What difficulty should I play on first playthrough?

[The great white dragon]

Very hard or survival? I want a real challenge but I'm a little weary of survival because I can't save on the dime but if it's more rewarding then I will play it

[Gustavo Eats His Own Chicken?]

Hard or Very Hard.

[Chloé]

I played on hard first for about 20 hours to learn the basics of the games then restarted a game on survival.

Fo4 with fast travel and without survival elements is just a bland pseudo-rpg imo

[casualsailor]

Save survival for a 2nd playthrough. Knowing where to look for good beds, where to find doctors and medical supplies and having a plan will make survival more enjoyable.

If you try survival before you know these things you can create problems for yourself that may frustrate you when you find yourself in a no-win situation having contracted an infection without the ability to heal it and dying while searching for a doctor. It's best to have a little knowledge of the world before trying survival.

Besides, having fast travel and higher carrying capacity allows you to collect junk and drop it off that you might otherwise leave behind. Before you know what mod you will want for guns and armor you will find yourself leaving behind important components due to survival's limitation. Again, having a bit of knowledge of these things will make survival more enjoyable while still a challenge.

Edit: Finally, you can switch between Normal, Hard and Very Hard without issue, but once you switch to Survival you cannot switch back. So use this to your advantage such that you can switch to a lower difficulty level for a particularly hard mission while you figure out its mechanics and the best way to solve it.

Edit2: And being able to quicksave before trying something unknown is a big help. I can remember doing a quicksave before trying to build certain structures as I figured out how to do what I wanted. If I had not been able to quickly undo those changes, I'd have not learned how to build settlements the way I wanted.

[Nellvan]

Originally posted by casualsailor:

but once you switch to Survival you cannot switch back

You got that bit wrong, you can turn it down from Survial, but then you cannot go back to Survial for that game.

[Xyzzy]

The difficulty that gives you some struggle but not impossible. You can change difficulty on the fly, so if enemy too tough, put it easier til it's dead. If it's all too easy choose very hard, still you can temporarilly put it to very easy for deathclaw etc then back to very hard.
The Struggle is the fun.
Bugs and errors are not fun, so use quicksave before each progress and decision. At panic times do a manual save then if you overwite your quicksave at a bad time and get killed over and over, you can load your recent manual save. have fun.

[Park_Ranger]

Remember you can adjust the game difficulty as you go through the game, from sissy to very hard. (Not including survival).

It's not like many other game's where once you pick the difficulty your stuck with it through the whole game.

Having said that, play on as hard a difficulty that you can.

[Ragnaman]

Originally posted by The great white dragon:

Very hard or survival? I want a real challenge but I'm a little weary of survival because I can't save on the dime but if it's more rewarding then I will play it

I modded my very hard difficulty to pre-1.5 patch survival, for my first playthrough. Also modded damage to be as post-1.5 patch survival.