. So pacifist mode is supposed to completely prevent all PvP and it almost completely works. Only radiation damage isn't covered by it.
The usual etiquette for FO76 player interactions is to ignore each other or possibly wave a greeting with the emote animation ingame. Hardly anyone plays it as a multiplayer game because it's crap as one and hardly anyone wanted a MP Fallout anyway. The only other emotes I use are the "I'm offering you a present" emote I got from the atomic shop, which I use when I happen to encounter a newbie near my camp and craft some equipment for them and the "thumbs up" emote for when a few people turn up for a public event I'm doing and we complete the event. The only other usual FO76 etiquette is in killing legendary mobs - if someone else is around, it's generally considered polite to allow them to do some damage to the legendary mob so you can both loot the corpse and get a legendary item.
I forgot the most useful mod in my earlier post - perk loadout manager. Skills and perks are implemented as playing cards. You can have every card in the pack, but you can only have a very limited amount in play simultaneously and many are highly situational. So you will be swapping cards back and forth a lot. Perk loadout manager allows you to do it in user-defined groups rather than one at a time. So, for example, I have one set of cards for general play, one set for selling stuff, one set for crafting and repair and one set for scrapping stuff. The mod is deliberately restrained so it doesn't provide a serious combat advantage (not that it matters any more as mods aren't allowed in the PvP mode anyway) and shouldn't count as cheating. You still have to bring up your pipboy, open the perks/skills screen, select a loadout, close it. But it's a huge convenience for situational and out of combat stuff, like selling to vendors and crafting items. Bethesda have promised to implement a perk loadout manager into the vanilla game, but why wait when you can mod one in now and the mod will probably be better than whatever Bethesda eventually come up with anyway.
I was looking for some pics of my old camp and I found my first post about it. I think it serves as a summary of what building is like in FO76, even if you overlook the crippling lack of building budget:
**** Official Fallout 76 Thread ****
A small conversation about building in FO76 followed and I posted some photos of the penultimate version of my fancy camp a few posts later. I managed to wrestle the game into allowing me to wall off the doorway in the wall and I replaced the turrets with missile turrets (
far more powerful) and scrapping the farm allowed me to put player vending machines at the side when they were released in a later patch, but it was just too much bother contending with the crappy building and the ludicrously small building budget. My camp now is a simple shed on the road just outside Flatwood, where I sell hundreds of plans for 50 caps each and give away water, scrap, some of every plantable crop and complete workshop use in safety as a service to other players.