Every Fallout 4 Companion and Their Story

Fallout 4 has 13 companions in the base game, people (and a dog, and two robots) the Sole Survivor can travel with across the Commonwealth in 2287. The Automatron, Far Harbor and Nuka-World add-ons bring three more named companions: Ada, Old Longfellow and Porter Gage. Most have a past that ties them to one of the game's factions, and several have a personal quest that settles their story. (Fallout 4; Fallout 4: Automatron; Fallout 4: Far Harbor; Fallout 4: Nuka-World)

The base game companions#

Cait#

Cait is a cage fighter at the Combat Zone, an old Boston theatre run by raiders. She grew up with abusive parents who, on her 18th birthday, put a shock collar on her and sold her to slavers. She eventually bought her freedom and went back to kill them, then drifted into chems and fighting to punish herself. (Fallout 4)

She belongs to no faction. Her personal quest, Benign Intervention, starts once she trusts the Survivor enough to admit her Psycho addiction. They fight through the Gunners holding Vault 95, a vault built to treat addicts, and put her in its detox chair. Her arc ends with the addiction treated and Cait off Psycho. (Fallout 4)

Codsworth#

Codsworth is the Sole Survivor's family robot, a Mister Handy butler from their pre-war home in Sanctuary Hills. Vault-Tec wouldn't take robots, so he was left behind when the family ran for Vault 111. For 210 years he kept cleaning a ruined house and hoping they'd come back. (Fallout 4)

He has no faction and no personal quest. He's the Survivor's first link to the old world when they wake, and he's still waiting at the house when the search for their son Shaun begins. (Fallout 4)

Curie#

Curie is a robot in a sealed research wing of Vault 81. One of the vault's scientists upgraded her from a Miss Nanny model and gave her a personality and a French accent. When the scientists died, she carried on their work alone and finished a cure for the diseases they had studied, then waited for Vault-Tec to come and collect it. (Fallout 4)

Her personal quest, Emergent Behavior, starts when she decides a robot's mind can't take her research further. Doctor Amari at the Memory Den in Goodneighbor offers a synth body instead of a human one: a synth left in a vegetative state after a failed memory wipe. Curie's mind moves into it, and her arc ends with her learning to live with feelings and a body that can be hurt. (Fallout 4)

Paladin Danse#

Danse is a paladin of the Brotherhood of Steel who leads Recon Squad Gladius. The Survivor meets him holding out at the Cambridge Police Station. He remembers growing up an orphan in the Capital Wasteland and joining the Brotherhood in Rivet City. He once had to kill his best friend, Cutler, after Cutler was turned into a super mutant. (Fallout 4)

His personal quest, Blind Betrayal, is part of the Brotherhood's own story. Records taken from the Institute show that Danse is an escaped Generation 3 synth, designation M7-97, with no memory of it. Arthur Maxson orders the Survivor to execute him at Listening Post Bravo. The Survivor can carry out the order, or persuade Danse to live and then talk Maxson round, in which case Danse is spared but exiled from the Brotherhood. If Maxson isn't persuaded, he kills Danse himself. (Fallout 4)

Deacon#

Deacon is a spy for the Railroad, the group that smuggles synths out of the Commonwealth, and he follows the Survivor in disguise long before they meet. He lies about himself constantly, including his name and how long he has been with the Railroad. (Fallout 4)

The story he swears is true: as a young man he ran with a synth-hunting gang, the University Point Deathclaws. He left them, settled down and married a woman named Barbara, and when the gang came back for revenge they found out she was a synth and killed her. He joined the Railroad to make up for it. He has no personal quest, and his fate is the Railroad's. (Fallout 4)

Dogmeat#

Dogmeat is a German shepherd the Survivor finds at the Red Rocket truck stop near Sanctuary. He has no owner, though Nick Valentine says the dog has helped him on cases before. (Fallout 4)

His story moment is in the main quest. In Reunions he follows the scent of Kellogg, the mercenary who took Shaun, across the Commonwealth to Fort Hagen. He has no personal quest. (Fallout 4)

John Hancock#

Hancock is the ghoul mayor of Goodneighbor. He was born John McDonough, younger brother of Diamond City's mayor. When his brother won office on an anti-ghoul campaign and drove the ghouls out of the city, John left in disgust. He later turned himself into a ghoul with an experimental radioactive drug. (Fallout 4)

After a bad bender he woke up in the Old State House, took the historical John Hancock's coat and hat from a display case, and led the uprising that threw out Goodneighbor's old boss, Vic. He has no personal quest. A later quest proves that Mayor McDonough had been replaced by an Institute synth, and Hancock is left knowing he hated his brother for the wrong reasons. (Fallout 4)

Robert MacCready#

MacCready is a mercenary for hire in the Third Rail bar in Goodneighbor. Players of Fallout 3 know him as the foul-mouthed boy mayor of Little Lamplight, a town of children in the Capital Wasteland. (Fallout 4; Fallout 3)

He left Lamplight at 16, as its rules require, and married a woman named Lucy, who was killed by feral ghouls. Their son, Duncan, is sick. His personal quest, Long Road Ahead, has two parts: killing Winlock and Barnes, two Gunners hunting him since he walked out on their contract, and then finding a cure for Duncan in the Med-Tek Research building. The arc ends with the cure on a caravan home and MacCready free of his debts. (Fallout 4)

Nick Valentine#

Nick is Diamond City's private detective, an old, battered synth carrying the memories of a pre-war Boston police detective named Nick Valentine. He was one of the Institute's early prototypes and escaped. He helps the Survivor track Kellogg in the main quest. (Fallout 4)

His personal quest, Long Time Coming, follows the original Nick's last case: Eddie Winter, a pre-war mob boss who had the human Nick's fiancée killed and who survived the war as a ghoul. Ten old police holotapes give the code to Winter's bunker, and the arc ends with Winter dead. In Far Harbor, Nick meets DiMA, another prototype, and learns they were made together. (Fallout 4; Fallout 4: Far Harbor)

Piper Wright#

Piper runs Publick Occurrences, Diamond City's only newspaper, and lives with her younger sister, Nat. She got into journalism as a girl, exposing the militia captain who killed her father. (Fallout 4)

The Survivor first meets her locked out of the city, banned by Mayor McDonough over an article hinting that he is an Institute synth. She has no personal quest. Her story moment is Story of the Century, an interview with the Survivor about life before the war, and her suspicions about the mayor turn out to be right. (Fallout 4)

Preston Garvey#

Preston is one of the last of the Minutemen, a militia that once protected the Commonwealth's settlements. After his unit was wiped out at Quincy by the Gunners, he led a handful of survivors to Concord, where the Survivor finds them pinned down by raiders in the Museum of Freedom. (Fallout 4)

He has no personal quest in the usual sense. Instead he asks the Survivor to rebuild the Minutemen, names them General, and keeps reporting settlements that need help. His arc runs through the Minutemen quest line, from retaking the Castle to the Minutemen's own path to ending the Institute. (Fallout 4)

Strong#

Strong is a super mutant made by the Institute's version of the FEV and held prisoner by his own warband at the top of Trinity Tower. A radio host, Rex Goodman, had been reading them Macbeth, and Strong took the line about the "milk of human kindness" literally, believing it was a drink that gave humans their strength. (Fallout 4)

His brothers locked him up with Rex for it. The Survivor frees them both in Curtain Call. He has no personal quest. (Fallout 4)

X6-88#

X6-88 is a Courser, one of the Institute's elite synths who hunt runaway synths on the surface. He's cold, contemptuous of surface people and devoted to the Institute's mission. (Fallout 4)

He only becomes a companion once the Survivor has joined the Institute. He has no personal quest, and his story is tied to the Institute's. (Fallout 4)

The add-on companions#

Ada#

Ada is a heavily rebuilt Assaultron robot, the only survivor when robots serving the Mechanist wiped out her creator Jackson's caravan. She is found near a Wattz Consumer Electronics store after answering a distress call. (Fallout 4: Automatron)

Her story is the Automatron quest line. She and the Survivor track the Mechanist's robots back to their source, and the arc ends with the Mechanist confronted in their lair. The add-on also lets the Survivor build their own robot companions at a robot workbench. (Fallout 4: Automatron)

Old Longfellow#

Old Longfellow is a hunter and drinker in Far Harbor, on the Island off Maine, and one of the few who can guide people through its radioactive Fog. Long ago the Children of Atom took the woman he loved, Hannah, and turned her to their faith, and he has hated them since. (Fallout 4: Far Harbor)

His personal quest is Shipbreaker, a giant fog crawler he has hunted for years. When it's dead, he hands over the harpoon gun he'd been saving to finish it, Skipper's Last Stand. (Fallout 4: Far Harbor)

Porter Gage#

Porter Gage is second-in-command to Overboss Colter, who rules the raider gangs of Nuka-World. He ran away from his parents' farm at 12, sick of watching them give in to raiders, and became one himself at 16. (Fallout 4: Nuka-World)

He wants a better boss. Gage steers the Survivor through the Gauntlet and into killing Colter, which makes the Survivor the new Overboss. He has no separate personal quest. His arc depends on the Survivor sticking with the raiders: turning on them ends the partnership. (Fallout 4: Nuka-World)