How To Wait In Fallout 4

Fallout 4 offers you an enormous apocalyptic wasteland, allowing your customizable character to wander the leftovers of the city of Boston and its surrounding area, The Commonwealth.

While wandering, you’ll be able to come across other survivors, battle deadly enemies, scour buildings for loot, and take on various quests.

However, there will be plenty of times when you want to advance time in the game, and you can handily do this with the “Waiting” feature.

This allows you to skip forwards through the day or night without having to wait out and waste your time, which can be especially helpful for time-sensitive things like stores that are only open at certain times.

That said, it’s not obvious how you can wait in Fallout 4, especially since it requires a different method from previous Fallout games! So, how can you wait?

The short answer is that you’ll need to find something to sit down upon. Your choice is chairs, benches, or couches. Simply walk up to them, and you will be given the prompt to wait, allowing you to then set a period of time.

However, there is a lot more to learn about how to wait in Fallout 4, and we’ve got all the answers in our useful guide below!

We’ll explain how to wait in Fallout 4, the benefits of using the waiting functions, and how the function is different from other Fallout games. Read on!

How To Wait In Fallout 4

As we’ve touched on in the intro, the waiting function in Fallout 4 works in a very different way from how it did in previous Fallout games, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. Waiting in those games took only the click of a button from anywhere, but the method in Fallout 4 requires more effort. 

Since waiting in Fallout 4 is so different from previous entries in the video game series, even seasoned Fallout players may not know how to use the function, so don’t worry if you don’t! 

In order to wait, allowing you to skip forwards in time, you will need to find something to sit down on. Your options here are limited to chairs, benches, or couches.

You should be able to find plenty of these scattered around the wasteland, mainly in buildings, but they’re still going to require time and effort to get to. On the other hand, you can always craft the objects for your settlement.

Once you’ve found one of those objects, walk up to it. A prompt should appear on the screen, which will tell you what button you need to press to begin the waiting process. After that, select the number of hours you’d like to wait, and confirm it!

It’s important to note that you won’t always be allowed to wait. This is because there are certain circumstances where you’re not allowed to wait and skip forward time in the game.

How Long Can You Wait In Fallout 4?

Although you get to select the amount of time that you wait in Fallout 4, it does have a limit for each waiting session.

When selecting your waiting time, you’ll find that you can choose any amount of hours between 1 and 24. This means that you can wait for a maximum of an entire day at a time. 

Being able to choose how long you wait is very helpful because you can fit it into exactly what you’re doing.

For example, if you’re waiting for a store to open and you know that it’ll open in 4 hours, you can select 4 hours, and you won’t have to waste a moment extra.

What Are The Benefits Of Waiting In Fallout 4?

There are various reasons why you might want to wait during Fallout 4.

For a start, specific buildings in the game’s world are only open and accessible at certain times. If you need to get inside urgently, using the wait function means you don’t have to waste real-life time waiting for access. 

This is especially true with various stores in the game. If you desperately need to trade or offload items at a store, it will not be convenient if it’s closed for business. With waiting, you’ll be able to carry on with what you want to do.

Another reason is that you may not like playing the game at certain times of the day.

This won’t be the case for everybody, but some of us can find it annoying having to wait out the nighttime and would much prefer to be exploring the game’s world during daylight when you can see everything – including threats – a lot more clearly.

This can be handy if you’re going to a new location you haven’t visited before, too.

Finally, the waiting function can be useful in helping you move certain NPCs to different locations, either yours or a designated one. 

How Does Waiting In Fallout 4 Compare To Other Fallout Games?

The waiting function has been in the Fallout series since Fallout 3, back in 2007. However, the way that you waited in the game was very different then to how it is in Fallout 4, which confused many players when the new entry came out.

While Fallout 4 makes you find an object to sit on to wait, the earlier games of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas allowed you to wait anywhere. To do so, you had to press the designated wait button. 

On PlayStation 3, this was “Select.” For Xbox 360, it was the “Back” button. Meanwhile, the default key-mapping was the “T” key on the PC. Once you pressed it, a menu allowed you to select your waiting time.

Final Thoughts

To wait in Fallout 4, find a chair, bench, or couch and select the prompt.