There are a lot of perks in Fallout 3. The majority of them just provide small bonuses
to various skills: +5 to Repair and Medicine, +15 to Barter, +10 to Speech, that sort of
thing. But there’s one perk that actually gives
you a new way to attack enemies. Can You Beat Fallout 3 As A Nuclear Anomaly? Uh… probably not. Nuclear Anomaly is a perk you can’t get
until you reach level 30, which also happens to be the max level in Fallout 3 even with
all DLCs installed. In this challenge, the only way to attack
an enemy is with that perk. So could you somehow reach level 30 in Fallout
3 without attacking anything? I highly doubt it since there are no XP farm
“exploits”, if you want to call them that, like there are in Fallout 4, at least not
that I’m aware of. Which means there are 2 ways for me to get
this perk and both involve cheating, but we’ll get to that in a bit. Inside Vault 101, I named myself Adam Bomb,
and started assigning SPECIAL Points. I drained Strength, Charisma, and Intelligence
because they had no value to me, maxed out Perception and Endurance to be able to take
a couple important perks, and put the rest in Agility and Luck. Looking back, Luck was probably a waste, I
think I would’ve been better off putting those points in Strength. The bonus to all skills is negligible and
I have a hard time believing Critical damage applies to the walking Nagasaki perk. I did kill the roach during my 10th birthday
party only so that I wouldn’t have to play the game as a baby or as a child, escaped
the vault without attacking anything as I’ve done many times, and stepped outside ready
to leave the world of mortals behind and take my place among the stars. I used the reward xp command to give myself
enough experience points to get me to level 30, and began the process of assigning skill
points and picking skills. In an effort to not become too overpowered,
because I’d be at level 30 and would have a bunch of perks by the time this was over,
I spread out my skill points evenly amongst all skills as I leveled up. I think this is a fair way to balance things
out. Almost half of the skills - Big Guns, Energy
Weapons, Explosives, Melee Weapons, Small Guns, and Unarmed - are worthless since I
can’t use any of those weapons. Doing it this way kept me from maxing out
only the skills I’d be using, like Medicine or Repair. I’m not going through all the perks I picked,
there isn’t time to talk about 30 different perks. The big ones were Explorer which marked all
locations on my map, Rad Tolerance to slap Minor Radiation Poisoning back to where it
belongs, Rad Absorption to turn my sweat into a cool neon green color, Devil’s Highway
to set my Karma to Very Evil, Toughness which was a dumb move on my part, No Weaknesses
to raise all SPECIAL stats lower than 5 up to 5, and Nuclear Anomaly. With this perk, any time your health is below
20%, you erupt into a devastating nuclear explosion causing big damage to everyone and
everything near you, including your armor and your limbs. With just about every skill at 70 and the
power to channel a nuclear detonation inside me, I set off into the Capital Wasteland,
looking for people to annihilate. My first stop was Silver out in an abandoned
house. Because I couldn’t directly attack her to
trick her into activating my trap card, I had to steal worthless objects from her. It was funny to watch her put bullet after
bullet into my sternum. She thought she could kill me. After spending more time than you’d think
being filled with lead and taunting her with coffee cups, my health got to below 20% and
nothing happened. You wanna now why? I messed up. I read “when your health is below 20”
as “when your health is below 20%”. I suppose this is why I had to take those
special reading classes in kindergarten. So, with 620 hit points, I’ve gotta get
down to a single sliver of health left before I detonates. And the wacky part is that my eruption can
actually kill me, which seemed counterintuitive and weird. Turning my legs into the remnants of a roadkill
squirrel dropped into a high powered blender was expected, but death was not. Unfazed by my own demise, I entered Megaton,
and was a righteous prick to Moira. My rudeness towards her pissed her off, which
then pissed me off even more than she was, prompting me to come to the realization that
everyone in this town had to go. I stole the eraser off a pencil and everyone
lost their mind. Bullets were flying, my blood was all over
the place, explosions happened many times, it was wonderful. I didn’t even have to fight back. In their attempts to kill me they made me
more powerful than they could ever imagine. Now, there are a couple unique quirks and
feature that affect this perk, because it is, after all, a Bethesda game. The good thing is that it restores some health
when you do the big boom. That’s useful because you can only detonate
once every 10 seconds. With enough health, that gives you time to
run out the clock and get ready to cosplay as a mushroom cloud. And the explosion itself is pretty large. I’ve seen people say it’s a worthless
perk but that’s simply not true. If nothing else, having it as a failsafe that
is automatically activated when your health is low enough makes it worth having. The downside is that it sometimes doesn’t
work. The explosion happens but the people around
you are not damaged by it in any way. My guess is that it’s because this perk
is kind of like Euclid’s C-Finder from New Vegas, it’s not meant to be used as frequently
as I used it. Later in the playthrough I figured out that
quick-saving and quick-loading before you destroy everything can sometimes fix it, but
other times it doesn’t. The last thing, as I mentioned not long ago,
is that depending on the difficulty the blast can kill you, so you’ve got to be careful
about what difficulty you choose to play on. With most of the people in town dead or wishing
they were, I spoke to Burke, rigged the bomb to see my big brother in action later in life,
tried to rob Crow outside of Megaton to devastate the outside as I did the inside, but nobody
was brave enough to face a walking nuclear warhead in open combat. The metal lad seemed ready for it, but he
was too weak. I didn’t want to take advantage of something
that wasn’t even alive in the first place. A Yao Guia though? Oh yeah, I’m all about it. The big beaver faced his end in style, even
doing a summersault into the afterlife. I played with a little doggie too. It used the flesh on my forearm as a chew
toy. I gave it a bop on the snout with a nuclear
newspaper to let it know that wasn’t allowed in the Mitten Squad household, and went shopping
for more dead bodies. They weren’t in stock, but I know a guy
who knows a guy who could help me out with that. Both of those guys are me. What surprised me was that I actually managed
to die a few times while dealing with the Raiders. Most likely because 20 health isn’t really
all that much. If someone has a powerful gun like a combat
shotgun, it’s fairly likely that they’ll take you from 23 to 0 before you can say Hiroshima. Having clipped the right coupons to get a
3 for 1 special, I spent, I dunno I don’t know, 5 minutes putting all the shopping carts
back where they belonged. Then I thought a grenade would send them all
flying, but that didn’t happen. Let down and unable to parkour on the flaming
car, I continued South East towards you know who. She may be powerful, but even she cannot overcome
the power of the Atom. I reached my hand up in there and grabbed
some goodies, she caught me of course, how could she not, I’ve got fingernails like
razor blades, and I unfortunately failed at making her mad enough to attack me. It’s like she knew what I was doing. I even tried throwing one of her buckets inside
her shack to really turn her tumbleweed into a tornado, but it didn’t work. Then, needing her to be dead already, I allowed
myself to hit her one time with my hands. The vile “woman” ran into the sea. She’s as smart as she is stupid. She knew the ocean was the one place I couldn’t
get her. Maybe. I kinda forgot that drowning hurts and stood
on the pier instead of breathing in the water to drain my health enough to explode while
submerged in water. The Curse of Grandma Sparkle, for the first
time in recorded history, did not plague me, but only because I couldn’t kill her. To make up for that, I broke both my legs
by accidentally jumping off a bridge on purpose and getting into a scuffle with a group of
Raiders camped out under that bridge. One of the trolls thought he had me because
he had the high ground. I’d make another Star War reference but
the only one I’ve seen all the way through is Solo. After discovering the Citadel, I crossed the
river to the Jefferson Memorial where Centaurs and Super Mutants littered the landscape and
were eager to meet their maker. The first blast got ‘em good, the horse
dog tentacle monster man and his owner died, but the others were not amused by my little
magic trick, they didn’t take damage. However, because my health was partially restored
after each explosion, I could just stand there and take the punishment until it happened
again. Didn’t work the 2nd time either, so I entered
the Memorial to cause great damage to the structure of the building as well as those
inside. The perk is so powerful that even a Super
Mutant Master can be brought to justice with a singular usage of it. One of the more annoying parts of using this
perk is how long it can take to get the bad guys to suck your hit points away with their
fancy guns and big sticks. You want to find the right middle ground in
terms of difficulty where the Nuke doesn’t kill you but the attacks from your attackers
aren’t so powerful that they’ll kill you before the explosion can happen either. I found that to be Easy or Normal, depending
on the instance. As I was being stricken down by the bullies
in the basement, something caught my eye, this Super Mutant, he looked different than
the others and I couldn’t figure out why. I learned later that it’s because they’re
the Overlord variety of Mutant and are the toughest of the Super Mutants excluding the
Behemoth. He was tricky to take down due to his toughness
and because of the damage thing I mentioned earlier. It took 3 Nuclear Anomaly Explosions to bring
him down. Compared to him, none of the others inside
were much of a threat. The memorial was cleared out, as were the
Mutants on the outside, and I set my sights on Smith Casey’s Garage. A couple more explosions happened on the way
out there. A bee wasn’t very interested in my idea
of being tag-teamed by itself and a dog so it killed the dog before I could, I killed
it, blew up a mole rat with my body, and watched as a pair of Albino Radscoprions made a Sentry
Bot their friend. If you want a real fight, these are the guys
you need to seek out. The Fallout wiki says they have the 3rd most
hit points of any NPC in the game, only being surpassed by Behemoths and that General from
the Operation Anchorage DLC. What’s more, they also possess traits similar
to that of the Solar Powered perk, meaning they slowly regenerate health while in the
sun. On the Easy difficulty, a single sting was
enough to kill me with somewhere around 160 hit points left. They’re no joke. But I am. I’m the big joke, and my body is the punchline. Well, my nuclear discharge is the punchline. But even then, getting myself into a position
where it could go off was no easy feat. I had to use armor and stimpaks to lessen
the damage of their attacks. It was more difficult than you’d think,
and it still took multiple blasts to kill them, assuming they actually hurt the scorpions,
because sometimes they didn’t. With their insidy-parts inside me, I continued
my journey towards the garage. At least I did until I got distracted by an
idea. That idea being stung multiple times by the
deadliest albino anything to ever exist on God’s grey and brown and green earth. A couple hooligans lured me into their sewer
with the promise of candy then proceeded to beat me to death with tire irons until my
molecules could stand it no longer and unleashed their ultimate finishing move which did nothing
because this sewer is imaginary, I’m not actually here right now. See, I’m outside. I also went ahead and activated the free cam
to get a wide shot of what it looks like when I erupt. It was… kind of a let down. Wasn’t very interesting. What was interesting was stealing from a group
of Brotherhood Outcasts to annoy them. That was a big one, big enough to cripple
all my limbs that mattered. There wasn’t anything valuable in the one
left unharmed. At Tenpenny Tower, I told Gustavo that I’d
handle the Ghoul problem for him and set off for the Metro station. The Feral Ghouls and Glowing Ones were similar
to the Albino scorpions from two paragraphs ago, they ripped and tore away at my health
until it was gone. Inside the station, I got mauled to the point
of exhaustion by a third dozen of ghouls. They were pussies who took too long to drain
my health enough for a violent outburst. Roy Phillips said me a profanity even after
I told him how much I hate it when people swear at me. He died, Michael McMaster took longer than
I would’ve liked to deplete my hit points and didn’t even have the common courtesy
to die after being on the receiving end of a human-shaped nuclear blast. After a couple reloads, he did, but the eye
candy of the ghoul world would not fall before me. Even after allowing myself to hit a feral
woman, she slashed me with a knife a couple times then ran away. Unable to kill that which has been stuck on
the border between life and death for generations, I left the tunnels, reported my failure back
to Gustavo, met Missus Burke at the top of the tower, watched a weird looking explosion,
the mushroom cloud was there but it was missing the fire part of the fire ball. Odd. Mrs Tenpenny was as stunning as ever, I dropped
a gift down to the peasants below, exploded another mutated bear, arrived at the Garage,
and entered Tranquility Lane. Before getting on with the summoning of make
believe communists, I hit my dad a couple times to anger him into biting me. The Nuclear Anomaly perk does in fact work
on Tranquility Lane, but Bradley was unscathed. Some guys in fancy hats showed up and started
shooting people, I postponed the challenge for a moment because this isn’t real, it’s
imaginary too, so that I could get the communists to shoot a weird looking little boy until
nuclear armageddon gushed from his open chest cavity, but they weren’t having that. So I left the simulation, spoke to mother,
and left her in the dust. Like, I trapped her down in the vault area
with the mole rats. Outside, I excitedly ran towards a group of
5 Talon Company Mercenaries. The Sentry Bot robbed me of my fun like the
people in the Mitten Squad discord when we changed all the role colors to purple for
like 15 minutes. But Father Fate saw my struggle and sent a
Deathclaw to rip the pain away. We ran towards each other ready to embrace,
then he ignored me in favor of the Albino claw thing. The Deathclaw never stood a chance, I exploded,
the ordinary scorpion melted into the pavement, I entered Little Lamplight, and made my way
to Murder Pass. I did this because I didn’t really feel
like going to Rivet City or ever seeing my mother who calls himself Dad ever again. The base mutants in the hell cave weren’t
much to send a letter home about, but the Overlords sure as shit were. They had these tri-beam lasers that could
mess you up in a matter of seconds without being able to detonate yourself before you
die. Again, it required a combination of actual
armor, stimpaks, and Med-X to be able to activate the perk on them. The Overlords were still not a pushover though. Deeper inside, I kept dying to the Overlord,
probably because I quick-saved right around the time the laser entered my nostril. The 10 second period between blasts also bit
me in the fanny here, it took a lot more effort than I would’ve liked to get to the Test
Chambers. Thankfully, Sid and the Centaur twins were
able to be made dead easily enough. The explosion kept not damaging the mutants,
so I started ignoring them, grabbed the GECK while taking a surprisingly low amount of
radiation damage, tried to self-destruct on these mutants with my flimsy body, but my
life left my body around the time I died, so it didn’t really work out. Fawkes ignored me as I got abducted by the
Enclave, what a true friend that guy is, I got my stuff back, and began making my way
through the Enclave base. I went out of my way to make sure the Scientists
were eradicated when I exploded, met the President, got the vial, returned to the Citadel, and
remembered that I hadn’t actually entered the Citadel yet, so I had to exploit my way
inside. I’ve done this as a baby, I’ve done it
without moving the camera, being a sentient warhead with full control of all my limbs
made this a cake walk. This probably the easiest time I’ve ever
had getting under the Citadel. From there, all that was left to do was meet
Elder Lyons for the first time, get my armor, and follow Liberty Prime to the Jefferson
Memorial. The unfortunate thing is that pushing through
waves and fortified Enclave encampments is where this perk would shine, but that’s
not what you’re doing. If you had ranged weapons, you could help
out, but when you have to be within 7 feet of someone and on the verge of death just
to have a chance at doing damage to an enemy, you’re effectively useless. Just before the bridge, I had the chance to
destroy this Enclave Soldier with a stupid face, but the Brotherhood reinforcements arrived
and stole his death from me. I was 8 hit points away from going off on
him, then they kil led him. But the exploding car sure as killed me. Inside the Memorial, I died several times,
detonated several more, and entered the Rotunda. Predictably, the perk failed to work here. I’d love to say that this perk is like my
air conditioner, it just works, but both of those statements would be lies. In time, Colonel Autumn was turned into a
puddle of corpse on the ground. Someone I never met told Sarah Lyons that
we had to activate the purifier now if we wanted to live, she asked which of us were
going inside to do the deed… and I told her no. Neither of us are going in and I’m not telling
her the code. What she didn’t understand is that this
is not the face of a man who wants to continue living. This man has seen what the universe looks
like inside out and is ready to die. The purifier exploded, taking both myself
and Sarah with it, and I’m like 90% sure I didn’t beat Fallout 3 as a Nuclear Anomaly.
