

Starvation in New Vegas increases at a rate of about 4.75 for every in-game hour, a constant rate that can only be offset by feeding the player’s character.


Here’s a breakdown of how Hardcore Mode’s needs actually impact your stats and gameplay, based on information provided by the fantastic Fallout Wiki. This forces players to re-evaluate the value of items, people that try to take every scrap of loot from an abandoned vault will find themselves struggling to balance heavy metal armor with the bottles of water and steaks that they need to survive. Low strength builds may not be able to carry enough food, water, and ammo along with the loot they pick up along the way to keep their primary needs under control. As the bars representing each need increase the player will begin to experience debuffs and other effects that correspond with the level of deficiency, up to and including death if a meter reaches the a maximum value of 1000.Īs an added layer of difficulty in Hardcore Mode, ammo is also given weight, which forces the player to balance inventory carefully. At the start of your adventure three bars are slapped into the player’s status menu each similar to that of the radiation meter with which most players are already familiar. Hardcore Mode operates on a very simple system of scavenging and cramming food and water into your character’s corpse as fast as possible.

With Hardcore Mode, stimpacks and rad-away no longer heal the player instantly, and biological needs such as sleep, hunger, and thirst are suddenly crucial to the player’s survival. Going HardcoreĮarly on in New Vegas, as players prepare to take their first steps out of Doc Mitchel’s humble abode into the searing desert sun of the Mojave Wasteland, players are asked if they would like to enable Hardcore Mode. With a few options and tweaks, you can make the world of Falloutas challenging and unforgiving as you would expect a nuclear wasteland to be. In the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout: New Vegas, the form of that challenge in the core game comes mainly from the dangerous enemies you’ll encounter - and even then, the game isn’t particularly difficult on its normal setting.īut when Hardcore Mode and mods are added into the mix, that’s when things get really interesting. They crave challenging game worlds that push them to their limits.
