Overview
Beaten the game but missed the hardcore achievement?Here is a set of tips on how to make a speedrun on hardcore provided that you already beaten the game once and you already know the basics.You may need a map of the game with that.
Character creation and skills to keep an eye on
Create a female character (cause you will need the Black Widow Perk)
Set the game’s difficulty to Very Easy and choose Hardcore mode when asked.
Make sure that Endurance, Intelligence and Agility are on maxed on 10 points, the rest don’t matter.
This way you will run very fast and you will have extra skillpoints and hitpoints
Tag Skills: Barter, Speech, Survival. Keep rising them up and prioritise Speach while playing the game. Make sure you have reached at least Speech 95 before the Hoover Dam mission.
First 2 Traits: Just put one on Good Natured, the second can be anything else you want.
Perks you gonna need: Level 2: Black Widow, Level 4: Educated, Level 6: Travel Light
With these skills you can outrun all human enemies (like fiends or powergangers) and can jump over animals like scorpions.
You can throw extra points to Medicine so that stimpacks give you extra healthpoints
First steps, how to reach Benni
– Grab anything you can from Doc Mitchell’s house including stimpacks, food, a doctor’s bag.
– Follow a path directly to The Strip but you have to make sure you discover some places in your map on your way there. Make sure you visit these places in the right order: Hidden Valley, El Dorado Substation (from Hidden Valley go to Scorpion Gulch from there to Helios One, El Dorado Substation is right North from Helios), then go to 188 Trading Post and recruit Veronica (you will need her so keep her alive.) and then keep it north until you reach New Vegas. On your way, sell any extra stuff you don’t need so that you can gather the 2k caps needed to enter the strip.
Benni and Yes Man, Visiting the Tribes
– Go right to the Tops, talk to Benny and use the Black Widow Perk to convince him to sleep with you. Kill him in his sleep and take his suit (he drops it on the floor next to the bed)
– Talk to Yes Man and ask him about all tribes.
tribes:
1:White Glove Society– go to Ultra Luxe: Just talk to Mortimer
2:The Omertas– go to Gomorrah: just entering and having your guns taken away is enough, go back out
3:The Great Khans– go to the Monorail Terminal in the Strip, by entering the monorail door you will have the guards alarmed and shoot, don’t worry, run past them and use the monorail to travel to Camp McCarran, once you are there it will be as if nothing happened. Go west to the Red Rock Canyon and talk to the 3 Great Khans who should be having their meal in their homebase (to find that house asap, just keep your eye on your upper right as you enter the Red Rock Canyon).
4:Brotherhood of Steel-fast travel to Hidden Valley, Veronica will open the door for you. Talk to head of security Ramos.
5:Boomers-fast travel back to Vegas. But head directly to the Nellis Air Force Base. Talk to Pearl. Easiest way is to tell Veronica to wait for you before heading into the bombardment session cause she might die.
You can either do the take cover and run and take cover and run trick.
Or you can just run directly through and have a chance to get yourself hit once or twice and have to use yours doctors bag.
– Fast travel back to Yes Man and tell him to him to ignore each tribe.
Final chapter, Hoover Dam
– Yes Man will take you to the basement demonstration and then you get back up.
– On the next dialogue with Yes Man choose to tell him that you don’t care about what happens to President Kimball (this way you completelly skip the mission)
– Yes Man will tell you to go to El Dorado Substation, fast travel there, do your job fast in and out. 90% nobody will notice you especially at day time cause they are all out patrolling. If the guards see you coming in and attack you, you can do your job and as soon as you get out you can fast travel back to New Vegas and back to Yes Man.
– Begin the Hoover Dam battle
– Just keep running past any enemy. Your hitpoints, speed and skills will help you survive.
– You can use speech to make the 2 power armored NCR guards at the controller room go away.
– Do your job, go in and out fast, head to Lanius’s camp.
– Run past everyone until you reach Lanius.
before talking to Lanius, put on Bennis suit. Your speech was aimed to be at least 95 by the time you start the Hoover Dam mission. Benni’s suit give you +5. Now you have 100 Speech.
Use all Speechcraft options to debate Lanius and convince him to listen to reason.
– Back at the exploding gate you meet General Oliver, choose Yes Man’s ending and finish the game.
and you never even fired a single shot.