ZSofia, as far as not being able to see anything, hold down the PIPBoy key and it will provide a handy light. I was stumbling around in tunnels until I read that somewhere in this thread. 
Me too! I was more than halfway through the game before I read this thread and found out that I had a torch and how to use it!
And I had finished the game when I found out (from this thread) that you could grab things, and in doing so find more stuff in your search.
The third thing I found out is that 20 is woefully low a limit of XP to keep you interested in this game long enough to have explored every bit of it. I seriously lost interest when doing things didn’t increase my XP so this is when I decided to finish off the main mission.
Luckily, I’d scanned through this thread and gotten that extremely important bit of information. 
However, were I going to explore a vast radioactive wasteland, personally I’d make damned sure I had a light brighter than the one on the free rape whistle I got at Staff Education Day this year.
Zsofia:
Things that increase XP include:
killing things
hacking computers
picking or forcing open locks
completing quests
discovering new areas (I’m pretty sure this is true)
The “compass” at the lower left part of the screen is important; it not only directs you to your next goal (big solid green arrow) but also indicates sites that remain to be found (“empty” arrows) and it also indicates (depending on your perception score) where “friendly” things are (green vertical bars) and hostile things are (red vertical bars). Once you see a red bar on your compass, turn toward it and go into VATS mode; you can then cycle through visible enemies and get a sense of what you’re up against. If you’re just starting out and don’t mind resetting and trying again, I would suggest high scores in Perception, Agility, and Luck, and tag skills in small guns, sneak, and speech. If you have a high Luck score and sneak a lot, you can get a lot of “stealth” kills, where just one shot to the head kills enemies that haven’t detected you yet. Small guns are the most plentiful weapons in the early parts of the game, and a higher speech skill will allow you to complete more quests without having to do things the “hard way.”
One of the hard lessons that some people have to learn when playing Fallout 3 is that it’s NOT a shooter, per se; your accuracy with guns will be affected by your skill score and your SPECIAL scores. Your ability to inflict critical hits will be affected by Luck score and certain perks. Put it this way; you could have a horrible small guns score and low Luck score and start shooting at some distant target with an assault rifle and MAYBE hit it three out of ten shots, and most likely with no crits, or you could have a high small guns score and a high Luck score and hit six out of ten times with a relatively high percentage chance to score a critical hit that MIGHT cripple or even kill the enemy with one shot.
Hmm, the game was never really dark for me. I ran on default settings (no gamma increased), and never ran into a place where it was difficult to see. I’ve heard that the Dunwich building is supposedly dark, but otherwise I think even the “dark” places allow you to see decently.
It could be your settings outside of the game. Or even something so simple as your room being brightly lit. I find I have to shut the blinds to see properly.
Come to think of it, weapons don’t just degrade from use but also from being shot at. Making the player’s weapons so they’re always in 100% condition but make NPC weapons degrade would give the player an unfair advantage. The alternative would be to remove degrading entirely, which would make a tactical element–the ability to disarm NPCs by targeting their weapon in VATS–totally moot.
Well, you could still disarm them, if only temporarily.
So, I’m on my third character. I generally try to do everything, I don’t want to get caught up in the main quest and I hate rushing through areas and missing things.
So today my path takes me to Jury Street Metro Station, and I think to myself: “Hey, self, there’s a Metro station here. Who’d a thunk?” Found me a neat little mini quest, too.
A place I’ve passed easily 30 times, and never thought about going in.
Wouldn’t have helped whomever that was upthread who got away from a Super Mutant attack when the mutie’s weapon broke.
So my game froze for the first time last night. I hadn’t saved or hit an auto-save point in a while, so that was about 30 minutes (which included a handful of intense gun battles and about 600 XP) down the drain. Anyone else having freezing issues in the PS3 version?
Actually, it’d be fairly simple to introduce mechanics whereby guns had a limited number of hit points, and shooting at them would lower those HP’s but simply shooting them would not.
Anyways, has anybody found any utility online like the interactive maps for Oblivion and Morrowind? For instance, I know I’ve also seen and passed by the Jury Street metro station dozens of times, but I’ve just started a new game and I’d love to be able to have an out-of-game utility where I could type in a location’s name and it’d pinpoint where I needed to go.
Anybody seen such a device online?
I didn’t even **find[b/] Megaton for the first several hours I was in the wasteland. Wandered around Springdale scavving for a while, before I finally decided to find a place to sell all the stuff I found. Don’t know how I missed the big signs.
RE: combat
Do you have ‘always run’ toggled on? It’s the CapsLock key. It makes fighting a lot easier if you can duck behind things to reload and charge up your AP.
Don’t underestimate the power of charging an enemy with guns blazing, then switching to VATS when you are nearly on top of them and unloading into their head.
What condition is your equipment in? Even at the relatively low repair skill you start with, you can get a pretty good improvement in damage. Also, frag grenades and mines are fairly plentiful and can help even the odds when you are outnumbered. Most enemies will come straight at you.
I’m pretty sure it is generally advisable to target just one part of an enemy. I think your crit chance, or maybe severity of crit effects, increases as the condition of that part decreases. Armor coverage also varies. If that raider is bare-headed, he really has no armor value against head shots.
Don’t know if any of these is what you’re asking for, but here goes:
The Fallout Wiki map (static)
Flash map at the bottom of the page. Allows toggling and mouse-overs.
Google map of the Wasteland. This is probably the closest to what you want. Seems very useful.
Or, if you don’t mind cheating, open the console and type player.addperk 00031DE5.
No console I’m afraid, Xbox.
And Claptree, thanks much, that looks perfect.
You’re welcome.
I found another type of encounter.
[spoiler]A bit into the main quest, the Enclave start showing up here and there. I’d seen that before, had my dust-ups with mind-controlled deathclaws and whatnot, but this I hadn’t seen.
Just northwest of the National Guard depot is a residential area. I was sneaking through, looking for loot, when I noticed a fire in one of the houses and decided to examine. Turns out it’s an Enclave outpost, with one Enclave trooper torching the apparently empty burnt out building with a flamer. After killing the buggers I move closer, only to find he had apparently been trying to burn some ghoul wastelander corpses. The outpost also had a deathclaw cage, only this was outfitted like a mobile examiner’s room, where it looked like the officer had been performing an autopsy on another corpse.
I also encountered something similar, with one soldier torching an empty caravan. Very weird, and slightly unsettling.[/spoiler]
I’ve got bounty hunters after me, being evil and all…
The Regulators
Yeah, that’s them. How I hate them. Pussies! But they do supply me with XP and ammo. 
I have to say I prefer being good in that regard. You get the Talon Company on your hiney, and they have far better armor - which can be used to repair the better versions of combat armor. It also seemed to me like they pop up far more often than the Regulators do.
Not to rain on your parade or anything:p
Rumor has it that if you have neutral karma you’ll be hunted by hit men. Anyone experience this?