Is it worth it to take the Wild Wasteland trait in Fallout New Vegas?

According to the wiki, there are a number of otherwise unattainable encounters that you can experience if you have the Wild Wasteland trait, including some in the DLCs.

Number of Wild Wasteland Encounters:

• "Core" game - 22
• Dead Money - 3
• Honest Hearts - 2
• Old World Blues - 11
• Lonesome Road - 4

These feature references to many popular movies/TV:

• Star Wars
• Indiana Jones
• Lassie

Notable Loot:

• Alien Blaster (and 100 shots)

Unattainable Loot:

• YCS/186 unique Gauss Rifle is not available if you have the Wild Wasteland perk (as it is replaced by the Alien Blaster)

Is it worth it? That's something only you can decide.

You can read up on the specifics of the trait on the Fallout Wiki article.

The biggest difference is trading the unique Gauss Rifle for a unique Alien Blaster. I think the Alien Blaster uses special ammo that you only find a very limited supply of while the Gauss Blaster uses MF cells. The Alien Blaster is pretty ridiculous though, zero spread and every shot is a critical. You also miss out on a few mini-nukes.

If you want the perk, get it for the humor. IMO it far outweighs the (fairly minor) gameplay changes, which I'm sure is intentional. It's basically one gun difference, plus a few mininukes, and if you're like me you never even use "too good to use" consumable items like that anyway.

In my experience, if you are the kind that would like/love a good laugh at times, it would be worth it.

Otherwise I don't recommend it considering that unique YCS/186 Gauss Rifle is replaced with Alien Blaster when you have this perk.

Note:

If you do get the perk, you can get one then the other with console codes on the PC, that would be the only way to get both, considering I have both.

To acquire both of the weapons (and extra ammo for the Alien Blaster), you can use player.additem item_base_id_here command.

Fallout wiki articles have the "item codes" ("base id") :

• YCS/186 Gauss Rifle - 0015b38d.
• Alien Blaster - 00004322
• Alien power cell (ammo for the blaster) - 00029364