Tape

A Tape (Holotape or Holodisk)
A Holotape. A tape on which you can write your own message or upload existing ones to your Pip-Boy.
Primary Use	Quest-related item
Alternate Use	Upload text to Pip-Boy Archives
Weight	1814 grams
Base Price	?? caps

Obtaining Tapes

You can buy them one-at-a-time from Veronica the Librarian at Followers of the Apocalypse's Library in Boneyard area for some Caps (on a timer), and sometimes find them for sale by regular NPC Merchants for much cheaper. You can acquire two by doing the Deliver Message for Elmer quest in Necropolis, and one tape from a message-delivery quest in Shady Sands.

Uses

When you get a Holodisk, you can load its message up to your Pip-Boy and read it in Archives. To upload a Holodisk, select the Use or "Hand" icon on a tape in your inventory. Then to read that message and others messages in your Pip-Boy, look in your Pip-Boy Archives. You can write your own custom messages too! To write your own message directly into a holotape, use Science on it (select "Skilldex" icon on a holodisk in inventory and then choose "Science" from list). An editing window will appear. You can delete an existing message from a tape by using your Delete key although text characters can only be deleted one at a time.

Functional Limitations

• Each Holotape has a 2000-character limit, but you can rarely get the full 2000 into a tape
• The editing interface does not scroll down so it is difficult to write long messages
• Size of editing window is not scaled to the width of an Archive record so formatting is a chore
• No mouse control, so cursor placement is via keyboard only
• No way to delete or overwrite records once uploaded, and no overwrite option
• No way to re-order or sort or filter records once uploaded

For longer messages, players should write their text in an external text file, copy it from there and then paste into the tape.

NOTE: In order to paste text into a tape, the character's chat bar must be open.

Using holotapes can be fun and effective, but getting tapes to look good in a Pip-Boy requires some practice.

Note
This feature is hard-coded into the game's engine so players should not expect these limitations to be fixed anytime soon.

KNOWN BUG

As of Season 3, a bug exists that corrupts formatting. All long text messages pasted into a tape do not recognize line breaks, and thus all lines are run together. For now, the work-around is to include two CR (line-breaks) wherever you want a single line-break. For whatever reason, a single CR gets ignored, while two translate into one. Try typing up some useful info into a text file, use two CR between paragraphs, copy when done and paste into a blank in-game tape. Read the tape and open that Character's Pip-Boy, click Archives, and click the record you just read. The formatting should look acceptable.