As much as I love FO, I'm no fan of terminal hacking. It's a horrible game of "guess what word I'm thinking of", being given 15 words and having 3 guesses or so before you have to cancel out and guess at a new word. I picked 10 INT hoping that it would have some effect on hacking terminals, but I don't notice anything all that different.

When all the words end in "ing" and I pick a word and get "3/7 correct". And pick another word and get "3/7 correct" I then have to ASSUME the 3 "ing" characters are right, and then look through the maze of characters on screen to notice each word and determine individually if the 4 characters in either of the 2 words I picked that were wrong are in the same location.

Was this designed to be extremely time intensive like this or am I missing something?

It's the Science skill, the higher your skill, the less crap dud entries you will get.

If you find strings between matching brackets that highlight like a word, enter those to remove duds or replenish chances.

Ah.... SCIENCE!

Well that's good then, so my high Int will help my Science skill raise quickly. But since it isn't maxed out yet, I get lots of garbage entries, and as my Science gets better I get less entries, thus lessening my options available. That makes more sense, thanks. Science is like Lockpicking for Computers.

@Azula
Can you explain that a little further? I'm learning new things in NV that I never knew through my entire FO3 playthrough. (For example, I just found out that if you have the AP to spare, you can queue up MULTIPLE attacks per VATS sequence. before I kept going back into VATS after a single attack!)

Move the cursor onto a string of jibberish characters that's nested between matching sets of brackets like this [!@#$%^&*]. It'll light up like a word choice and pressing X or whatever if you're on the PC will reduce the number of choices or replenish the number of guesses.

In addition to making the number of choices smaller, increasing Science will also make it dramatically more likely that the first guess on the top row left column is the right answer.

Wow. I had no idea about this! Thank you a lot for the information.

See I KNEW I was missing something!

Is this actually true? In Fallout 3 having 99 Science wasnt any better than 75.

EDIT: Nevermind, researching on the subject.

The effect is more pronounced on easier terminals but at 100 even the Very Hards become a two button crack.

Excellent, thanks for the heads-up!

Aye, plus strings enclosed like the following examples will also do that as well. (*%&&) and {*%&$}, I can't quite remember if the likes of <&^%&^%> will work as well or not though.

they all do the same thing. In around 2000 hours of Fallout 3 I never detected a pattern related to the brackets or the string length.

You know, it's things like this which are important to us couriers.

Like, if an animal pounces, crippling it in the legs will prevent its ability to pounce.

This is good tactical knowledge that we give you... go forth and conquer!

Emm quick hint, not sure if this works in NV or not...

But in fallout 3 the BEST WAY to hack terminals is simply open a terminal, guess the first 3, if you dont get it just back out of the screen and load it up again; repeat. Im guessing the sorted this cheat in NV but if not give it a bash.

I never knew this.

If you are told that the word you guessed has 5 out of 7 or 5 out of 9, that means 5 of the characters are in the exact position of the password. On every subsequent guess, the correct character of the password remains in the exact position. You have to decide which are correctly placed.

:)

Also, never exhaust your last guess unless you're certain. The guess count doesn't carry over if you leave the terminal and come back.

AFAIK, the choices in the screen change when you do this, but (i'm not sure... someone needs to check this) the password might be static to your game.

Yes, the choices do change. I always make sure to leave the hack before locking out (down the line I was thinking about getting that perk that'll let you re-hack a locked terminal up to 4 more times, but if my Science skill is high enough, I really shouldn't need that perk)

always felt hacking was crap. because not only is the # of characters correct/incorrect its also location of them, not just which ones. >< sometimes can make the weeding easier, sometimes not. (spends 15 resets on a Very Easy lock w/40 science) WTF?!

*picks hard lock with minimum skill required with 1 bobby pin* well at least tahts easy... :banghead:

Well, your personal INT score will obviously help as well.

I found the best solution to the hacking terminal problem was resolved with a modest mod. I know this doesn't help the consolers out there, but I felt the skill check was enough of a deterrent, assuming that success would be all but guaranteed in a save/load, shut off after the third guess scenario. It just saves time that way, and allows me to experience whatever the terminal had to offer story wise and let's me get back to blasting.