[FO1] Illuminating how Night Vision perk works

mountain_hare

First time out of the vault
I was reading through the description of the Night Vision perk, which says that it decreases darkness by 10% for the vault dweller.
One walkthrough mentioned that instead of bothering with the perk, to just turn your monitor's brightness level up.

I figured that the perk must also increase your ranged accuracy in dark settings (ie. nighttime and caves), so I did a little testing, and yeah, it increases your ranged accuracy by 15%. Getting all excited, I thought I had found something new in the game mechanics, but nahh, this was discovered ages back.

What I did discover was an annoying bug. When I took the perk while in a dark cave, my chance to hit did not increase! I was a little disappointed, thinking that the perk didn't work in caves.

However, if I took the perk while in town, and then entered the cave, my chance to hit increased by the 15%. This does not occur in town areas, where your +15% bonus is applied within about a minute at night (it's obvious, as the screen brightens up).

So I figured that the game makes a check for the perk every time you enter a new hostile area, and apply the 15% bonus if the area is dark.

Of course, I wasn't sure, since the enemies are moving about and it's a little hard to determine exactly how many hexes away they are. So I took the perk while in town, entered the cave, targeted at a radscorpion to get the chance to hit. Then I reloaded the game and immediately entered combat, and targeted at the same radscorpion (which hadn't moved). Lo and behold, my chance to hit had dropped 15%.

So what can you take from this? Two things:

1. If you are going to take the Night Vision perk, take it while in town before entering a hostile area, so that when you enter a new (hostile) area it is applied.

2. If you reload a game while in a hostile dark area, your night vision perk will not be applied until you RE-ENTER the area.

Whew.
 
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