There are 78 permanent SPECIAL points in Fallout 4.

• You start off with 28 points.
• You can find a You're SPECIAL! book in your Sanctuary home for another point.
  • Can only increase a maxed stat if a debuff like alcohol is used to temporarily lower one of your maxed stats
• You can train all your SPECIAL stats up to 10, so that's 42 remaining points.
• Additional Bobbleheads (for each specific SPECIAL stat) can be found, 7 points.

You can max out your character with 10 in each SPECIAL trait provided every time you level up you simply choose the appropriate training to increase your stats (as opposed to choosing perks).

Remember, there's no level cap, so you can keep on levelling and start getting other perks later.

So you start off with 28, but you can easily improve all of them to 70, should you choose to only train those perks starting at Level 2.

This means 70 - 28 = 42. Meaning the earliest you could max out all your stats is getting to Level 43, while every time you level up putting points in the stat you want to increase, provided you also don't find any bobbleheads along your way.

Additionally, some perks grant permanent increases in stats at specific times of the day or at a certain HP level, so those are technically also "permanent".

In order to contribute to your likeness score, a letter must be in the correct position. For the sake of example, let's assume that CARS is the correct password. In this case:

• BARS would yield a likeness score of 3
• CAMP would yield a likeness score of 2
• BRAS would yield a likeness score of 1

It is worth noting that this is not the only mechanic at play - if you find a matching set of parentheses, brackets, or braces ( (...), [...], {...}) on the same line, you can click on the leftmost of the pair without using an attempt. Doing so will either reset your attempts, or eliminate an incorrect password from the terminal.

As pointed out by Nolonar, there are situtations where you can reuse a closing punctuation mark multiple times. For example, you would be able to use the first two braces within the following string: {..{..}. This does not work in reverse - You will only get one use out of the string {..}..}.