Fallout 4: the Sole Survivor and Dogmeat looking at each other.
Image via Bethesda/Steam.

Fallout 4 Best starting stats for Survival build

How to avoid getting wasted on the Wasteland.

While Fallout 4 is far from the most beloved entry in the series, it breathed fresh and non-radioactive air into the series through Survival Mode. That’s the name they gave to a difficulty setting that’s not just the hardest possible in this game, but also one that brings extra setbacks. The Wasteland is never kind to visitors, but Survival Mode can make it an utter nightmare, so let’s look at how to make surviving it a possibility.

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Optimal stats for Survival Mode in Fallout 4

The most important stats for survival mode are Strength and Endurance, with Intelligence taking a distant third place. You can neglect pretty much every other stat to get the two main ones as high as possible. That’s because, in this mode, nothing beats the ability to carry stuff, take damage, and heal up. A good starting comp would look something like:

  • Strength: 9
  • Perception: 1
  • Endurance: 10
  • Charisma: 2
  • Intelligence: 4
  • Agility: 1
  • Luck: 1

How to play Fallout 4 in Survival Mode

While you can go back to a regular difficulty mode at any moment of your fearless playthrough, Survival Mode is something you can only activate before the game starts. Once you quit, there’s no going back to it on that save file. The game allows your character to keep their life after resigning Survival difficulty, but not their survivalist pride.

What’s different in Survival Mode

On top of making everything harder overall, Survival Mode essentially removes many quality-of-life aspects of the base game. It doesn’t feature manual or regular autosaves. The only way to save is by resting. The game saves when you exit, but the save is deleted as soon as you load back in.

Ammunition has weight, meaning that it can get you over-encumbered, which will cause you to lose stats and take damage. Lastly, you cannot make use of the console to cheat.

You can Play Fallout 4 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and on PC. You can watch the Fallout TV series on Amazon Prime.


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Tiago is a freelancer who used to write about video games, cults, and video game cults. He now writes for Destructoid in an attempt to find himself on the winning side when the robot uprising comes.