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After tweaking the game to your liking and determining your character’s origins, it is now time to survive the harsh wastes. A number of mods have made this game much more challenging, but also fair. Unless you are constantly mashing your sprint key, hydration should last you up to 3 days before becoming critically important. In addition, you should be able to last without food for several days without noticing any effects. As for sleep, you can go upwards of a month without it. That being said, your needs still do matter and they will creep up on you before you know it. This is why knowing how to provide for yourself in the harsh wastes is important

Shelter

The Mojave & the Capital Wasteland are places of varying weather conditions. Hot days will dehydrate your quicker while rainy days will dampen you. All of these, whilst affecting hardcore needs, may also serve to affect other skill modifiers. This is why establishing shelter is a necessity. Other reasons are as follows...

1.) Your carry weight has been significantly reduced. Finding a place to rest your head and store your gear, whether it be in a tent, mobile RV, or one of the many player homes throughout the wastes is important

2.) Many player homes throughout the wastes host crafting stations for armor and weapon repairs, chem crafting, food preparation, and purification of water. These are all important processes to make sure you are prepared for your journeys.

3.) Healing and assessing player condition is important. The wasteland has been beefed up with many more spawns and much more dangerous enemies. It is best to retreat to your home and find out how to best recover rather than sitting in the middle of the wastes where any manner of man or beast could attack.

We will leave it to you to find these player homes on your adventures

Human: Hardcore Needs

Like I said, it may be easy to forget you need to sleep and eat, but hydration is the most rapidly changing stat depending on your movement, the temperature, carry weight/armor weight, and time. While all normal methods of water drinking are still in game, bottling water is one that is new. To do this…

1.) Have an empty bottle in your inventory (You can get one by drinking a bottle of water/other bottle)

2.) Approach any source of water

3.) Press the grab key (Z by default) whilst in/looking at the water source

While I will not post every value below, understand that drinking anything other than water such as alcohol and soda will only serve to dehydrate you even more. This also applies to dry foods and other foods. Make sure to read every consumables description before consuming it.

As for sleeping and eating, these are self explanatory. Make sure to watch your meters in your pip-boy and sleep/eat when you begin to feel hungry. All three of these stats will produce negative modifiers once they reach a certain threshold, so making sure your character is healthy will ensure you do not become over encumbered or worse.

Finally, we come to one that is less a need and more of a point of preference...

Bathing & Cleanliness

As time progresses, dirt will accumulate on your body. As you know, the Capital Wasteland & Mojave are not places of cleanly nature. To wash yourself, all you have to do is follow the simple steps below...

1.) Find a body of water or tub 2.) Aim (right click to zoom) at it and press your activation key (E by default) 3.) Wash yourself.

Optionally you may also craft soap. This is the only way to get the clean status. Below are the requirements.

1.) 50 Survival

2.) One of the following - Broc Flower, Apple, or Pear

3.) 1 Turpentine, 1 Abraxo cleaner.

Finally below are the different status effects of hygeine

1.) Clean: CHR+2, Sneak-15 (because of the soap perfume)

2.) Normal: nothing, vanilla game

3.) Level 1 - Slightly dirty: CHR-1, Sneak+5 in interiors and exteriors

4.) Level 2 - Dirty: CHR-3, Sneak+10 in exteriors only

5.) Level 3 - Very dirty: CHR-5, Sneak-10 in interiors, Sneak+20 in exteriors

6.) Level 4 - Appalling: CHR-7, Sneak-15 in interiors, Sneak+25 in exteriors, Animals are not hostile to the player