Fire ants can’t shoot fire and turn at the same time. Wield a combat knife and do a Mexican hat dance around them while you poke them full of holes – you won’t take a single point of damage if you do it right.
Sounds like a good tactic. Probably worth mentioning to any noobs who are going to be drawn into this damn thing way sooner than they should. That kid spawns all over the place. Oh, and inform the public that shooting their antennae is worthless.
Yeah, the ants were really hard at that stage - I took that on way, way too early.
I just started this game last night- have a lot of fun, so far.
What mods should I pick up? Are there any that are considered to be indispensable?
If you ask me there’s too much specific and min/maxing advice in this thread for a Fallout 3 noob. First time through the game much of the fun is in discovering stuff, not in being told what order to do things.
Just take Small Guns, Repair, and whatever strikes your fancy as your most advanced skills to start. Bear slightly left coming out of the Vault and there’s a small safe in the second or third house on the left as you come into Springvale with a random gun and misc loot. Also some drugs in one of the mailboxes. Gives you a bit of loot to turn into better equipment. Now pop into Megaton, rig yourself out with the best-repaired firearm you can, and go clean out the Super Duper Mart, and you should be well on your way. Small Guns and Repair are overpowered enough that you don’t need to worry about developing your character perfectly - just go out and enjoy the exploration. Keep your gear repaired to the best level you can and have fun blowing the heads off the supermutants.
Ah…was just getting ready to reinstall the game myself and load up the DLC’s and start playing again.
Most of the suggestions I’d make have already been made, but I’d suggest getting several mods and loading them up before you start. The main mods I’d suggest are the two that allow you to repair your weapons and armor using scrap metal. You can find them here with some searching. There are a ton of good mods on this site, but I think those two and this, which allows you to manage mods easily.
It’s up to you, but personally I think that these mods make the game much more enjoyable. There are a ton more, as I said, that I previously loaded. If you really want something fun load one of the .50 cal mods, or the one that allows you to buy a Gauss Gun… 
-XT
Shooting off their antennae makes them attack any other ants in the area so if you’re trying to go one-on-one with 'em it is indeed worthless, unless you’ve laid a trap.
My method is to go in with some mines and a sniper rifle Arkansas has one in Minefield, but if you kill him he won’t be available for part of a later miniquest. and sneak around. The sniper rifle can take out a worker in one shot from quite a distance. Soldiers and Warriors take longer but if there are more than one, shoot an antennae and have them wear each other down. When they start getting too close, back up and drop a trail of mines. They wont trip more than one mine unless you get them to chase you by shooting off their antennae.
By the way: there’s no real need to deal with the ones aboveground if you can avoid them.
This site is also quite helpful I’ve found. You can do searches on quests, items, locations, etc, which is helpful if you are stuck on a specific quest or looking for a cool location or named item.
I haven’t used this, but here is a walk through of Fallout 3 and all the DLC’s on GameSpy.
-XT
I like the Victory (sniper laser) Rifle. 
I am also looking at mods. But the Nexus and Planet Fallout are quite terrible with their navigation. What are the mods you would suggest? I got one which use skills to give the accuracy for VATS (since I prefer a RPG-style game to FPS).
I have no idea why I am having so much difficulty; The first time I made into the mall I kept being killed by shotgun. Then the next time I restart I stumble into three Talon guys at the super market; then next I got killed by three Mole Rats! I think it must be because I have my Toughness at 4 instead of 5.
I restart the game and set the difficulty to easy and now it’s manageable. Avoided the mall till I am level 3 and it was easier (or is it because the dude with the shotgun didn’t turn up).
I tried visiting the Barn but never got the alien technology. I made do with a Chinese commando - his sword is quite good to begin play with!
/me gives CrazyChop 20 Nuka Cola Caps, then wanders away into the wastelands
Personally I would not recommend any of the mods that modify accuracy or the VATS system…but that’s just me. The mods I’d recommend are the ones I listed…the two mods that allow you to repair your armor and weapons using cross weapons and scrap metal. This isn’t the ones I used, but it might be interesting (and I guess it works with the new DLC expansions). I haven’t found the mods I used before (they would be a bit old by now), but if you do a search on repairs on the Nexus site you will see a ton of mods.
Yeah, it was one of my favorites and it’s pretty easy to get early on if you know where it is. My only issue with it when I played the game through the first time was keeping it repaired, as you don’t get a lot of sniper rifles to use to repair it with.
-XT
These are the mods I’m running which I would consider essential. I turn some of my mods on and off depending on what style of game I want to play, but these are the ones I always use:
Anchorage Gauss Rifle Fix – The original is extremely buggy. This mod removes the “explosion” effect, which fixes it so that it’s no more buggy than every other sniper rifle in the game (which all fire high and to the right of the crosshairs).
Homemade Wondermeat – A small thing, really, but saves you from having to go traipsing down into the area where the Wondermeat maker is located every time you want to make some. You’ll still have to do the miniquest to find it, it’s just more convenient.
Cross-Repair Armour and Cross-Repair Weapons – Allows you to repair weapons and armour with similar rather than identical makes. For example, you can repair a silenced 10mm with a regular 10mm, and you can repair a laser rifle with a laser pistol.
GNRFix – Fixes the INCREDIBLY annoying bug with GNR Radio where he keeps repeating the same news clip about Greyditch “going silent,” even after you’ve completed the quest.
Less Useless Karma Gifts – Normally if you keep high karma, the people of Megaton will start giving you alleged “gifts.” These “gifts” generally consist of, like two bullets, or an empty bottle. This mod makes the gifts rather nicer, as in, a handful of bullets, or the occasional scaveneged weapon or armour. Nothing outrageous, just enough to be pleasant rather than annoying.
Lil Critters – Adds some regular-sized scorpions, baby molerats, dog puppies, and so on. I find it adds a bit more realism and makes the wastes slightly less lethal for low-level characters.
Max Level 100 – Increases the maximum level cap to 100. If you have Broken Steel it already lifts the cap to 30 (and I’ve never bothered to play a character higher than 30 or so anyway), but if you don’t have Broken Steel, this is very useful.
Melee/Unarmed Pack – Can’t recommend this one highly enough. It adds a shitload of new perks, armour, and weapons designed to make playing a melee or unarmed character more fun. By adding melee perks which breaks down by blade or blugeoning, it also effectively creates more build types; blade characters are all swiftness and agility, while blugeoning characters are all muscle and raw damage.
Meresti Metro Station Entrance – Makes the entrance to Meresti Metro usable once you finish the quest there, so that you don’t need to run down a whole maze of tunnels to use the shop there.
No Auto Aim – As a sop to the borderline-retarded console users, Bethesda added an invisible auto-aim function which can’t be turned off – without this mod. If you’ve ever wondered why, when you aim a sniper rifle at someone’s head, it hits their arm or kneecap as often as the head you’re actually aiming at, blame the auto-aim (and the console cretins who apparently move their joystick around with their toes).
Power .32 pistol – The .32 pistol has the lowest stopping power of any of the pistols, yet it uses ammo which is otherwise useful for a far more powerful weapon, the hunting rifle. This mod makes the pistol better than a 10mm but not as good as a .44 magnum, so people actually have a reason to use it.
Raiders Redone – Completely redesigns the raiders to make them more challenging, and to make them look more like Mad Max-style bad guys. Also adds some unique “boss” raiders with their own names and better skills.
Rivet City No Fires – The burning fires in the market at Rivet City always killed my frame rate, dropping it into the single digits. This very simple mod removes a few of the random empty bottles and burning fires. You won’t even notice it, but it’ll fix the framerate problems. (I can’t find this mod right now – Google is returning hits for the name – RCmarket-barrelbegone.ecp – but not the file itself.)
RobCo Certified – A fun little three-level perk which allows you to fix broken bots and reprogram them to act as followers. The higher the skill, the better the bots you can reprogram. It allows for another viable build type: the mechanic.
Container Respawn – Even though most areas will eventually respawn with new enemies to fight, the containers there remain empty. Kind of a bummer, and doesn’t really make a lot of sense. Now, when the enemies respaw, the crates and ammo boxes respawn with them.
Water Beggar Script Fix – I can’t say too much without ruining some of the plot, but if you have Broken Steel, the water beggars will die due to a script error at a certain point, even if you haven’t chosen the path which supposedly kills them. This mod fixes that.
I’m referring to a mod that puts a scoped laser rifle in Moira’s inventory, not a .308.
Crap. I just installed it and patched it up to 1.5. Should I reinstall and only update to 1.4, or are modmakers updating their mods to work with 1.5?
Ah…I thought you were referring to the named sniper rifle.
Damn. 
Aren’t they up to patch 1.6 now? And none of the mods work past 1.5??
-XT
Eventually my resistance will fade and I’ll get this game. I plan on getting it relatively soon, actually.
Now is a good time…the DLC’s are starting to come out on DvD now, so you don’t have to go through Microsoft Live’s loopy BS to buy them.
(This is a good thing IMHO…it’s why I stopped playing until they started to put the things on DvD)
-XT
I’m one of those “console cretins”, as mentioned upthread.
No one’s mentioned picking up the junkyard dog. I found him really helpful in early levels, as the enemies would focus on him while I blasted away.
I dropped the dog as soon as I had enough caps to buy the Charon the ghoul’s contract. Best money I spent in the game. Granted, you can use both, but the dog dies a bit too easily, and occasionally gets lost.