Hacking in Fallout 76 is the same as it is in other Fallout titles. But for those joining the game thanks to watching the (incredible) show, this may be a tricky feature to get around.
Hacking in Fallout 76
Hacking in Fallout 76 is relatively simple. There are many terminals in the world that can be hacked into, but you’ll only be able to start hacking terminals that you have the skill for. Without any hacking perk cards, you’ll have a skill of 0, and can only hack terminals with a skill of 0. But more on that later.
When initiating a hack, you’ll have a standard four attempts to get it right or you’ll have to wait a small cooldown before trying again. Alternatively, you can exit the terminal and try again, restarting the hack but replenishing your attempts.
You will be given a long string of words (all the same character length) and special characters. Upon hovering your mouse over a word, the whole word will highlight. Your aim is to select the right password, which will unlock the terminal.
Upon selecting an incorrect word, you will be told the “likeness” of that word to the target word. This likeness tell you how many characters of your chosen word share the same space as the target word. Your job now is to pick another term that only has a character or characters matching the space of the previous word the number of times as the likeness dictates.
You will get a new likeness if the next word you picked is also wrong, which will help you narrow down your searching even more. Make sure the word you picks corroborates with the likeness of all previous attempts.
You will keep doing this until you fail, or find the right password.
Tip: If you picked a word that has a likeness with the previous word, but that word’s likeness is 0, then that means that the character you used is the wrong one.
Make sure to find complete bracket sets
A rather hidden feature of hacking are the complete bracket sets. In between the words will be random strings of special characters. Hidden amongst them, however, may be bracket sets, in the form of “[….],” “<….>,” or “(….).”
Upon hovering over the first bracket, the whole bracket set will light up. So you can easily identify these bracket sets by hovering your cursor over every special character. Clicking these bracket sets will give one of the following benefits:
- Your attempts will be reset
- An incorrect word will be removed
It is always worth looking for all of these bracket sets, which will appear in random quantities with every hacking attempt.
Hacking perks in Fallout 76
To gain access to higher level terminals, and to reduce your lockout time on an unsuccessful attempt, you’ll want to equip Hacker perks.
Here are all the Hacker perk cards, which you’ll need to level up your Intelligence to equip:
| Perk Card Name | Perk Card Effect | Perk Card Equip Level |
| Hacker | Increase hacking skill by 1, and reduce lockout time. | 4 |
| Expert Hacker | Increase hacking skill by 1, and reduce lockout time. | 22 |
| Master Hacker | Increase hacking skill by 1, and reduce lockout time. | 38 |
As you can see, each of these hacking perk cards all improve your skill by one. As they can’t be upgraded, you’ll have to level up your Intelligence to equip more of them to hack higher level terminals.
These can be found from the usual perk card packs.
Note that the Master Infiltrator legendary perk will increase your hacking skill by 3, making these perk cards redundant. You’ll be able to choose it for your legendary perk slot once you unlock your first one at level 50. It also helps with your lockpicking.
