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I'm playing Fallout 4 and I've had the Mysterious Stranger perk for a while, recently I noticed he completely stopped appearing, earlier he used to appear quite often. I haven't added any new MODS since.

Is this a bug, and how to fix it ? (It was fun having him pop up suddenly)

I have the level 1 perk of Mysterious Stranger and I know that the rate at which he shows is 10%.

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    The thing about chance is that every occasion he can appear, he only has a chance to appear. Yes, this means that he should appear at least once every 10 times, but "chance" doesn't make that guarantee. So it's a possibility that you've just been unlucky of late.
    – Ben
    Feb 7, 2018 at 3:12
  • haha that was deep but jokes apart, from appearing so often to not appearing at all seems like an issue for me
    – Nigel Fds
    Feb 8, 2018 at 0:27

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As I mentioned in the comments:

The thing about chance is that every occasion he can appear, he only has a 10% chance to appear. Yes, this means that he should appear at least once every 10 times, but "chance" doesn't make that guarantee. So it's a possibility that you've just been unlucky of late.

To elaborate slightly, what this means, is that every time he is eligible to show up, he has a 1 in 10 chance to do so. This means the game randomly selects from 10 choices: 9 "no's", and 1 "yes". That chance is fairly minimal, and is entirely legitimate that this can happen indefinitely. I.e., there is nothing wrong with your game.

This is not the same as "stacked chance". Some games use a system that have a low percentage of success, but with every failure, increase the chance of success. E.g., You may start with only a 10% chance of success, but when ever you fail, that chance of success increases by 10%. You still have the chance to fail, until you have failed 9 times, in which case you have a 100% chance of success. Fallout does not use this system.

Try levelling up the perk (This does require you being a higher level though). From the wiki:

The appearance rate is 10% for the first rank, 12% for the second rank, and 14% for the third rank.

This doesn't increase that chance by much, but it can help.

From my experience with Fallout 3, New Vegas, and Fallout 4, I too have experienced large "droughts" where the Mysterious Stranger will just not appear. Sometimes taking up to 24 hours of gameplay for him to reappear (spread over several weeks, making it feel much, much longer).

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  • To be fair, Bethesda's RNG is quite broken. In Skyrim I collected about a dozen charmed necklaces from the revelers, because I got them as a "random" encounter at pretty much every third spawn point. The same in my current playthrough in FO4. With three points in luck at level 15 the last 10 or so random encounters had legendary enemies. On my first try to finish the game I got none until level 20 and had difficulties to stay alive due to multiple illnesses and absolutely no antibiotics were spawning in containers.
    – metaphor_set
    May 17, 2018 at 13:46
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In my experience, I've found that the Mysterious Stranger almost never shows up if your VATS selection completely kills an enemy. I also had the issue where he would never show up, but once I started leaving enemies with about 30% of their health left instead of completely killing them, he showed up almost every time to finish them off.

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  • That's good to know ..
    – Nigel Fds
    Aug 12, 2018 at 23:43

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