How do you hack in Fallout 3

If you mean hack the terminals, you need to guess the password to unlock it. Guessing the password is like a simple word puzzle. Lets say that there is a word that says REPORTED and it says you have 4/8 correct. That means that only 4 of the letters are in their correct positions. Say the next word is DESERTED and you got it right, it meant that the 4/8 previous letters must have been *E**RTED. You can work it out with a bit of clever deduction.

But let's say you've used up 3 of 4 attempts and you don't want to risk locking out the computer indefinitely. There are more options to prolong your attempts. You will notice a bunch of scrambled symbols like $(/..[{{*&^%]. all over the place among the words. Look very closely at those symbols and try to find open and closed brackets in a single line.

Acceptable closed bracket blocks [%6.] {$$]:} (&##@) Anything between those symbols is still a closed bracket block and often easy to miss are bracket blocks that use the same starting or ending bracket within a block. If you move the mouse over the first bracket, it will highlight the entire line up to the closing bracket. Clicking on this highlighted line will remove one dud password. There are often quite a few of these which you can click as many as you can find with no loss of attempts.

Here is my method which is simple and virtually fail safe no matter how hard the security is:

1. Select any word to work from and attempt to solve it within 3 attempts.
2. Begin eliminating the duds and you may eventually stumble upon an allowance refresh. If you don't get "Allowance refreshed", go to step 6.
3. Keep eliminating duds until there are no more bracket blocks available.
4. Have a look at what words are left and continue deducing what the password might be.
5. If you get to the 4th attempt and there is only one word left to try, you can't lose. Click it and the terminal will be unlocked.
6. If by the 4th attempt you have not found the password and it's too risky to guess, exit the terminal and repeat the entire process with a new set of codes and bracket blocks.

If you devote a lot of points to your science skill or wear clothing which can boost it by a few points (eg, Jonas' Lab Uniform), you will have fewer words to contend with and by the time you max out your science skill, you can eliminate all but the actual password by selecting the bracket blocks and never have to guess the password again.

I hope this all made sense and you find it helpful.