Fallout 3 bugs

Add-on-specific bugs
For add-on specific bugs, please see the following pages:


 * Operation: Anchorage bugs
 * The Pitt bugs
 * Broken Steel bugs
 * Point Lookout bugs
 * Mothership Zeta bugs

NPC-specific bugs

 * For NPC-specific bugs, please see the respective NPC article page.
 * For bugs that apply to NPCs in general or to followers in general, please see the NPC bugs section below.

Quest-specific bugs
For quest-specific bugs, please see the respective quest article page.

Location-specific bugs
For location-specific bugs, please see the respective location article page.

One glitch that can happen when you enter specific areas (it all randomly depends on the time of entry and where you are going) is that you may suddenly slow down after walking within a certain distance of a location. This glitch is permanent if you continue going about your business, but can be fixed by reverting to your last save before you last got near the area (doesn't have to be the very first time you got near it), and steer clear for a while until it's safe to return. Come back in a few days or so and the glitch shouldn't occurr. You'll know that the gltich occurred when you lag up for a second or so upon fast-traveling or simply walking too close to a location, and then visiting 3rd person, noticing a slower leg movement.

General advice and notes

 * Make sure your game is patched to the latest official patch (1.7.0.3). If your game is not up-to-date, do not report any bugs you may experience.
 * Save often and in different slots. Do not rely too much on autosave. A frequently overwritten autosave slot can become corrupted.
 * If you are playing on the PC, make sure your computer meets or exceeds the Minimum System Requirements. If any component of your computer falls below the minimum system requirements, do not report any bugs you may experience.

Mods

 * The Vault does not cover information concerning third-party mods for Fallout 3.
 * If you have any mods installed, do not report any bugs you may experience, even if it seems to you that your issue is not mod-related. Please visit the Bethesda mod forums for information.

Using the console
On the PC, many NPC, quest, and player-getting-stuck issues can be resolved through the use of console commands.

Crashing, freezing and other hardware- or software-related issues
Stuttering, crashing, freezing, and slow-down issues are often hardware- and/or software-related. Please visit the Bethesda Fallout 3 hardware forums for information regarding these issues. In particular, read through the stickied threads at the top of the forum pages.

General solutions

 * Leave and re-enter the area.
 * Load a save from before the glitch occurred.
 * Exit the game, restart the game, and load a save from before the glitch occurred.
 * PC users may be able to fix some issues by using console commands.

Flying creatures and items

 * Deathclaws and Protectrons frequently experience a physics engine glitch which sends them hurtling through the air. They can go quite far.
 * The disabled Protectrons in Big Town, in particular, are often subject to this glitch. This can cause a portion of the quest "Big Trouble In Big Town" to become impossible to complete.
 * Jumping onto the Rivet City bridge when it is not in final position can cause the player character to be thrown into the air.

NPC and Creature body parts stretching

 * NPCs and Creatures can become stretched out like chewing gum. Targeting limbs appears to target pieces of them that are smeared. Can be associated with incorrect one-hit-kills but the bodies remain alive and shooting, even to the point of the game thinking they are still moving around. VATS registers on the "dead" body, but the HUD indicator moves around (backed up by the crosshairs registering red and the voice of the actor also emanating from the indicator.) Occasionally it happens to live NPCs and Creatures which can begin jittering and shooting off into the sky, however they are like a surreal 3-D kaleidoscope, rapidly changing shapes. Be aware that certain NPC's or items are much more likely to stretch, such as the protectron or feral ghoul reavers, as well as pre-set skeletons.

The player character is stuck
There are places in the game world where the player character can become stuck - in the landscape, behind furniture, etc. The following are commonly known places where the player character can become stuck.
 * My Megaton House - between the bed and the wall.
 * Various crevices in rock formations
 * Between alternating flights of stairs and other objects in the stairwell.
 * Underneath a ledge formed by the top car in a stack of cars. (esp. while sneaking)

In places where fast-travel is not an option, it is possible to become unstuck by utilizing frag grenades or mines to dislodge the player with force.

NPCs are stuck

 * NPCs occasionally experience pathing issues.
 * NPCs may continue to run up against an obstacle rather than finding a way around.
 * NPCs may get hung up on rocks or other low obstacles. NPCs cannot jump, so sometimes this is problematic.
 * Upon fast-traveling, NPCs may spawn inside rocks, behind walls, or in other inaccessible areas.

Commonly stuck NPCs include:
 * Mr. Crowley
 * Scribe Rothchild
 * Liberty Prime
 * Fawkes
 * Bryan Wilks

Floating in the air
Due to clipping and pathing issues, NPCs, creatures and items will sometimes appear to float in the air. Following are some common instances:
 * Dogmeat exhibits this behavior often when using stairs.
 * Super Mutant Behemoths, due to their large size, often exhibit floating behavior.

Falling out of the map
NPCs and the player character may occasionally fall through the map or into a wall or other object. Following are some commonly known places where this is likely to happen.
 * Vault 92 - Overseer's Office. Walk along the wall behind and to the right of his desk, you will clip through it and fall into the hallway below his desk. From there, you can go through the door into a locked room in the Sound Testing chamber. There are some useful items in this room, but there is unfortunately no way to get back, since the door ahead of you is jammed, and the hallway behind you is still covered by the Overseer's desk.
 * If you revisit Vault 87 following completion of the main quest mission (accessing it via the Reactor Chamber), then open the vault door from the inside, there is no rendered exterior and you are confronted with a void (Patched: The door is now "Inaccessible").
 * Grayditch.
 * Bridges.
 * Craterside Supply.
 * In Seward Square, walk northeast behind the Capitol Building, past a spot where Talon Mercs and Super Mutants are in a firefight. You will come upon a set of buildings that are low-poly distant-land models with low-res textures. You can continue walking presumably indefinitely on completely flat land once you pass these buildings.

Clipping
"Clipping" is the term for objects passing through one another. Clipping can lead to the flying creatures and items, the falling out of the map and the stuck glitches. Items with clipping issues may not be visible.

Armor and clothing
Some pieces of armor and clothing exhibit clipping when worn in conjunction with each other.

Weapons

 * Sometimes when the player gives a large weapon to a follower, then the follower walks into a mine it can cause the weapon to be stuck through their bodies but still shoot as if they are still holding it in their hands.
 * Sometimes NPCs get stuck on path while advancing toward deployed Frag Mines then instantly appear as though they teleported through its triggering area. Additionally, Frag Mines have also been observed warping nearby enemies onto the Mine.

Creatures and items
Creatures, items and NPCs sometimes spawn partially inside a surface. This can cause them to jitter, vibrate, or make noise. As a result, items sometimes cannot be picked up or moved. Common instances of this glitch follow.
 * Disabled Protectrons in the RobCo Facility.
 * Certain weighted chain traps start spontaneously shaking, probably caused by the level not loading correctly. The heavy weight connected to the chain seems to float in mid-air while the chain violently shakes.
 * Protectron bot corpses outside the National Guard Depot do some bad jittering and falling if fast traveling to the location later, or exiting the Depot and returning back outside.

Heads spinning around
Sometimes NPCs' heads spin around and upside-down.

Multiple skin tones on NPCs
Sometimes NPCs' various body parts are of different ethnicities.

Upside-down gun
NPCs sometimes wield, fire and/or holster their gun upside-down.
 * In the case of followers, sometimes manipulating their inventory (e.g. giving them a Stimpak) will fix it.

Crashing and freezing
Crashes and freezes may happen occasionally to anyone. Crashes and freezes are only notable when they are repeatable (e.g. they happen under the same set of circumstances often). If the crash only occurs on one particular save, then the save itself is most likely the source of the problem. Please verify that crashes and freezes are repeatable on more than one save game before reporting.

Following are some reported circumstances under which crashing and freezing occurred.
 * After blowing up Megaton, attempting to reenter Tenpenny Tower results in a crash with exception 0xC0000005; a memory access violation.
 * Birth scene: Right after Doctor Li leaves and your Mother says "We did it", the game becomes idle; only the E button works making the baby cry.
 * Approaching the Jefferson Memorial.
 * When you get the reward from Burke on Tenpenny Tower.
 * When using V.A.T.S.
 * In Shalebridge Hill when you attempt to pick up any of the 5.56mm ammo magazines in the Ant Queen's chamber.
 * When receiving your first Pipboy.
 * When skipping NPC dialogue by clicking through.
 * When bringing up the PipBoy.

Megaton residents missing or dead
Any NPC in Megaton may fall off the various high places in town and die or disappear from the town. Please seeRecovering_missing_NPC_in_Fallout_3 for more details.
 * They may fall somewhere where you cannot find their bodies.
 * They may be lost in the "void," the normally not playable area that exists if you climb over the Megaton walls.
 * They may have teleported to Springvale.

Lip-sync not working

 * NPC's mouth moves during dialogue but nothing is said. Subtitles at the bottom of the screen "fast forward".

NPCs referring to the player character or other NPCs by the wrong gender
There are many instances of spoken dialogue not taking into account the proper gender of a character. Common occurrences follow:
 * The dialogue for the first Enclave soldier who greets you in Raven Rock was not recorded twice; he refers to you as a "he" if you are playing a female character.

NPCs still talking after death
After an NPC dies, their voice may still play, especially giving the warnings about not stealing things.

Random Object Contact Damage
You might notice that when you step on a pre-set object, such as a skeleton, it will whiplash and hit you. Listen closely to the noise; you might hear your character grunt in pain and your health bar decrease. When the object suddenly moves at a fast speed, it will damage whatever it makes contact with. This applies to anything that can be grabbed (inventory objects work but only if you can drop them) and moved around, like random oil drums/barrels, skeletons, weapons, miscellaneous items, etc. This is due to the physics behind the celiing traps such as brahmin skulls attached to giant boards of wood that ram you, the motor hanging from a chain, etc., and how they do damage in correlation to how fast you made contact with them. While this can easily cause a follower to die in some situations, it has a great use: killing NPC's without karma loss/gain! To do this, take an item like a barrel, hold it up in front of you (between you and your target of choice), and run into it. The damage is much more evident in weaker enemies, like most merchants. When using a small item, like a bottle of whiskey, it is recommended to shoot the item while holding it, as that will grant much more momentum when it makes contact. For larger items, like oil drums/barrel, running into it is recommended as you will cover more area on the item and thus inflict more momentum than a bullet. If you have the lawbringer or contract killer perks, there will be no ear or finger to loot. However, people will not turn hostile towards you for killing and NPC this way, regardless of your karma and all other factors (unless they were already hostile).

Common issues with all followers

 * Duplicate weapons may appear in followers' inventories. Removing one weapon makes the duplicates disappear.
 * With multiple followers, sometimes they may not all follow you into a new area. If you save while this is the case, the save may be corrupted.
 * Followers may become inexplicably hostile toward other NPCs.
 * Followers may fail to arrive with the PC when traveling to new areas.
 * Followers may drop dead upon entering a new area.
 * Followers may exhibit glitchy behavior when told to wait - not waiting where they are supposed to, subsequent dialogue options being incorrect, etc.

Quest items remain in inventory permanently
Any quest item may get stuck permanently in your inventory. However, even though the item displays a weight on the PipBoy screen, that weight does not count toward your total carry weight.

Level up error

 * A rare level-up bug leaves the player with a negative number of skill points to allot, jamming the game in place at the skill point distribution page.
 * The game may freeze at the level-up screen, particularly when choosing perks.

PipBoy glitches

 * The PipBoy moves up a little in the screen each time you view it. Repeatedly viewing and hiding PipBoy will eventually render the whole PipBoy screen invisible. Keep opening and closing eventually will reset to normal.
 * Using your PipBoy to repair many items at once may cause the PipBoy screen to become distorted and the text to disappear. Upon going to the start menu the text will not appear or be distorted as well.
 * The PipBoy screen gets intensely bright and the screen is unable to be read. Saving the game and then loading it up should fix the problem.

Common user errors

 * Pushing buttons too fast when in menus or in dialogue may cause the game to freeze.

Radio bugs

 * When you enter new areas, radio may be glitched because of loading. It repeats a part of the song/speak until the radio returns to normal.
 * Radio songs and news skip occasionally skipping to another song or another piece of news.
 * Freezing for 10 seconds or so whenever the radio tracks loop.

Loading and saving bugs

 * A game may load with the player stuck in firing mode.

Infinite ears and fingers

 * With the Lawbringer or Contract Killer perk, you can knock an essential NPC (e.g. Shrapnel and children) unconscious as many times as you like. They will spawn an ear or finger each time they are knocked unconscious.

Infinte XP

 * With the Mister Sandman perk, you can knock an sleeping essential NPC unconscious as many times as you like. You get experience for the "kill" each time.
 * Knock Knock of Little Lamplight has an easy Speech Challenge that does not get cleared. Can repeat for infinite experience.
 * Listen to Bittercup rant about how she has been with all of the men in Big Town. In this rant you find out specifically about what happened with her and Pappy. End the conversation with her and talk to Pappy. A couple lines in you'll have a speech option that will never go away and can continue to gain 5 XP experience each success.

Free repair

 * When selling and buying Leather Armor to/from merchants (tested with Crow and Moira Brown), armor's repair level isn't uniform. Further, selling and re-buying the same suit of Leather Armor will yield a fully-repaired suit! This is thus partially a bug and partially an exploit, as the player can obtain a 100% repaired suit of Leather Armor (DR 24) at level 2 for less than 100 caps.

Super Unarmed Skill
Requires Operation: Anchorage (add-on), to do this you need the Chinese Stealth Armor and 2 Hockey Masks. To do the glitch equip the CSA then equip one of the hockey masks, then repeatedly equip the other mask. If you check your unarmed stats, it will have been raised by 10 instead of 5. Keep on tapping to raise it to 15,20,25, etc. It eventually stops, but the damage of the unarmed weapons rise so that the power fist can do up to 2000 damage, killing almost anything instantly on very hard difficulty.

Super Big Guns Skill
At the Bethesda Ruins, there is a raider that spawns every 3 days that has a Big Guns Skill Book on them.

Crashing and other hardware- or software-related issues
Stuttering, crashing, freezing, and slow-down issues are often hardware- and/or software-related. Please visit the Bethesda forums for information regarding these issues. In particular, read through the stickied threads at the top of the forum page. Common pc-only crashes and freezes occur under the following circumstances:
 * When alt-tabbing while in full-screen mode.

NPC scripting glitch and PC-only fix

 * On some save games (this might show up in the beginning of the game and will never end) NPCs will stop conversations with each other before they should, or the player might not get his/her controls back if a script does the "disableplayercontrols" command and a conversation ends. This has occurred at least in Vault 101 in a conversation with Dad and Oasis with the conversation between the two arguing inhabitants. Another problem that seems to be related (appears along with the aforementioned bug) is that NPCs may walk through a load door to a new cell and not appear on the other side.
 * Both these problems are seemingly fixed by going into the G.E.C.K., loading Fallout3.esm, and clicking the "recompile all scripts" button and saving a plug-in with this change, loading it right after Fallout3.esm.
 * The v1.7 patch still requires this fix.
 * A workaround has been found: save the game if NPCs stop talking suddenly, and then reload that save. They'll continue their conversation for at least one response. Repeat the process as many times as needed to get the conversation to finish.

Radio bugs

 * The radio can cause audio and video stuttering.

Key-binding bugs

 * Rebinding The Pip-Boy key only rebinds the key to open, the closing key is still default.
 * Wait function does not work when button is rebound to "w" key.

Common user errors

 * Player stuck unable to move, HUD also missing. Possibly due to bumping the "~", which opens the console to input cheats, directly above the TAB. If you're sure the console is not open, pressing the tilde (~) key and typing "enableplayercontrols" will fix this.
 * Sometimes you get stuck in "slow walking mode". CAPS LOCK, which locks down "run", is probably enabled (and possibly toggled when you Alt-Tab out of the program if the light is mismatched), so try hitting the key again.
 * Having a game controller plugged into the computer can cause control problems, even when the controller is disabled in the .ini file. Physically disconnect the controller from computer.