Thus far, all I’ve found is the one in Lexington, the one the Brotherhood of Steel gave me for signing up, and two that were being used by raiders.
I haven’t really made much use of power armor thus far - I’ve always been the type of gamer who’s wary of using finite resources (like fusion cores) for fear that I may need them later.
I was at four, maybe five, when I started focusing on collecting them. I realized that I walked straight by a few that are located relatively close to Sanctuary.
Same here! When I finally went in the glowing sea (necessitating the use of the armor), I was amused to note that I’d already collected something like 40 fusion cores.
As I said before, the old V.A.T.S. would only freeze at the shot selection stage, then when you were actually firing the targets would be moving and the percentages you thought you were getting were constantly spoiled. By slowing down time, the new system shows you that the actual chances are dynamic while you’re selecting your shots.
On the Bunker Hill quest, I will probably need to backtrack before pulling the trigger on that battle because I was operating on the assumption that the game would let you further manipulate how the conflict played out.
Likewise, but when you realize how abundant the cores are (any time you find them in an ammo box they seem to come in a 4-pack), you also realize there’s no reason not to wear power armor at all times from that point on, since you probably aren’t ever going to run out. I’ve been wearing it nearly 100% of the time for the past 15 or so levels and I’m still at 40+ cores. Go ahead, I’m giving you permission - Just Use It. 
The only thing I don’t like about it is the yellow-colored HUD. They let you set the color of your normal HUD and PipBoy to whatever you want, but they either overlooked the obvious or decided to purposely deny you the choice of setting your power armor HUD color. The hell is up with that?
I’m at level 19 and think I’ve found a grand total of maybe 3 cores. I bought 2 more, but they were pretty expensive, and immediately after ended up giving them away because some overseer of some vault (81?) wanted them.
At what level do they become abundant? Cuz I ain’t there yet, obviously.
I mean, how carefully do you search areas? The main thing is hitting all the ammo boxes, since as mentioned, when they do spawn cores they seem to always be in sets of 4. I have found them in other types of containers somewhat rarely (and only single serving), and of course there’s the fusion generators that you should always look for, but those are also single serving. Ammo boxes are where it’s at.
There’s a few merchants that seem to have 3 or 4 every time their inventory refreshes, too.
I don’t think I’ve ever found 4 fusion cores in an ammo box, and that’s with two ranks of scrounger.
Have you found some amount other than 4 in an ammo box? I’m curious because it’s been exactly 4 literally every time for me, some 10+ times. And earlier in the thread a few people also specifically mentioned finding 4 in an ammo box, so that leads me to think it’s a default value.
I’m not sure that I’ve EVER gotten a core in a box. They’re always in the world rather than in containers. I could be wrong on that count bit I’m positive finding four at once would have stood out in my mind. I found two together in a room at the Institute and that made am impression.
I don’t have any scrounger perks and I found 3 fusion cores in a dumpster.
Huh.
What difficulty are you guys playing on?
It’s fairly academic for me - power armor doesn’t really suit my playstyle. Half of my fun is from playing a character who looks kind of like me, I hate the power armor HUD, and I’m more of a sharpshooter build.
Very Hard. It was a nice challenge up until the point where I started using power armor all the time, and now that I have X-01 armor upgraded fully to Mk. VI (and of course a bunch of sick weapons all fully upgraded) I’m pretty much invincible even on that setting, unless I get super sloppy/careless. Yeah, I could ratchet it up to Survival but I don’t want to do that this far along; would rather do it on a fresh second playthrough. Or I could just not use the power armor, but then it feels like purposely gimping myself for the sake of a challenge. If I’m gonna do that, might as well go all out. Second playthrough: Survival mode, no power armor, unarmed melee only. Now that would definitely pose a challenge.
One neat thing about playing on the higher difficulties though is you do get boatloads of legendaries.
MacCready gave me a fusion core once. I have a ton of them saved up since I tend not to use the power armor. It’s a pretty heavy action point hit as compared to my ultra-light armor.
I have 26 cores in my inventory at level 22. Been using the power armor about 50% of the time. I search every last crevice and container in every zone. Sometimes they’re in very inconspicuous places.
Yeah, speaking of very inconspicuous I just found another ammo box with 4 fusion cores in it - and it was inside the shell of a broken filing cabinet. So anyone having trouble: make sure you’re looking in places like that.
(And as long as I’m sharing screenshots, here’s my finally completed bobblehead collection, and a fridge I found full of heads)
Unbelievable! Maybe it’s geography-based. I still have a large swath of the southernmost edge of the map that I haven’t explored yet. Or perhaps it gives you more fusion cores when you use the armor a lot?
I’ve been playing on hard difficulty and I’m getting ready to kick it up another notch. The biggest problem is that explosives still one-shot me if I’m not super careful. I probably need to bite the bullet and spend some points on endurance (I’m only at 3) and maybe some overall damage resistance.
Here is my power armor garage. The bottom leftmost armor is a full X-01 and it slowly downgrades by effectiveness until you see the incomplete T-45 armor on the top right. I’ll probably stop collecting frames now and just focus on tricking out the pieces of my bottom row.
NETA: I do wish there were more than four types of armor, or that the different levels within the categories had visual distinctions. Huge missed opportunity for cool factor with the six-piece armoring system.
That’s pretty cool. I left a few suits in random settlements, and stopped picking them up after I realized I only really needed one frame. But I like your creative approach to the excess.
That kind of thing really makes me wish for the next game to be the Fallout MMORPG. Bethesda games always have these cool, immersive, awesome worlds but the lonely nature of the single player experience doesn’t really let you share it in the organic way that people like for sharing their characters and creations (as someone alluded to earlier in the thread regarding the settlement building system). The infrastructure for millions of players all to have their own settlements existing in the same virtual world (or more likely, lots of different servers) is no small thing, of course, but how cool would it be?
You can do different paint jobs at least, and there are several paint jobs that you unlock via finding magazines (I think it’s called Hot Rodder). There’s also one you can buy from the Atom Cats garage (their signature flames) - for me it costed over 5k caps at the time even with the bartering perk and decent charisma, so I didn’t buy it. But I have so many caps now and not much to spend them on, so I’ll probably go back and grab it.
Is it maybe you have a low Luck stat? I gather it affects found Caps/ammo, so maybe that too.
