Only two player, possible?

[The Botanist]

Is it possible to play the game with only one friend on a server without anyone else?
Or how does that work?

We just want to have a co-op experience together without anyone else bothering us

[Mr. Fish]

maybe

[Beytran70]

If you or your friend have Fallout 1st then you can host a private server and play together that way with nobody else. Otherwise you'd still be in a world with others but you could be in the same party and just do stuff together.

[The Botanist]

I see, so how is the community? Are they toxic? Is there a way to not be in a pvp setting (like pve). I really don't want to experience ARK Survival Evolved all over again..

[BizarreMan]

99.99% of the time other people do not bother you on a public wor.

There are several events and encounters and a few other things that require multiple players unless you have done the grind to make yourself god tier. If you aren’t, you will fail spectacularly and be disappointed.

[Gpappysr]

ENJOY THE GAME PEOPLE ARE PRETTY GOOD NOW. TRY TO HELP EACH OTHER

[Halcyform]

If you don't have fallout 1st, you can invite someone to a group and just do your thing. Most of the map is dead most of the time because you rarely see maps with full populations anymore - at least I don't.

If you want a completely isolated experience, you'll need to pony up the cash for a Fallout 1st subscription. Just one person has to have it and you need to be friends in game. The person with fallout 1st can launch their private server and then the other person can join.

If you decide to forgo the fallout 1st subscription and use public server, make sure you go into settings (before you launch the game) and enable pacifist. This will turn off PvP by default. The only thing left from there is staying away from workshops. If you go messing around in those areas, you'll likely get flagged for PvP.

[Mooman]

A server has a maximum of 24 players (32 with friend invites).

Those 24 will be all sorts of levels but generally players near your physical world location as the game connects to closest AWS server.

They will be spread out all over the map. Some player building their camp, some questing, some XP farming in instances, some exploring and so on. The chance of running into others is fairly low outside of some popular areas and public events.

You can start on public servers and if it is too annoying that you want to pay for the private server you can do so without losing progress. Adventure servers for public and private share progress but fixed rules whereas custom servers (paid) have adjustable rules but progress is limited to them.

[Halcyform]

The community is hit or miss.

For the most part, people pretty much do their own thing. You run into a few mongoloids here and there, but nothing an ignore and a server hop can't fix. Conversely, you also run into a few bored veteran players that will give stuff away, craft something for you and/or show you a few things.

If you do run into some people that you want to play with, I recommend friending them asap. You never know when the public server will crash on you. Then you forget/misspell their name and probably never see them again.

[doublejesus]

I gotta be honest I've leveled a character to over level 100+ in the last week and I barely encountered other humans in my entire play through except for at events or that one time a bored level 1000+ started following me around killing everything after I died a couple times to super mutants in their public party. Which was annoying but fine, I get it they were bored and thought they were helping so I wasn't gonna be mad. One time a dude said something cause he thought I was cutting in line in front of him at the vendor during the meat week event but I just told em I was showing my wife the dude and had a good laugh about it.

Claiming workshops can make you susceptible to pvp the game has a pacifist mode you can enable so you won't get into any fights otherwise except for at claimed workshops or a handful of events. I'm wary of suspicious camps I don't like walking into buildings if the owners home and it feels like a trap but if you dropped all your junk off at your stash there won't be anything to lose by being griefed by trap stackers.