How to Hack Terminals

During your adventure, you'll come across various terminals in different locations. These terminals may contain logs entered by their previous users, controls to deactivate/reactivate doors, safes or Defense systems, activate and program robots, and many more. Some terminals, especially those who hide precious loot or rooms behind them will usually be password-protected. Hacking these terminals yield an ample amount of experience.

Locked terminals can be accessed in two ways: finding its password or forcibly hacking it. A terminal's password is usually found in the same location, either dropped by an enemy, found among other loots, or playing a holotape found in the same area.

The game doesn't provide any tutorial on how to hack terminals but players of Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas will be able to breeze through them since the mechanics are practically the same. Locked terminals will give you four attempts to select the correct password displayed on the screen. In F3 and FNV, selecting the incorrect password four times in a row will permanently lock you out of a terminal (you'll have another chance if you have a specific perk)

In Fallout 4, selecting four incorrect passwords will just lock you out from the terminal for a mere 10 seconds then you're good to try again. Exiting the terminal screen after 3 incorrect passwords will prevent you from getting locked out but the passwords will be randomized again.

The actual password cracking process needs some thinking. When you access a locked terminal, you'll see a screen with random words and symbols. Ignore the symbols since you have to select the correct word as the password. The length of the words listed determine the difficulty of the terminal. Novice difficulty will usually feature 4-5 character words.

Selecting the first word is purely a wild guess (which you can unlock in one attempt just by pure Luck) but in normal circumstances, this first word will be your clue. After selecting a word, the terminal will display it on the lower right-hand corner of the screen and will display "Likeness = X". This states how many letters of the selected word is in the same position as the correct password. In the image example above where the correct password is "Harem", the first word selected is "Faces". Both words have letters "A" and "E" in the 2nd and 4th positions. So when we selected the second word "Razed", coincidentally, letters "A" and "E" in the 2nd and 4th positions as well. That Lead us to the conclusion that the correct password is "Harem".

Once again, "Likeness =X" is your clue; where X is the number of correct positions of the letters from your selected word and the terminal's correct password.