Fallout – How to automate the hacking minigame

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Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas have a hacking minigame that's basically Mastermind. You have a bunch of passwords and four tries. When you get the wrong password, you get the number of letters that were correctly placed. That's it.

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How can I play this minigame effectively without resorting to pen and paper and guesswork or tables with the known correct passwords?

Best Answer

I have already automated this for you. My solver is available at: http://moria.us/fallout3/terminal.html

Note: this is a single-page application, so you can just save the solver to your hard drive as an HTML file and run it from there.

Tutorial

Let's suppose you find the words RAMBO, DUMBO, MAMBA, BRICK, TANKS. Go ahead and enter those into the solver.

[del] RAMBO -0- -1- -2- -3- -4- 3 moves
[del] DUMBO -0- -1- -2- -3- -4- 3 moves
[del] MAMBA -0- -1- -2- -3- -4- 2 moves
[del] BRICK -0- -1- -2- -3- -4- 3 moves
[del] TANKS -0- -1- -2- -3- -4- 3 moves

You can see in the right column some of the words are marked as "2 moves" and some of the words are marked as "3 moves". This column is a little tricky to explain, but this shows the maximum number of required moves necessary to solve the puzzle under the following conditions:

  1. You select that word next, and

  2. You play perfectly afterwards.

So you can see that if you select MAMBA, you will need to guess at most two words in order to find the correct word.

Suppose you select MAMBA, and you have 2 positions correct. Click on the -2- next to MAMBA:

[del] RAMBO -0- -1- -2- -3- -4-
[del] DUMBO -0- -1- -2- -3- -4- 1 moves
[del] MAMBA -0- -1- [2] -3- -4-
[del] BRICK -0- -1- -2- -3- -4-
[del] TANKS -0- -1- -2- -3- -4-

The word must be DUMBO (which is the second move).

During a playthrough of Fallout 3, I noticed that a large number of terminals mostly had "5 move" words with maybe one or two "4 move" words. This means that using the tool, you can play perfectly and beat those terminals every single time... but without the tool, I would abort after three failed guesses.

All you need to do is click a word with a low number of moves.

More information

You can see why MAMBA is the best by clicking on all of the numbers next to MAMBA. No matter what you click, only one other word will be left (or zero).

If you pick a different word, like RAMBO, you might still be left with two choices afterwards. For example, if you choose RAMBO but have 3 positions left, you get:

[del] RAMBO -0- -1- -2- [3] -4-
[del] DUMBO -0- -1- -2- -3- -4- 2 moves
[del] MAMBA -0- -1- -2- -3- -4- 2 moves
[del] BRICK -0- -1- -2- -3- -4-
[del] TANKS -0- -1- -2- -3- -4-

How it works

"View Source" works fine, it's all JavaScript. If I recall correctly, it recursively calculates the maximum number of moves necessary by examining situations like "what if you choose DUMBO and you have 3 correct". The maxmoves() function is where it's at.

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