Some of Fallout 4’s most common glitches, bugs, and tricks

As with most Bethesda games, Fallout 4 has it’s own share of glitches and bugs. Some may be beneficial, some may be annoying or even detrimental to your gameplay experience, and some may be good for a laugh or two. Fortunately, most of the more common bugs encountered in this latest entry in the Fallout series are proving to be helpful more than anything else.

Things that range from “time to reload that save from hours ago” to “that’s mildly inconvenient”

• Some companions will always smoke a cigarette when not in combat or traveling. In other words, their idle animation will almost always consist of them smoking, and the cigarette may clip to their hand when they aren’t smoking.
• The game may not recognize that you defended a settlement from an attack (especially attacks by the Institute, where they usually abduct a settler and replace them with a synth), despite the settlers having the correct dialogue and interactions. Should you try and leave the settlement, the game will consider the settlement to be razed, and all the food, power, water producing, and defensive items will be destroyed.
• Some settlements, especially Covenant, don’t properly transition the ownership of any items in the settlement to you once you take it over. This means that any defensive turrets already in place will not contribute towards your settlement’s defensive rating, and will fire upon any turrets that you place. Furthermore, picking up items that you didn’t place will be considered stealing, and will turn your settlers against you.

Things that range from “this saves a lot of time” to “this can be game breaking if I invest a lot of time to it”

• Areas that have mines in them will not immediately respawn the mines if you set them off and reload a save that occurred in that area (a fancy way of saying you stepped on a mine and got blown to pieces).
• Dropping things like guns in a settlement and then picking them back up will essentially trick the game into thinking that you removed an actual building item, thus letting you place more items than you normally would. Of course, this also leaves you at risk of overbuilding a settlement and placing more items than your console or PC can handle.
• You can get infinite XP (albeit at an agonizingly slow rate) by finding a locked safe that is linked to a computer and locking and re-picking the lock over and over again.
• You can essentially buy everything from a vendor for free by exploiting the ability to sell ammo. Carrying your ill-gotten (and questionably useful) goods is a whole other story.
• You can force your companions to bypass their normal carry weight by dropping an item and commanding them to pick it back up.

Something that isn’t a bug but is interesting nonetheless

You can play any of the minigames (such as Atomic Command or Zeta Invaders) found in Fallout 4 on your mobile device. Simply find the corresponding RobCo Fun magazine in the game, link your game to the Pip-Boy app, and you can play the minigames anywhere you go, even if you aren’t connected to the game or the internet.