I beat the game with zero kills

[xyzzyxyzzy2]

There was a story which made the news about a guy who beat Fallout 4 with no kills, so I decided to try it for myself. He did it in kind of a lame way, by save scumming his way through everything, but I found that this was not necessary.

I found I could do it, with a lot of planning and knowing just what paths needed to be taken in the game. Ended the game at level 26 (28 after the experience dump the game gives you once you complete the main quest), zero kills.

If anyone wants to try it, here's a short no kill guide for the game:

(SPOILER ALERT)

First, you must back the Minutemen faction, this is the only one which allows you to finish with no kills. The other 3 paths all near the end force you to kill people to progress. You can not have a companion with you while you're anwhere with enemies, since all companion kills count as your kills.

Since you won't be killing anything, what you have going for you is:

1. Pacify perks. You'll need a charisma of 10, which gives you a 100% chance of passing every speech check in the game, and then take Animal Friend, Wasteland Whisperer, and Intimidation, which let you pacify animals, creatures, and people.

Rank 1 lets you pacify them, rank 2, which you get around levels 19-23, lets you command them to attack whoever else is in the area.

Keep in mind that pacify only works maybe 25% of the time (once they're pacified, commanding them to attack always works). This makes it a big hassle to use, but it still does work. 6 mole rats attacking you? Try to pacify them all, it works on 2, you have those 2 attack the others, and then you run off while they're busy with each other.

2. The syringer rifle. With the pax syringe, most everything in the game (not bots or synths or a few bosses) stops attacking and just stands around. With the berserk syringe, everything goes hostile to everything around them and attacks at random (except doesn't attack you).

Sadly, though, the berserk syringe stops working once enemies reach level 20.

3. Jet. Jet, which gives you bullet time, lets you run away from anything attacking you and escape, or blitz on through a mission area and get to the end without having to fight or take much damage.

4. Dismissing your companion in a strategic way. This is a bit of a cheap tactic, perhaps, but necessary. There are certain people who MUST be killed to complete the game, such as Kellogg. Bring a companion into an area, dismiss them and they will begin walking home. Immediately get an enemy to go hostile to you, by running into their field of view or whatever, and your companion will turn around and run to attack them. Now their kills don't count as yours, because they're not your companion at the moment.

5. Kiting enemies onto each other. You have to kill all the bugs around some cabin for a quest? Go find a supermutant hangout somewhere in the area, get them to chase you over to the bugs, they kill all the bugs, you complete the mission.

6. Crafting for experience. Since you won't be getting any kills, and since a lot of the quests in the game are going to be impossible or way more trouble than they're worth, you'll very likely want to level up through crafting. Break down everything in Sanctuary Hills, make 2000 fence posts and 1000 wire fences, get 9000 experience.

You might not have to do this, but you pretty much need to get to level 23 to complete the game, since 23 is when you can incite pacified humans to attack each other.

Crafting also let me build lots of water purifiers in Sanctuary hills, which gave me 150+ bottles of water every day, which I traded in Diamond city for fusion cores, so I could spend 100% of my time in power armor. This helped enormously.

Here's an example of what you might do: You get a mission from Preston Garvey to kill all the raiders in some plant. Now, there are like 50 raiders there and you're not realistcally gonna manage to get them all killed. But you don't have to. In almost all the "clear out the raiders" quests, all you really have to do is kill the named enemy (the one named Clint or Bob or whatever) at the end of the mission.

So you put on power armor, enter the building, pop a jet, blitz on through towards the end, possibly using several jet, until finally you get to Bucky the raider. You shoot Bucky with a berzerk syringe (if you're lower level), and immediately every raider that's been chasing you halfway across the area attacks Bucky and he's dead in 5 seconds. Mission complete, you run out the exit. If he's too high level for Berzerk, you try to pacify him, and if this works, incite him to attack, and every raider will attack him and he'll be dead.

If pacify fails on him, you try to pacify anyone else in the room, and hopefully you can manage to get him killed. Meanwhile, while they're fighting, you run off a distance, go into sneak, and wait a few minutes. When you return, you'll be able to try pacifying Bucky again.

The hardest missions to complete are probably rescuing Nick Valentine and killing Kellogg. You can't let Valentine kill anyone, or it counts as your kill, so you have to pacify/pax syringe everyone before he gets a chance to kill them. With Kellogg, you have to clear the area leading up to him as much as possible, then bring in a companion and dismiss them/ reacquire them multiple times to kill the few enemies still left, and finally Kellogg.

Completing a no-kill run really shows that pretty much ANY playstyle can work in Fallout 4, if you put some effort into it.

[Nick930]

Cool story bruh

[The_Pastmaster]

Re: #1: 10 Charisma does not give 100% chance to pass speech checks. :) It's very possible to fail on the red (hard) ones. The yellow (easy) ones, not so much though.

[Spacecowboy2011]

Some would argue that, despite your Pip-Boy not registering kills, using Pacify to set animals/people on each other violates the spirit behind a no kill run, as you are telling them to do some attacking and/or killing.

Still, an interesting approach to something that Fallout 4 really didn't want to make possible, unlike New Vegas. FO3 no kill, well... that ends minutes into a run with no way around it! Kudos to giving it a go, more hassle than I'd care to go through.

[Fuhrer]

Originally posted by Spacecowboy2011:

Some would argue that, despite your Pip-Boy not registering kills, using Pacify to set animals/people on each other violates the spirit behind a no kill run, as you are telling them to do some attacking and/or killing.

Still, an interesting approach to something that Fallout 4 really didn't want to make possible, unlike New Vegas. FO3 no kill, well... that ends minutes into a run with no way around it! Kudos to giving it a go, more hassle than I'd care to go through.

I'd certainly argue that. You're far from innocent if you hire people to kill for you.

[azxcvbnm321]

Awesome. And no, talking to someone to get them mad isn't the same as killing. Fuhrer, why don't you kill your mother, she birthed you into this lousy world so you have to suffer for years and years? If you kill your mother now, YOU did it, I didn't kill her.

All the OP wanted to do is complete the game without killing anyone. He never killed or hired anyone who killed since he had zero companion kills while they were "employed" by him. He might not be completely innocent, but he never said he was trying for that.

[CPT Schnizleblitz]

Cool man. Always fun to read and/or see people do crazy stuff like this.

[Shahadem]

So basically what the OPer proved is that Fallout 4 cannot be completed without killing NPCs and thus the OPer lied when saying he completed Fallout 4 without killing. No matter how long your Rube Goldberg machine is, if you are the one who starts the events leading to an NPC death and you had intended that death to occur, then the death is imputed to you.

[Haunt Fox]

Originally posted by Spacecowboy2011:

Some would argue that, despite your Pip-Boy not registering kills, using Pacify to set animals/people on each other violates the spirit behind a no kill run, as you are telling them to do some attacking and/or killing.

Still, an interesting approach to something that Fallout 4 really didn't want to make possible, unlike New Vegas. FO3 no kill, well... that ends minutes into a run with no way around it! Kudos to giving it a go, more hassle than I'd care to go through.

Well, yeah, Hitler killed millions of people right? As far as I know, he never took up a gun, knife, or laid hands on and killed anyone himself (with the exception of the bunker, where he is said to have killed his own dog before killing himself.) He just told people what to do, and they did it.

Bosses may be glory-hogs, but they also get all the blame.


I nearly got out of of the vault last week without killing anyone - only killed one damn guard. But it keeps crashing right when you're crossing the room to get out of the vault (I just snuck past that girl and her ♥♥♥♥ of a father and left them to their family business), Oh, well, I might try again for a total no-kill run. :)

[xyzzyxyzzy2]

Originally posted by Shahadem:

So basically what the OPer proved is that Fallout 4 cannot be completed without killing NPCs and thus the OPer lied when saying he completed Fallout 4 without killing. No matter how long your Rube Goldberg machine is, if you are the one who starts the events leading to an NPC death and you had intended that death to occur, then the death is imputed to you.

Well yes, this goes without saying. Kellogg has to die in order to complete the story missions. The very first mission the game sends you on, to concord to free the minutemen trapped in the museum, there are 6 raiders who must die in order for the minutemen to be freed. Then the deathclaw outside has to die.

Nearly every quest in this game consists of "Go to this spot and kill all the X". To complete the minutemen questline, you must have 8 settlements, and other than sanctuary, there's maybe 1 settlement in the game you can get without killing anything, which is the one where you fix the gardening bots' water supply. Every other one, some mutant or feral or bug has to die.

My point is that, in this game which was never designed with the idea of a no kill run, it's actually still possible to do it, to reach the end of the game with zero kills recorded, to never use a weapon to damage anyone and to never even have a companion kill anyone. I'm aware that in the real world, what I did would not absolve me of the moral responsibility of my actions. This is just a game, who cares?

[AndyRobby]

Thanks for sharing your experiance and well done, Give the rush through players a new challenge instead of whining.

[Deku Scrub]

Huh, was wondering how you would take care of Kellogg.
Love doing challenge runs of games are I've played them a couple of times, so this was interesting to read!

[Fuhrer]

Originally posted by azxcvbnm321:

Awesome. And no, talking to someone to get them mad isn't the same as killing. Fuhrer, why don't you kill your mother, she birthed you into this lousy world so you have to suffer for years and years? If you kill your mother now, YOU did it, I didn't kill her.

All the OP wanted to do is complete the game without killing anyone. He never killed or hired anyone who killed since he had zero companion kills while they were "employed" by him. He might not be completely innocent, but he never said he was trying for that.

So what you're saying is Hitler did nothing wrong.

I don't know if I agree with that.

[Haunt Fox]

Originally posted by Fuhrer:

Originally posted by azxcvbnm321:

Awesome. And no, talking to someone to get them mad isn't the same as killing. Fuhrer, why don't you kill your mother, she birthed you into this lousy world so you have to suffer for years and years? If you kill your mother now, YOU did it, I didn't kill her.

All the OP wanted to do is complete the game without killing anyone. He never killed or hired anyone who killed since he had zero companion kills while they were "employed" by him. He might not be completely innocent, but he never said he was trying for that.

So what you're saying is Hitler did nothing wrong.

I don't know if I agree with that.

No, of course I'm not. I added later, bosses might get all the glory but they also get all the blame when others do their dirty work.

That's the point. You can TECHNICALLY go through and say "it's a no kill run" - which, because it's a video game, is as close as you can get ..... but it's not really a no kill run, it's more like "getting your heavies to do all the killing" run.

[Fuhrer]

Originally posted by isengrim:

Originally posted by Fuhrer:

So what you're saying is Hitler did nothing wrong.

I don't know if I agree with that.

No, of course I'm not. I added later, bosses might get all the glory but they also get all the blame when others do their dirty work.

That's the point. You can TECHNICALLY go through and say "it's a no kill run" - which, because it's a video game, is as close as you can get ..... but it's not really a no kill run, it's more like "getting your heavies to do all the killing" run.

I... wasn't talking to you?

[xyzzyxyzzy2]

Originally posted by The_Pastmaster:

Re: #1: 10 Charisma does not give 100% chance to pass speech checks. :) It's very possible to fail on the red (hard) ones. The yellow (easy) ones, not so much though.

Are you sure? I had dozens of speech checks throughout my playthrough, including red ones, and never failed any of them. I might have just gotten lucky, though.