Thanks
@Semple
Just done the missing child quest in the water park, the one with robot Annie. Nice reward for me, I needed a new gun.
Struggling with the weight limit, but reading above everyone is.
Level 10 now and just plodding along, the quests seem to be coming thick and fast.
It plays like an early access game, but for £15 you can easily get a lot of game for your money.
Struggling for ammo and stimpacks though, Ammo especially.
You're using a fully automatic weapon with low damage per shot. You're not going to be able to sustain that. By the way, the bonus damage on that gun doesn't stack so if you use it on full auto it's effectively a normal 10mm SMG. Only the first bullet will do extra fire damage until the 10s (or however long the fire damage takes - I think it's 10s) is up.
At L10 I would suggest using a pipe revolver rifle for long range and a pump action shotgun for short range. Both have relatively high damage per shot, so you'll be using less ammo and you'll be spreading the use over 2 types of ammo. You'll need to scrap lots of pipe revolver pistols to get the mods to turn one into a pipe revolver rifle with a hardened receiver and a scope, but if you do that you'll have a rifle with the range and damage of a hunting rifle but a faster rate of fire and less recoil. If anything gets closer you can switch to the shotgun. Some people use the double barreled shotgun as it does more damage per shot, but it needs to be reloaded every 2 shots and the reloading takes a long time. I think the pump action is a better trade-off between damage per shot, fire rate and time spent reloading.
If you learn a weapon's crafting plan (by scrapping enough of them or by getting lucky with plan finds) you can craft one at higher levels - after starting to craft it you'll get a menu with the available levels. Higher levels require more materials but do more damage. Very useful, especially with pipe weapons because they increase frequently with player level (1,5,10,15,20 IIRC).
Whatever weapon you use, modding is key. I pick up and scrap every weapon, even ones I never expect to use, in order to learn as many mods as possible.
Melee is also good, but you need to be able to survive getting that close and staying that close.
So armour is also key. Power armour is the end goal as it's vastly superior to unpowered armour, but it's not really practical below L25 when you can use T45. Raider power armour can be used at L15, but it's quite rare and a bit meh. I would suggest picking up a power armour chassis or 3 ASAP and collecting pieces as you come across them so you'll have full sets ready for when you can use them. The process is this:
1) Transfer all pieces from the chassis to your inventory.
2) Enter the empty chassis (which doesn't have a level requirement).
3) Exit the chassis, which is now marked as being yours.
4) Transfer the pieces back onto the chassis.
5) Wait 2 minutes and the chassis
with the pieces on it will be automatically transferred to your inventory. It weighs a total of 10. You can put it in your stash and wait until you have levelled enough to use it.
Any time you like, you can take it out, select it in your inventory to deploy it to the world, transfer extra parts to it and wait for it to be returned to you inventory again.
By the time I hit L25 I had an almost complete set of T45, most of a set of T51 and an almost complete set of T60.
But before L25 I think the key is to pick up and scrap every bit of leather and metal armour you can find in order to learn the plans for the armour pieces and mods for them. Even without any armorer perks you can make some pretty decent armour that way. Mix and match leather and metal to get the best combo of ballistic and energy resistance. You might be lucky and get a useful low level legendary armour piece as a quest reward, too.
I'd also suggest building yourself a camp and placing it carefully. Put it somewhere off the beaten track and not near a monster spawn point and you'll be fine. A couple of turrets for monsters, perhaps. Nothing you can really do against malicious players (hence putting it somewhere off the beaten track). Punji board traps are cheap to make and use hardly any building budget, so feel free to strew dozens of those around. That'll deal with many monsters even without turrets. It's useful to have a base where you're safe, where you can reduce the amount you spend on fast travel (it's free to your camp, so if it's closer to your destination going to your camp first will reduce the total cost), where you can have all the workstations conveniently in one place, where you can grow food to make soups (+food, +water and +hp all in one) and make adhesive (tato+mutfruit+corn+purified water+cooking = starch = adhesive).
For ammo, even if you're not using full auto, crafting your own is pretty much essential. You'll need a chemisty workbench and a tinkerer's workbench. The chemistry workbench to make gunpowder from cotton and acid (which would be gun cotton, not gunpowder, but never mind). The tinkerer's workbench to make ammo from gunpowder, lead, steel and possibly plastic (for shotgun shells). Tagging at least lead for searching is extremely useful...
Whaaaaaaat???? How'd you do that? That would be very useful, as I have no idea what junk turns into aluminium.
You can do it in three ways:
1) Try to craft something you are lacking materials for. At the bottom of the screen you'll see a list of keys, one of which will be labelled "Tag for search". Press that key and whatever materials you're lacking for that particular crafting will be tagged for search. From then on, any junk item you see the name of will show a magnifying glass icon if scrapping it would provide any of that material. It doesn't work for scrappable items other than junk (e.g. weapons), but junk is the category that really matters for this.
2) Put some of the material in your inventory, go to the junk tab, highlight the material and press that "tag for search key"
3) Put unscrapped junk in your inventory, go to the junk tab, press the key labelled "component view" and that shows you which materials are in the junk items you have in your inventory. Tag for search the same way as in (2).
I assume you're using an auto of some kind if you're running out of ammo? I'm using a .308 rifle and a shotgun mostly, and having no ammo issues at all. And they both drop most things in one or two hits.
Ammo becomes a bit of an issue again later, in my experience. I'm now using a combat rifle and combat shotgun, but when I'm up against L30+ mobs it takes a lot more than one hit from a combat rifle to drop them. A pack of scorched or supermutants can take >100 rounds quite easily. I used ~400 taking on a L62 4 star legendary glowing death scorpion yesterday, plus ~100 shotgun shells. But apart from that I'm OK for ammo because I do a lot of scavenging. Lead's the bottleneck, but it's not too bad.
I may have hit a bit of a game breaking bug. Found my first power armour just now, got in it - and it doesn't show in the 'apparel' bit of my inventory. So I don't think there's any way to get out of it again. Unless I'm missing something. Will try again later when I have some more time to play.
You're missing something. In the usual Bethesda way, it's not obvious and not explained.
To get out of power armour, you hold (for a couple of seconds) the same key you used to get into it. I can tell you that the default is "E" on PC, but use whatever you used to get in it.
The power armour will then be deployed in the gameworld in front of you. If you're pointing at it, you'll see a list of options. Enter, transfer and collect IIRC. Collect it to transfer the power armour to your inventory. If you wait ~2 mins it will automatically be transferred to your inventory anyway. In your inventory it will show only as a chassis, weight of 10, in your apparel tab. Don't worry - whatever pieces were on it are still there, as is the fusion core inserted in it. In effect, the chassis functions as a container. To get back in, select the chassis in your apparel tab and an outline of the armour will appear in front of you with a list of options. One of them deploys the power armour. IIRC it's labelled "Accept". On PC it's the same button you use to enter and exit power armour. Probably the same on a console, but consistency and sensible UI choices aren't Bethesda's strong points.
about 6 hours ago I said to myself I will play 10 more mins then call it a day & do real world stuff 
then it started to rain really heavy here in London 
& over 6 hours later I am still at it 
and so is the rain!
and can't build a tinker station to craft ammo as I don't have the plans...
