Playing on hard-hardcoe with a character focused on melee and explosives, took survival as my 3rd tag figuring it would be useful for hardcoe mode.

Well I was disappointed in the skill and kind of regretted taking it, since you could find food in a bunch of places and crafted food wasn't all that much better, until I was able to make 2 recipes, gecko kebab and desert salad.

Gecko kebab is an awesome recipe, uses easy to find ingredients (banana yucca, gecko steak, Jalapeno, buffalo gourd), makes 2 items per batch, gives more food than steak AND more hydration than water, and only weighs .25!

Desert salad is also awesome for its healing. For my character (75 survival) it heals 255 hit points over 15 seconds (17 per second). That's almost 3 times the rate of a stim and lasts over twice as long, plus it only weighs .2.

The only problem with Desert salad is I don't know where to find pinyon nuts growing in the wild. I've found a few in buildings (the east pump station has 4 or 5) and legion soldiers sometimes carry them, but I don't even know what the plant looks like, if there is one. Anyone know where to find these?

You can find more than a few in buildings, though often they need to be stolen. I don't recall seeing many, or maybe any, in the wild.

Buy them, you can find lots of ingredients in Westside Co-op

After making some desert salad (which heals 21hp(15sec) at 100 survival without arcade) I went hunting for nuts.

Yes you can steal quite a few about the place, but mostly I just buy them off merchants whenever I see them. When the merchant restocks they can be re-bought usually.
I dont think the nuts even grow in the wild, but I haven't looked everywhere to be honest.

You're gonna love my nuts!

Anyway, with gecko-kebabs I'm phasing out all of the rest of my food and almost all of my water.

Those missiles and 40mm grenades take up a lot of weight! The less I have to use on consumables the better.

Plus with this recipe on my new character, I'll actually be able to go completely solo!

Not even ED-E?

How fun is it with Explosives? My pick for hardcoe was Energy rather than anything else - because all ammo is perfectly converteable between types and a lot of it gets recycled. So whatever you carry and/or stockpile, you can use.

Thank you for this advice man! I will start using survival more now.

Might be more useful if I play another playthrough on a harder difficulty. On Normal, I get like 100+ Stimpacks I'm never going to run through.

Explosives is fun, but really heavy. Plus you can't use it up close, the blast radius is much larger than it appears visually. I wouldn't mind using it at medium range so much on non-hardcoe, but crippled limbs are more of a pain on hardcoe and explosives cripples limbs like crazy.

And to be honest I had to mod explosives a bit to make the explosions more powerful. You can do good damage with explosives in the stock game but compared to damage you can do with bullets for cheaper, plus less weight, they needed a boost. Increased most explosions by about 30% in power. It does make it a bit easier for an explosives character but it also makes powder gangers way more dangerous at early levels, plus you have to be extra careful in minefields.

I played no medicine, high-ish ( 65 ?) survival on vh/hc without problem . Desert Sallads, Gecko Kabobs and Steaks and mass purified water. Thou shalt steal or buy EVERY nut and seed.

For me Jalapenos were the hardest to find ingredients, until I noticed one while killing ants at the El Dorado Dry Lake. That place has 8 or 9 jalapeno plants, don't know how they grow there. Plus there's some off the roads between Primm and Jean Sky Diving.