Fallout 76 character creation: how to make your perfect Vault 76 resident

After a surprisingly long time in Vault 76, the residents are finally allowed to emerge and repopulate the post-apocalyptic world. Since Fallout 76 is an online game, making your own unique character is your way of making your mark on the world. As there was a party the night before, you can make them as fresh faced or permanently hung-over as you wish. The important thing is that you make what you want to, rather than struggle with the controls. This guide will go through the character creation tools, how they work, and how to make your perfect Vault 76 resident.

Fallout 76 character creation guide

Looking the part is one thing, but what happens when you emerge from the Vault? Those looking for a beginner's guide to get started with the Fallout 76 beta and indeed the full game when it comes out should have a look at our Fallout 76 guide hub.

Manipulating the face

This will take the vast majority of your time when creating your avatar and there are multiple different ways that you can customise them. There are a ton of presets available for either gender, so you can find a template that you can tweak to your heart's content. You could just go with one of the presets if you want and there's nothing wrong with that at all if you just want to go into the game.

For the more artistic among you, you can experiment with the various customisation options. By pressing the F key, you can bring up a new set of options. These will allow you to click on any part of the face and mold that body part into shape. For parts such as the nose, ears, cheeks, and jawline, you can only really control the shape and angles. If you ever want to get a different angle, for keyboard and mouse users, hold right click and move the head around. You will always get the option needed to tinker with the particular body part displayed underneath your character, so do consult this whenever you get lost.

Hair, beards, skin tone, and eyes

If you want to change your hair style, you'll need to highlight the hair and press the button associated with "Type" to bring up the many options for styling your bonce. You can make them as bald or hairy as you wish. You can also tinker with the colour of your chosen style. For beards, it's the same process, only you're pointing at the chin instead, and for skin or eyes you can change their colour by highlighting them and pressing the corresponding button.

Applying extras to your character

Back out of the menu up to the first layer (the one with the Extras option) and you'll be able to apply things like makeup, markings, blemishes, and scars. Again, there's a surprising number of different options here and you can change the colours to whatever you wish.

Toggling Body frames

Once you've decided your gender, and finalised your face and any extra details you wish to apply to them, you can tinker with their body frame. This is just a simple triangle slider that can adjust how thin, fat, or muscular that character is. You can't really tinker with their height sadly, but this is the next best thing. Upon finishing with this step, you're ready to take your photo ID to show your new character in all their personalised glory.

Above all else though, have fun with it. If you want to make someone in your likeness, then that's up to you. If you want to make someone that looks like a hideous freak of nature, they'll fit right in with the ghouls, even if they don't accept them, but they will be your character. You can then introduce your own character to everyone else, more on multiplayer in our Fallout 76 multiplayer guide. Eventually you'll be able to get outfits to further personalise your character, as well as use Atoms to purchase cosmetic items. Since Atoms can be obtained via challenges, you can head to our Fallout 76 challenges guide to see which challenges you can complete to accumulate Atoms quickly.