Every one of Fallout 4’s companion perks is permanent the moment you unlock it — dismiss the companion, romance someone else, never see them again, the bonus stays on your character sheet for the rest of the playthrough [1]. That part, most guides get right. What they miss is that one of those twelve perks doesn’t actually do what its own in-game description claims, and a thirteenth “companion perk” everyone lists alongside the other twelve isn’t unlocked the same way at all.
This is a ranking built around what each perk actually does in practice — including the one where the game’s own tooltip is wrong — plus the fastest, source-verified way to farm each companion’s affinity instead of just waiting around.
How Affinity Actually Unlocks a Perk
Affinity is a hidden 0–1000 value per companion (it can overflow slightly to 1100) that you can’t see on the Pip-Boy [2]. At 0 they “tolerate” you. At 500 they “admire” you. At 1000 they “idolize” you and hand over their perk. Every liked action adds +15, every loved action adds +35, and dialogue or repeatable actions get multiplied by a size scalar — 0.5x for small triggers, which covers most of the repeatable actions below, meaning a “like” is usually worth 7.5 and a “love” 17.5 in practice, not the full 15/35 [2].
Just having a companion follow you also raises affinity passively, on a diminishing curve: every ten in-game minutes (as long as you’ve earned at least 1 XP in that window) they gain 40 − (0.033 × current affinity) [2]. Do the math from zero and it takes roughly 520 in-game minutes — about 8 hours 40 minutes — to hit idolize on passive travel time alone, but only about 160 minutes to hit the 500 admire threshold where most of the good dialogue unlocks [2]. That’s why nobody actually waits it out: triggering a companion’s specific likes is 10-20x faster.
Most of those specific likes also have a cooldown before they can fire again — weapon and armor modding resets after 48 in-game hours, which sounds slow until you notice it triggers for every companion standing near the workbench at once, not just one at a time [2]. Lockpicking, hacking, and stealing reset faster and can be chained back to back with a different action to rack up two or three separate approval triggers in the same few minutes [2]. That gap in cooldown length is the real reason the fastest column below leans on lockpicking and hacking over crafting-bench actions whenever a companion likes both.
All 12 Companion Perks, Ranked
Ranked by how often the bonus actually applies in a normal playthrough, not raw numbers — a perk that fires every fight beats a bigger perk that only fires in one build:
| Rank | Companion | Perk / Effect | Fastest affinity action |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | MacCready | Killshot — +20% V.A.T.S. headshot accuracy [1] | Steal an item, or pick one of his owned locks [2] |
| 2 | Curie | Combat Medic — auto-heals 100 HP once per day below 10% HP [1] | Accept a settler’s quest through peaceful dialogue [2] |
| 3 | Preston Garvey | United We Stand — +20% damage and +20 Damage Resistance vs. 3+ enemies [1] | Accept a settler’s quest peacefully — he loves it, his single strongest trigger [2] |
| 4 | Deacon | Cloak & Dagger — +40% Stealth Boy duration, +20% sneak attack damage [1] | Pick a lock, then hack a terminal — two separate likes back to back [2] |
| 5 | Piper | Gift of Gab — double XP on speech checks and discovering locations [1] | Accept a settler’s quest peacefully [2] |
| 6 | Paladin Danse | Know Your Enemy — +20% damage vs. Feral Ghouls, Super Mutants, Synths [1] | Mod a weapon or armor piece at a workbench — he loves both [2] |
| 7 | Nick Valentine | Close to Metal — 1 extra hacking guess, 50% shorter lockout cooldown [1] | Hack a terminal, then leave the cell long enough for it to reset and hack again [2] |
| 8 | Strong | Berserk — +20% melee damage below 25% HP [1] | Fight — he likes combat kills directly [2] |
| 9 | X6-88 | Shield Harmonics — +20 Energy Resistance [1] | Hack a terminal, or mod gear at a workbench [2] |
| 10 | Codsworth | Robot Sympathy — +10 Damage Resistance vs. robotic energy weapons [1] | Mod a weapon or armor piece — loves both, stacks with Danse at the same bench [2] |
| 11 | Hancock | Isodoped — 20% faster crit charge while carrying 250+ Radiation [1] | Take a chem — he likes it, no radiation threshold needed to trigger the like [2] |
| 12 | Cait | Trigger Rush — see below, it isn’t what the tooltip says [1][3] | Pick a lock [2] |
The One That’s Bugged: Cait’s Trigger Rush
Trigger Rush’s in-game description promises 25% faster Action Point regeneration when your Hit Points drop below 25% of maximum. That has never been how it actually works [3]. The real trigger has nothing to do with health at all — your AP actually regenerates 50% faster specifically when your current AP pool drops below 25 points, regardless of how much health you have left [3]. Full-health characters who just dumped their whole AP bar into V.A.T.S. get the bonus; characters bleeding out at 10% HP with a full AP bar don’t get anything.
It’s not a rumor — it’s stated directly in the perk’s own effects breakdown on the Fallout Wiki, and it’s why Trigger Rush ranks last here despite Cait being one of the easier companions to max out. Treat it as a minor AP-recovery quirk for V.A.T.S.-heavy builds, not the emergency low-health cooldown its own tooltip advertises.
Dogmeat Isn’t Like the Other Twelve
Most “all companion perks” lists count thirteen companions and thirteen perks, folding Dogmeat’s “Attack Dog” bonus in alongside Killshot and Combat Medic as if it works the same way. It doesn’t. Attack Dog is a standard perk-chart perk — it costs a real perk point, requires 4 Charisma, and unlocks in four separate ranks at character levels 1, 9, 25, and 31 [4]. You buy it with SPECIAL investment like Gunslinger or Blacksmith; you don’t idolize Dogmeat to earn it, and he doesn’t have the affinity-driven personal quest, romance, or dialogue arc the other twelve companions do [1][4].
That’s a real, practical difference: Dogmeat’s bonus scales with your level and perk points, not with how much time you spend running errands for him, so there’s no fastest-affinity-action row for him in the table above — there isn’t an affinity grind to speed up.
Which Perks Fit Your Playstyle
The same twelve perks aren’t equally worth chasing depending on how you actually play:
| Player Type | Farm These First | Why |
|---|---|---|
| New player | Curie, Preston Garvey | Both trigger from actions you’re already doing early — settler quests and low-HP moments — with zero build commitment [1][2] |
| Casual player | MacCready, Piper | Killshot helps any V.A.T.S. playstyle without a build change; Gift of Gab passively speeds up leveling every time you explore [1] |
| Hardcore optimizer | Deacon, Danse, Preston | Stack Cloak & Dagger with a sneak build, United We Stand with a heavy-combat build — these are the two perks with build-defining numbers [1] |
| Completionist | All 12, in a deliberate order | Every perk is permanent and stacks with the others once earned, so a full playthrough can collect all twelve regardless of final build [1] |
The Lone Wanderer Trade-Off
Lone Wanderer gives a flat damage resistance and carry weight bonus specifically when you’re travelling with no human companion (Dogmeat doesn’t count against it) [1]. Every companion perk on this list, by contrast, requires actually recruiting and idolizing a human or synth companion — time you’re not spending under Lone Wanderer’s bonus. You don’t have to pick one permanently: because perks stay unlocked after dismissal, the efficient route is farming affinity with each companion in turn, then running solo under Lone Wanderer for the rest of the game once you’ve collected the perks you want [1]. Trying to run both a companion and Lone Wanderer at the same time just wastes one of the two bonuses.
Farm These Before You Finish the Main Quest
It’s mechanically impossible to finish Fallout 4’s main story while keeping every companion available — some questlines force you to choose factions that lock others out permanently, and Danse in particular will refuse to interact with you at all outside the Railroad ending [1]. If a completionist perk collection matters to you, farm affinity with faction-tied companions — Danse, Deacon, X6-88, Preston — well before you commit to an ending, not after. The safer companions to leave for later are the ones with no faction attachment: Curie, Piper, Nick Valentine, Hancock, MacCready, Cait, and Strong can all be picked up in any order without an ending deadline forcing your hand.
Verified against Fallout 4’s current live build. Perk effects and the affinity formula have been unchanged since the April 2024 next-gen update — values above still apply.
FAQ
Do companion perks stack with each other?
Yes, and that’s the entire point of farming more than one — none of the twelve were designed as mutually exclusive, so a character running Killshot, Combat Medic, and United We Stand simultaneously gets all three bonuses at once with no penalty [1].
Is it worth farming Trigger Rush at all given the bug?
Only if you’re already running a V.A.T.S.-heavy build that regularly dumps its AP bar — the 50% regen kicking in below 25 AP is a genuinely fast recovery in that specific situation [3]. If you were hoping for a low-health panic button, it isn’t one, and there are eleven other perks worth your time first.
Can I lose a perk if a companion’s affinity drops back down later?
No. Once idolize is reached and the perk is granted, it’s yours permanently, even if you go on to anger that same companion into leaving for good afterward [1].
Which perk is the fastest to actually unlock?
Preston Garvey’s United We Stand, in practice — accepting settler quests through peaceful dialogue is his one repeatable love trigger worth +35 affinity (roughly +17.5 after the size scalar), and the Commonwealth hands you an endless supply of settler radiant quests from the moment you found your second settlement [1][2]. Curie and Piper share that same trigger at the weaker “like” tier, so a single settler quest chain can push all three companions toward idolize simultaneously if they’re all in your party.
Sources
- Fallout Wiki (Fandom), “Fallout 4 companions”
- Fallout Wiki (Fandom), “Affinity”
- Fallout Wiki (Fandom), “Trigger Rush”
- Fallout Wiki (Fandom), “Attack Dog”
- TheGamer, “Fallout 4: Every Companion Perk And How To Unlock Them”
Still stocking your Commonwealth loadout? Our STALKER 2 beginner’s guide is worth a look if you want another post-apocalyptic wasteland to survive once you’ve collected all twelve perks here.
I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.