Hack in Fallout 3
Hacking in Fallout 3 can be quite a challenge if you don't know how. The manual helps a little, but there are some things it doesn't tell you. Here's what you need to know to hack any computer in the game.
Instructions
1. Raise your Science skill. While Luck and a few other factors feed into your success with hacking, nothing has more of an influence than the Science skill. The more Science you have, the less wrong choices appear and the higher level computers you can hack. You can hack any computer in the game with the full 100 Science skill.
2. Look for brackets facing each other on each line. There can be things in between them, but what you are mainly looking for is: { }, [ ] and ( ). There can be any number of things in between them, such as {%&$} and (*). Scroll through each line to find as many as you can. Each bracket pair will either delete one of the wrong choices (thus narrowing down the possibilities for the right password) or refresh your attempts. Refreshing your attempts grants you four new chances to guess the right password. Unfortunately, whether a bracket pair refreshes your chances or deletes a dud password is totally random. Either way though, it's a good thing. Note that bracket pairs will highlight themselves when you scroll over them.
3. Try a password. Once you've found all the bracket pairs, pick a password at random. If the password is incorrect, you will receive a number, such as 3/7. This tells you how many of the letters in the password you just picked are in the correct position.
4. Write down all the rest of the passwords. This is where the graph paper comes in handy. Write the rest of the possible passwords directly beneath the one you guessed.
5. Go through your list and eliminate the words that do not match the correct number of correct letters. For example: You guess the password FALLING and got 3/7 correct. Beneath it, you have FRAILTY and STEWING. You can eliminate FRAILTY because it does not have three letters in the same places as FALLING. However, STEWING does (ING), so it remains a possibility. Continue eliminating words in your list until you narrow down your choices.
6. Pick the next most likely password. It is possible that you will have several possible passwords that have the correct letter positioning as your first guessed password. In that case, pick another one of your possibilities and narrow it down again. Keep going until you have one possibility left.
Tags: Science skill, between them, bracket pair, bracket pairs, computer game, each line