Usefulness?

You can find various terminals while wandering trough Washington D.C. in Fallout 3, these usually open doors/safes or even better, you can get some lore out of them. Without knowing how to hack properly you would be missing out on some of the best loot, the best weapons, the most fun secrets, and a big piece of the story, vault backstories for example can be really interesting.

Is it really THAT important?

Well, yes and no, it's not required to beat the game, but it sure makes it easier, and if you care about lore it's a good skill to max out

When you interact with a terminal you will be greeted by a computer screen with random characters and words in it. One of these words is the password, and through the power of hacking you can click the right one, the harder terminals contain more and longer possible passwords

The Screen


Now how do I do it?

After you click on a word, a small message appears on the bottom right corner of the computer screen, it tells you how many letters are in the right place in the password, IT DOES NOT MEAN that if all the words have an A in their words it's impossible to hack, it means that there is an A in the password, just not in the right place. It's complicated to read but easy when you get the hang out of it. Trust me


In this case the password was "Sides" how did he figure it out?, he first clicked "Lines" and the terminal told him that 3/5 words were right, but he didn't know which ones, so he clicked a word that was very similar to it, "Likes" he could easily figure which were the right letters, see for yourself

L I N E S
L I K E S

so I E S were the right letters in the right place, going by exclusion the password was "Sides" maybe you would think that it could have been the L too but by comparing the words there was no other that would meet the requirements if L was included.

How does the interface work?

Attempts: These will determine how many times you can click a word and see if it's the correct password, don't finish the attempts or it's over, you will not be able to retry to hack the terminal, if you have one attempt left, it's best to reset the terminal by pressing the off button (big red one in the lower right corner) this will reset the attempts too. IF you do run out of attempts the terminal will be locked, but don't panic, you can try finding the password (in closets etc...) but it's not always available or if you get the "Computer Whiz" perk you can retry to hack the computer again... just don't screw up again or it's over forever (unless you wanna use console commands)

The Words on screen: This is the big chunk of random characters and words that fill up the majority of the screen. In this block somewhere is the correct password, our job is to find out which one it is by process of elimination. There are also some special sections of the code that can either give you back a mistaken attempt or remove a password choice from the block completely, but we'll see this later.

The... number that pops up and tells you how close you were to the solution

this little part of the code tells you how close you were to the solution 4/12 letters for example, it will not tell you which of the letters are right, you gotta use your brain and figure it out.

The Power Button The red button on the bottom right of the screen exits you out of the terminal. It's used to shut down the terminal (duh) when you don't have enough attempts it will automatically throw you out. It's best to shut down the terminal when you have 1 attempt left, because if you reach 0 the terminal will lock itself.

Tips and Tricks

choosing the right word:when choosing the first word search for similar words or words that end in "ING "ATION" "TION" and others that won't come to mind now.

Go by elimination What i said in the "How do i do it" section, you should think when hacking, not click random words.

Secrets of the code

...this is where the guide gets juicy



Hidden in the code block you may be able to find what I like to refer to as a "Bracket Trick." A Bracket Trick is a collection of those random punctuation marks that appear between the words that are encased in a bracket of any kind. In the code block above, there is one hidden in there. Every terminal has a chance to produce bracket tricks, but not every terminal will have one. Some may even have multiple tricks. To tell if you have found a Bracket Trick all you have to do is hover the cursor over the opening bracket. If the entire thing lights up, congratulations, you found it. Click it and there are 2 possible outcomes

(i took these last 7 lines of the guide from a note i used to keep on my desktop so somewhere out there on the internet credit to some guy)

Outcome 1 The computer will remove a word that was not the password

Outcome 2: the computer will replenish your attempts to 4

(Credit to Buzzard) If the duds have all been removed and a bracket is selected, the message "Entry Denied" will be displayed. (No more words to delete)

(Credit to Bort)

With regards to the bracket tricks, they can be applied to the following:

<>
[]
{}
()

Having multiple opening brackets on a line means that there are multiple tricks on that line.

Example: <34h<gfuihsd>

Thanks for reading this guide, this hacking mechanic also applies to Fallout new vegas and Fallout 4.

EDIT 04 April 2024: Fixed some typos that were long overdue. Final edit, is this you?
EDIT 16 Jun, 2018: changed the conclusion
EDIT 30 April 2016: Fixed some typos