Vault-Tec Bobblehead

The Vault Boy bobblehead figures were promotional Vault-Tec items.

Twenty of them can be found in the Capital Wasteland. No matter their location, bobbleheads are always considered to have no owner, so there is never any karma loss or risk of retaliation for taking a bobblehead. Once found, you can store the bobbleheads on a Bobblehead Collector's Stand in your House in Megaton or in your Tenpenny Tower Suite.

Two of the achievements/trophies involve collecting Vault Boy Bobbleheads. The first achievement or trophy is named Yes, I play with dolls and is awarded for collecting 10 of them, players then earn the second achievement/trophy called Vault-Tec C.E.O. for finding all 20 of them.

Effect
Each of the Vault Boy bobbleheads in Fallout 3 permanently increases one of the 7 S.P.E.C.I.A.L. statistics by 1 point or one of the 13 skills of the player character by 10 points. The bobbleheads will not increase a statistic beyond the maximum of 10 (S.P.E.C.I.A.L.) or 100 (skills). Keep that in mind when planning your character, or their bonus might be wasted. It is inadvisable to max out any of your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. before collecting the bobbleheads, as any that are collected afterwards will have the bonuses go to waste.

With the addition of the new Almost Perfect perk that becomes available when level 30 is reached, (Broken Steel DLC required) it is tempting for advanced players to wait until they can use this perk, then collect all Bobbleheads. This is because Almost Perfect raises all of the player's S.P.E.C.I.A.L. to 9, so collecting all bobbleheads after taking the perk makes it possible to raise all stats to 10. This requires waiting until level 30, however, which could handicap you for much of the game. You should weigh the benefits of higher stats now (more skill points from high Intelligence, access to various perks) against having a "perfect score" later on.

List
For videos showing Bobblehead locations, see the bottom of this article.

Bobbleheads with an asterisk (*) on it can be lost. Read the respective footnote for the conditions.

Point Lookout
In the Point Lookout add-on, several "fake" Bobbleheads appear (called Schmault-Tec Bubbleheads) during a hallucination sequence as part of the main questline (after you get sprayed with the Punga Fume). These bobbleheads are larger in size than normal bobbleheads. They cannot be added to inventory but give the player sarcastic messages. For instance, when finding the Luck Bobblehead, it says, "Dead mother, life in a post-nuclear Wasteland and not a friend in it. Yeah, you aren't exactly blessed," When finding the Charisma Bobblehead, you see birthday balloons, and a skeleton on an operating table; then when you look at the skeleton it says "Mom." Also, the bobbleheads are found in an almost identical order as the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attributes, and there are bobbleheads for the attributes and for the skills.

Behind the scenes
The bobbleheads were also used as a Fallout 3 promotional item by Bethesda Softworks and are included in the Collector's Edition of the game. They are identical to the ones in-game, but are in a generic standing-with-arms-folded pose.

See: Fallout 3 promotional items.

Videos

 * Video guides for obtaining all twenty Bobbleheads

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