Fallout 4: How to Level Up Quickly

The wasteland can be a pretty dangerous place. With Deathclaws, giant super-powered monsters, and gangs of raiders wandering the post-apocalyptic ruins of Boston, you better be well-equipped during your adventure. But even if you have the best weapons, without enough experience and a high-enough level, wandering too far astray will lead to almost certain death.

Therefore, you’ll want to earn some XP as fast as you can and level up so you can take on anything that the wasteland can throw at you. So without further ado, here are nine ways to help you level up quickly.

Put Points into Intelligence

Intelligence is an incredibly useful characteristic for your Fallout 4 character to have. Not only does it unlock some rather handy points as you progress through the game, but the more points you pour into Intelligence the more XP you’re going to get from any activity you complete that normally gives you it.

A recent Reddit post has calculated the effect that one additional point into Intelligence will have on the amount of XP that you get. This rather brilliant calculation has worked out that for every point you put into the Intelligence skill, it works out at about a 10% increase in the XP you receive. Therefore it’s simple enough, if you need more XP and faster, focus on putting those early skill points from levelling up into your intelligence characteristic.

Make Modifications

Fallout 4 introduced us to a lot of modifications, allowing us a great amount of variation and customization in our tools of destruction. Crafting or modifying your weaponry and armor each time you make a change to any of your items you’re gonna get some XP. It may not be a lot, but combine this with our first tip and you’ll soon find that you’re levelling through the ranks much quicker than you were before. Not only is this beneficial to building your XP, but it’s incredibly handy for some of the trickier enemies in the game.

Settlement Building

Moving onto the other type of crafting, settlement building is an entirely optional area of the game that you can explore and pour time into at your own leisure. Your settlement can be useful for storing things such as power armor, all your junk that can be turned into handy crafting parts. However, if you enter the workshop mode and start building things around your settlement, you’ll find that building defences, crafting buildings and generally developing your settlement will also be giving you a steady trickle of XP.

If you feel like taking a break from the violence of the wasteland, and need some extra experience, give your settlement some TLC. Your experience bar will be grateful for it.

Hack and Lockpick Everything

As you explore the many buildings and locations of the wasteland, you’ll come across a ton of opportunities for you to put your lockpicking and hacking skills into practice. Regardless of your skill level, each successful pick or hack will result in a bit of experience pushing you up toward that next level.

If you really want to get the most XP possible, pouring any points you’ve got into the Locksmith and Hacker perks will mean you’ll be able to successfully hack terminals and pick locks of a much higher difficulty. The higher the difficulty of each of these little puzzles, the higher your experience reward. Once again, combining this with a high Intelligence selection will result in huge chunks of XP coming your way very quickly.

Never Shy Away from a Fair Fight

This is kind of an obvious one, but we feel it should be reiterated all the same. When you’re wandering around the wasteland, there are a lot of enemies who want to you dead, whether it’s for a source of food, or for that nice laser pistol you have in your hands.

As long as you’re not grossly outmatched by your enemy and have plenty of ammo, you should always be seeking to take down your enemy. Every kill in the wasteland is only going to give you more experience and every activity you can do to keep your experience bar moving up is worthwhile doing. Especially when it’s a particularly tricky enemy and the XP reward is rather large. Keep your ammo levels high and take down those enemies!

Use Your Words

Your barter skill is another source of experience that many people tend to forget about, preferring to resolve their issues with their guns and not words. Fallout 4 actually rewards players for using speech to get more information out of NPCs, haggle down a price or barter in whatever circumstance. If you’ve put a few points into your Charisma category, you should at least have a relatively good chance at succeeding at a couple of these. The XP reward tends to be much larger than resorting to violence as well.

Speak before you shoot, wastelanders.

Search for Optional Quests

This is another rather obvious one to finish off our list. If you’re struggling to get past that one quest in the main storyline, consider having a look around the wasteland surrounding you. Plenty of characters have optional side quests you can take on. In fact, many of the quests in the game come from all of the different factions. Play the field and work with all of the factions in order to get the biggest amounts of XP available to the player in the game and level up faster. Just make sure whatever quests you do accept aren’t going to upset the faction you ultimately want to side with.

Know the Map

It’s a little secret that the further south and west in the map that you go, the stronger and more dangerous the enemies are that you’ll encounter. Therefore, with this in mind always be sure that if you do have to venture south that you’re always well stocked up with powerful weaponry and plenty of medical supplies.

Defeating more powerful enemies, of course, comes with a greater XP reward than just defeating those pesky Radroaches. The XP you’ll earn from powerful enemies are more than just desserts for your trials, just don’t get carried away and underestimate your enemy.

BONUS

If you want to use exploits to level up quickly, here’s a quest glitch that lets players farm infinite XP fairly quickly. The only prerequisites for this glitch are that you’ve joined the Brotherhood of Steel and that you have a high-damage sniper with a long-range scope on it. Once you’ve completed a couple of the quests and have accepted to help out on the patrol, follow our quest glitch guide above to bring in some pretty huge amounts of XP.

And there you have it, our tips for gaining that precious experience quickly in Fallout 4 and storming through the levels. How quickly have you levelled up? Any tips of your own? Let us know in the comments below.

For more Fallout 4 guides, check out our wiki!