Fallout 3

The Karma achievements are made significantly easier with the addition of the Broken Steel perks.

The first step in getting all three achievements is to create three save files at level 28. The closer you are to reaching 29, the better, but at any point will work fine.

Getting to level 30, not the karma, is actually the hardest part of these achievements. If you are like me, and reached level 20 long before the game ended and before you got Broken Steel, you have a long way to go after the added quest ends. The first things I would do is the side-quests that are offered surrounding Project Purity. Return to the Jefferson Memorial and offer to help Scribe Bigsley, who is inside the building. That will result in two decent quests. There is also a side-quest that can be accessed by hacking or a successful speech on Bigsley or by talking to the ghoul Griffon in the Museum of History.

Once those quests have been competed, you will probably still have a long way to go. The fastest way to make up that experience is by hunting Super Mutants. After finishing the Broken Steel quest-line, speak to Paladin Tristran and ask if there is anything else you can do to help. He will offer you a reward for killing super mutants and bringing back blood samples to him. This is much easier than scouring ruined buildings for scrap metal, pre-war books, cameras or sensor modules. The National Mall and the Germantown Police station are great places to hunt mutants. Just make sure to get the well-rested bonus before you trade in the samples. 10% extra experience goes a long way in this grind.

You can also increase the difficulty to get more experience per encounter. This is really a must if you are playing on easy or normal. The extra 15 or so EXP an encounter will really speed things up in the long run. Also remember to leave your companions at home. They are experience hogs. You won't receive any EXP from enemies that they kill.

Once you get to 28 and have the files created, load one up and, when you reach level 29, choose Here and Now. This perk will immediately level you up again, to 30. At level 30 choose Karmic Rebalance. This will set your karma to Neutral and you will get the achievement.

Rinse and repeat for the other karma achievements. I recommend that you don't use this method for whatever karma type you mainly play as, as it really is a waste of 2 perks.

Cheers!

Just before you hit level 30, save the game. When you pick your level 30 perk, choose one that alters your Karma.

** MINOR SPOILERS BELOW. **

To get this achievement, you need to reach level 30 with neutral karma. (Either have neutral karma when reaching level 30, or reach level 30 and select the Karmic Rebalance perk.)

Getting to level 30

Straightforward enough, but there are ways to achieve this more quickly. First, avoid companions.

Second, look out for the NPCs who request certain types of items, and then watch to see if redeeming those items provides XP. Two such "standing orders":

* Scrap metal in Megaton. (Easy to find everywhere.)
* Pre-war books at the Arlington Library. (Excellent per-book XP.)

Lastly, I recommend hacking every terminal, picking every lock, and attempting (almost) every speech challenge. All provide nearly guaranteed XP, without the hassle of shooting an Albino Radscorpion or Super Mutant Overlord a half-million times.

Karma

Neutral karma generally means that you do as much harm as good. Playing through the storyline as the traditional hero will get you a wealth of positive karma, so getting the neutral karma achievements will require you to do some evil (mostly murder and theft).

If you need a karma boost, I have two suggestions:

* At the Church of the Atom (Megaton) or Saint Monica's Church (Rivet City), donate caps. If you have a lot of cash lying around, it will be very easy and quick to get into "positive" karma.
* In Megaton, give away your scrap metal rather than requesting payment. (You still get the XP.)

If you need to decrease your karma, this is easy -- go on a killing spree in Megaton or Rivet City. (Megaton is great for using the Fat Man.) This will have some obvious gameplay effects however, so I suggest saving the game prior to this -- go get the achievement, load your save, and then continue.

Neutral karma can be a tough target to hit sometimes, so my suggestion is to check your karma after each murder / mini-nuke. Once you hit neutral karma, simply stop killing and run away until you are out of range of all angry wastelanders.

If you actually need even more karma loss (I did for level 30), first steal everything you see, but be careful not to be caught, as it will typically provoke a gunfight. Then go on your murder spree.

As other already have said, the hard part is to reach level 30. I found a way which no one have commented until now, so there it go...
If you have the Mothership Zeta DLC, there is a part almost in the end (after the space walk) that you reach the weapons lab. Well, there is an area on the far left that have a button to summon enemies (raiders, robots and deathclaws). They are infinite and can't reach you for melee attacks (you stay on a higher platform without direct access). Just change the difficulty to very hard, press the 'summoner button' (multiple times if you want a lot of enemies at the same time rushing your leveling up), kill the enemies and repeat the process how much times you want. In the same area where you stay for the waves there is an archway heal, so even on very hard is almost impossible to die, just watch yourself and pass by it from time to time. I reach my levels 28, 29 and 30 that way and took me only about 40 minutes. Sweet!

By the way, after 1 our 2 waves, if you are using an alien weapon (like Alien Atomizer or Alien Disintegrator) you will gain the Xenotech Expert perk, that will give to you 20% more damage using these weapons (which are very good in my opinion, specially the Disintegrator).

For the achievements, everyone was already told about it:

- Just save right before reach level 30;
- Then when reach it just pick the Devil's Highway Perk to instantly turn you on evil status and get this:



- Load the savegame right before level 30;
- Now pick the Escalator to Heaven perk to instantly turn you on very good status and get one more cheevo:



- Load the same savegame again;
- Pick the Karmic Rebalance perk which turns you on neutral status and you finally will get the last level 30 achievement:



Comment of l Shernos: Might be good to add that if you already finished the quest of the mothership zeta, you have no way to go back to the firing range.

If you don't have any problems with a glitch/mechanic abuse, there is a way to get XP retalively fast after you leave the vault.

Make explosives one of your tag skills as you will need a skill of 25 to do this method. Having an intelligence of at least 4 is advisable.

First, go to Megaton and the Craterside Supply (Talk to Lucas Simms at the entrance of Megaton if you are unsure of where this is) and talk to the shop owner, Maria. Tell her you will help with her book and choose to talk about Minefield.

After you finish talking with her, make "The Wasteland Survival Guide" your active quest. then travel to Minefield which should be where your objective marker is. Disarm two mines and fast travel back to Megaton.

Go to the Craterside Supply and make the frag mines you picked up your active weapon. As you walk in, you should see a mercenary leaning on a wall. Head directly behind the wall he is leaning on, crouch, then throw a frag mine and pick it up.

You should keep this process going, getting 5 XP each time you pick up a mine (up to seven with the swift learner perk maxed out). I would advise getting the swift learner perk as quick as possible to increase your speed of leveling up.

One thing to note is that past 5 pm, Billy Crealy will visit the shop and wander, along with his girl. I recomend waiting until 8:00 am when this happens. Eventually, the mercanary will want to go to bed regardless, and you will have to wait until 8:00 am for him to come back.

When you are only a few XP away from level 30, save, then for the first time you level up, keep your karma and get either nuclear anomoly or almost perfect, create another save, and load the previous save. This time take the karma changing perk of your choice to get another achievment. load the previous save, then pick your final karma changing perk to get the last level 30 karma leveling achievment. Then, if you wish, load your actual level 30 save without the karma changing perk and be amazed at your ridiculously strong character.

I take no credit for the contents of the video.

just adjust your karma accordingly and do this(from fallout wiki):

"SKIPPING LEVELS

-- Keep in mind that this skips a level. You do not level up twice (meaning you will only be able to set points for 1 level up). With that being said, this glitch is only useful if you want a faster way to get the Achievements for reaching level 8, 14, 20, and 30.

-- Skipping levels still rewards you with the boost in Health for both levels. Maximum HP increase per level is (EN / 2) + 3.

-- You must gain enough XP to level up. You need to go through a door (to load a new area) before the Perk screen appears. Once through the door the Perk screen will automatically pop up, and you will have skipped the next level.

-- You can skip multiple levels. Once you have successfully skipped a level, just load your autosave, turn around and go through the door again before the Perk screen, and repeat.

--You can also level up past level 30. You will get the health boost for each level past 30. You cannot continue leveling up after level 30 on the Xbox 360 or PS3 using the above "level skipping" method."


It has a lot to do with timing. It seemed to be hit or miss a little bit until I got used to it. Basically what I did was once I reloaded the auto save, I'd turn and face the door. In the bottom right of the screen the words "level up" will appear. it seemed to be timed correctly if I entered the door at the moment the words began to disappear. You'll know you did it right if when you load on the other side of the door, the level up stat screen will pop up while the background is still black. a few seconds later, the background/room will load in behind the previously mentioned stat screen. then reload the autosave, which is now one level higher, until at the desired level.

Rather than going on a killing spree or stealing spree and risk killing important characters or accidentally leveling up before you were ready (killing people gives experience), I've got a much easier solution. NOTE: This solution is designed to quickly LOWER your karma. If you are at bad or neutral karma you need to give away money or purified water or something. Just don't be evil OK?

Level up to just before the appropriate level (8,14,20,30,etc). Have enough scrap metal available that when you sell it, you will level up. I just stored all that I found my house once I had plenty of cash.

SAVE A NEW SAVE FILE

Now here's the trick. Go into Moriarty's Saloon. In the back, through the doorway behind the bar, there's a security terminal. If you hide up against the wall, Moriarty won't see you unless he's standing on top of you. Hacking his terminal causes you to lose karma. After it's hacked the first time, even opening it again causes you to lose karma. Here's where the fun begins. When you back out of the terminal, it does an animation where the keyboard retracts. During that animation, interaction with the terminal is possible, but it doesn't open the window until the animation stops. You can spam the button to interact with the terminal several times before it actually opens and you karma EACH TIME. It took me all of six minutes to get down to neutral karma from very good and another three or four to get to bad. All without having to waste time tracking down and killing the townsfolk.

When you get to neutral karma, save over your NEW save file, sell the scrap metal, and unlock the neutral achievement. Then reload and keep going. When you get to evil, go sell the scrap metal again and unlock the evil achievement. Then reload your ORIGINAL save file, which should still be a good karma, and sell the scrap metal for the good achievement. Problem solved in 15 minutes. Can't beat that.

All of the guides you will see are really good ways to level up quickly etc.

For those of us who aren't looking for advice on how to level up and just looking for a quick way to make all three of the LVL 30 Achievements pop, do the following:

- Make a save right before you are about to hit LVL 30.
- Once you hit is and are able to distribute skill points and perks choose the Neutral Karma perk (Karmic Rebalance)
- After you choose this it will make you Neutral Karma and POP.
- Reload your save and do the same with the other 2 Karmas you need.

This is super easy to cover all three without taking time to mess about at this stage of the game.

Happy Hunting

To get this achievement extremely easily get the swift learner perk from early on as possible so you get 10% more xp from anything per rank which there are 3 of so 30% total, fast forward to completing the main story, dlcs and side quests and save the second you are about to level up to level 30 from level 29, or be like me and save when you level up before the menu comes up, now its simple pick the Karmic Rebalance perk which sets you to neutral and gets you this achivement, then reload and pick Devil's Highway, then reload again and pick Escalator to Heaven and there you have it all three level 30 karma perks and you can still play your specific karma build after. Regarding the level 8 and 14 karma achievements I suggest playing a barely good character level up reload commit a few bad deeds to get to neutral, level up, then commit a lot of bad deeds to get to evil then load the original save again, playing just over the line of good is easier because it is much easier to lose karma then to gain it quickly.