How to hack in Fallout 4

By Jesse Lennox April 25, 2024

A hacking tutorial in Fallout 4. — Bethesda

No matter what perks or skills your character has in Fallout 4, hacking will always come down to your ability as a player. There’s no way to cheat the system here, and if you don’t grasp what the game is asking you to do, you’re mostly out of luck. Terminals will hide great loot behind their cryptic puzzles, as well as allow you to take over certain controls to turn your enemy’s security against them. Some have very interesting logs about certain characters or events for all you lore junkies out there. Hacking has tons of uses, so let’s brush up on your computer skills and give you a refresher on how to hack in Fallout 4.

How to hack in Fallout 4

When you first interact with a terminal to hack in Fallout 4, it will be a little overwhelming. As long as you have a high enough hacking skill to attempt a hack, you can go right into the minigame.

The basic idea of hacking is to find words hidden in that jumble of letters and symbols. Your goal is to find the correct word to crack the terminal before you run out of attempts. Once you find any word and select it, the terminal will tell you how close that word is to the correct one based on how many letters it has in the same space as the answer in the form of a likeness rating. The higher the rating, the more letters it has in common. It is somewhat similar to Wordle, only you don’t type in the words yourself.

If you’re running low on attempts, or want to make it easier from the start, you can look for any symbol or character within two of the same type of brackets, such as (,[.{. or <. Hitting these special characters will either return an attempt or remove an incorrect word from the screen.

If you run out of attempts, you will need to wait a short time before you can try again. However, if you get to rank 4 in the Hacking skill, then you can never be locked out and can keep trying right away.

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Jesse Lennox loves writing, games, and complaining about not having time to write and play games. He knows the names of more…

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