Fallout 4 forces a terminal boot animation on you every time try and hack a terminal – and that takes forever to sit through multiple times. So, if you’re tired of looking at that godforsaken animation, then it’s time for you to finally learn how to hack terminals in Fallout 4.
Even though the terminal hacking minigame has remained the same since Fallout 3, players still don’t know how it actually works. Because it’s not just a random guessing game.
How to Hack Terminals in Fallout 4 – Hacking Minigame Explained
When you’re figuring out how to hack terminals in Fallout 4, the first thing you need to understand is the actual objective of the minigame.
On the terminal screen, you’ll see a jumble of words and characters. Clicking on one of these words counts as a guess. You have four guesses before you’re locked out of the terminal. Your goal is to select the correct word, with only one word out of the bunch being the right one.
Whenever you select one of the words, provided it’s not the right one, you’ll see “likeness =” followed by a number appearing on the right-hand side of the terminal screen. This number indicates how many letters in your guess are the same as the correct word including their position.
- For example, if the word you’re looking for is “HELP”, and you guess “HELL”, you’ll see “likeness = 3”. That’s because the h, e, and l all line up between your guess and the actual word.
- If you were to guess “TIME”, then you would see “likeness = 0”, despite “HELP” and “TIME” sharing an “E”. That’s because it’s not in the correct spot.
Fallout 4 Terminal Hacking Brackets Explained
Within the terminal hacking screen, the various words you can click on are mixed in with a bunch of random symbols and characters. Typically, hitting one of these does absolutely nothing. However, that isn’t true for brackets.
If you notice a bracket pair of any kind, being “[]”, “<>”, “{}”, or “()”, then hovering over one of the brackets will highlight all of the characters between the two. Click on it, and one of two things will happen. Either your guesses will be reset, or an incorrect word (“dud”) will be removed.
It’s important to note that the only way for these brackets to be clicked on is if there’s an opening and closing bracket in the right order, of the right type, on the same line. There is typically a handful of them in every minigame.
Fallout 4 Terminal Hacking Strategy
So, now that you know how to hack terminals in Fallout 4, it’s time to talk strategy. There are a few ways to go about strategically hacking terminals – once you know how the minigame works, it tends to be fairly easy.
This is how we like to go about hacking Terminals in Fallout 4:
- Select a random word as a base point. This uses up one of our guesses and gives you an initial point to construct more guesses.
- Once we’ve used up my first guess, we start working through the terminal hitting all of the bracket pairs. This does two things. First, because we used up our first guess, getting our guesses to reset doesn’t go to waste. Secondly, it’s going to get rid of a whole bunch of duds. Depending on the terminal, it’s actually possible that we end up with only one or two words left – so we don’t actually have to figure out the right one.
- Once I’ve gone through and hit all the brackets, we use the “likeness” information that we got from my first guess to figure out which of the remaining words could possibly be the correct one. At this point, there shouldn’t be too many words left – so it becomes pretty easy.
The difference in difficulty between this and jumping straight in is staggering. Whether you like this process or not, hitting the brackets before you start properly guessing will save you a lot of time, and frustration.
Terminals will grant you access to new loot and gear you up for the next adventures. If that loot isn’t enough, you may want to pick up something a bit more powerful:
Power Armor Locations in Fallout 4 | Fallout 4: Grenades (Types, Crafting, and Throwing) | Fallout 4: Power Armor Guide
