How to use Chemist as your best / only utility perk

Chemist is a very strong perk to get early. This is largely because you can use Chemist to replace (or delay the need for) all of the other utility perks, most of which are far more limited in scope.

e.g. if you get Blacksmith at level 2, you can upgrade a switchblade or baseball bat.

e.g. if you get Strong Back at level 2, you can carry more desk fans.

...whereas Chemist is the Butcher Pete of perks - If you unlock it at level 2, you can immediately use it hard and widely and well.

Chem-maxing Begins: turn a stack of Sanctuary trash onto Poisoned Caltrops. Trade the caltrops @ Abernathy for shipments. Pause while clearing out your first dungeon (Wicked Shipping or Gorski Cabin or the Super Duper Mart) to turn zombie loot into Jet.

This chain of actions:

(a) doesn't suck time. It happens 100% incidentally, on a route you were going to take anyway

(b) takes seconds to spam, but yields a load of XP (far more than Savant or any other early perk)

(c) condenses bulky garbage, like fuel cans, desk fans and bone cutters, into lightweight trade goods - 2 pounds of Jet is more valuable than 50 pounds of crud.

(d) incidentally yields lightweight components that are key to early game weapon upgrades - you just have to pick what you need (oil, screws, copper) out of the chem bench.

(e) beats setting up a settlement (e.g. Water Farm) for caps, because it is much faster, and it doesn't tie you to one place. It thereby breaks you out of the Survival Mode trap that some players complain about - without fast travel, the game can becomes a tedious treadmill simulator if your character is staying near a home base, spending days just ferrying garbage around.

Chem-maxing Continues: scoot to Diamond City (via Carla / Drumlin Diner / Grey garden - grabbing Hubflower and supplies on the way).

Note: Grape Mentats already have a fairly long duration, and the perk extends it. If you don't dally, you can clean out Myrna, do a bunch of craft, clean out Percy, do a bunch of craft, then clean out all the other merchants and extort every one of the quest-givers, all on one dose.

Note: if you see her caravan, trade with Cricket before you head inside. Cricket always has Flamer Fuel (other merchants don't stock it until level 10). This allows you to add Jet Fuel to the loop that is covered in this post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/fo4/comments/1v2v6yw/fantastic_way_to_farm_xp_caps_buy_steel_shipments/

Doing this example (or something even vaguely like it) gets you nicely set up, and quickly. This is true even if you only do the "big" XP loop only once or twice, i.e. you don't have to power level with it, for it to be good.

This streamlining works because Chem-maxing deprecates a huge wad of the other perks and specials.

* Perks like scrapper, scrounger and lock picking become completely useless. All they do is yield generic stuff (that you then have to lug around). That is a waste of a perk, because Chemist + trade already yields loads of generic stuff, that you don't have to lug around.

* You don't have to dungeon crawl for trash. Any trash that you do pick up can be transformed / compressed into high-value stuff --> STR can be a dump stat.

* You'll make more XP via crafting than you could with Savant --> Luck can be a dump stat.

* Aid items make you durable. Buffout + Vodka give > 100 temporary hit points if you ever need a quick buffer. Antibiotics + Refreshing Beverage fix all the "permanent" harms of Survival mode; you can sleep in filth, slam chems and swim across rivers without any worries --> END can be a dump stat.

--> most QoL and crafting perks get deprecated:

e.g. You can craft a savage melee weapon without perks. While you are doing a trade loop in Diamond City, take a minute to shop with Moe, then assemble a Bladed + Aluminium variant of his magic whacking stick (building the same mods yourself requires Blacksmith II)

e.g. You can craft a top tier laser weapon without Science! While in DC, pause for a minute to grab the relevant bits from Arturo, then build a maxed out sniper variant of his magic pew pew (building the same mods yourself requires Science III and a stupidly gigantic stack of rare materials)

TL;DR: going early and hard into Chemist lets you eject a heap of utility / QoL perks (and their requisite SPECIAL levels) from your build. This lets you go harder on lethality perks + upgrades.