Fallout 76’s Wasteland is full of surprises—this includes other vaults to find, as well as a surprise examination you suddenly find yourself taking. Vault 76, of course, is the eponymous main one, the one that the story emphasizes—but there’s more going on, and this guide tells you how to get a handle on that.

OTHER VAULTS

You can find three other vaults in the game’s world—Vault 63, 94, and 96. You can’t actually get into these vaults (though Bethesda plans to open them in the coming months), but if you want to camp outside of them like a Nintendo fan ahead of the Switch’s release, we can at least tell you where to find them:

• Vault 63: In the southern part of Ash Heap, partially hidden inside a shack
• Vault 94: Northern section of the Savage Divide, east of the Pumpkin House
• Vault 96: South of the Spruce Knob, in souther Savage Divide

INTO THE FIRE EXAM ANSWERS

Into the Fire is a main quest in Fallout 76, that tasks you with passing a Fire Breather exam. This can bring your progress to a halt, because you have to search for these answers to be able to answer 7 questions. Or, you can use our guide.

1. Evacuate as quickly as possible
2. A water-soaked rag
3. Gently bind the burn with clean bandages
4. Retreat immediately
5. 1 pt. Purified Water, 2 Ash Rose, 2 Blight, 2 Soot Flower
6. Fall back and engage from a distance with firearms
7. End his life as mercifully as possible

In Fallout 76, you can launch a nuclear weapon, and wreak havoc. You can also, on a smaller scale, modify the weapons you have, to try and make them more powerful and more effective at tearing through all hostiles you come across in the Wasteland, human or otherwise. This guide covers all of that.

NUCLEAR CODES

You can check out our guide on launching nuclear weapons in Fallout 76. This specific section of the guide is instead going to talk about getting the nuclear codes you need to launch the missiles.

Here’s the good news—previously, we thought the codes you get are encrypted, and scrambled out of order. We thought that the only thing for you to do is either to try to puzzle out the decoding yourself with your group, or wait till later in the week, when the Enclave will have encrypted most of the codes in their surveillance lab.

However, there is a quicker way: you can use the a fan developed website (https://nukacrypt.com/how). The website uses the cipher for the codes, which are actually all common, and can be found within the game itself, to help you out. You essentially put in the fragment of code that you have, and the website will use it to generate the full code for you. Since the cipher seems to be hard coded into the game, it doesn’t seem like it will change, even if the codes themselves do.

WEAPON CUSTOMIZATION

You don’t unlock weapon customization, it is available to you from the get go. There are two kinds of weapon customization available to you:

• You can either use a crafting table
• You can apply the mods directly

As for mods, you can either buy them directly from vendors, or you can scrap weapons with mods applied to them to learn how to craft that mod for yourself.

Fallout 76 may be a multiplayer shared world survival shooter and all that, but it’s still an open world game, which means it has a tiresome amount of collectibles strewn throughout the world for you to gather. Some of these can actually be useful, however—such as Nuka Cherry, Cap Stashes, and Stash Boxes. And in this guide, we tell you where to find them.

NUKA CHERRY

There are so many of these to be found in the Wasteland, it can be hard to know where to begin with trying to hunt them down. Which is where we come in!

• Site Bravo
• Mount Blair Tranyard
• Belching Betty
• Hemlock Holes
• Hornwright Estate
• West Tek Research Center
• Observatory
• Sunnytop Ski Lanes
• Seneca Rocks Visitor Center
• Charleston Capital Building
• Site Alpha
• Abandoned Bog Town
• Site Charlie
• Whitespring Bunker
• Monogah Power Plant
• R&G Station
• Charleston Station
• Thunder Mountain Power Pond
• Black Bear Lodge
• Pioneer Scout Camp
• Grafton
• Smith Pond
• Monogah
• Thunder Mountain Power Plant
• White Powder Winter Sports
• Kanawha Nuka Cola Plant
• Pleasant Valley Cabins
• Sutton Station
• Morgantown
• AVR Medical Center
• Morgantown High School
• Big Bend Tunnel West
• Tyler County Fairgrounds
• Solomon’s Pond
• Greg’s Mine Supply
• Palace of the Winding Path
• Freddy Fear’s House of Scares
• Fort Defiance
• Glass Cavern

STASH BOX

Stash boxes can come in handy if you find them… and that’s where our guide comes in.

• Morgantown
• Sutton
• Morgantown Station
• Charleston Station
• Sutton Station
• Flatwoods
• Overseer’s Camp
• Grafton
• Grafton Station
• Red Rocket Filling Station
• Welch Station
• Sunnytop Sation
• Pleasant Valley Station
• Red Rocket Mega Stop
• Seneca Rocks Visitor Center
• Lewisberg Station
• Whitespring Resort
• Whitespring Station
• R&G Station
• Watoga Station
• Abandoned Bog Town
• Valley Galleria

CAP STASHES

Caps are the currency in Fallout’s world, and finding a stash of them means you’re better prepared for the Wasteland’s economy. This section of the guide tells you where to find them:

• Berkeley Mine Exhibit
• Morgantown Trainyard
• Poseidon Energy Plant
• New River Gorge Bridge Resort
• Burdette Manor
• AVR Medical Center
• Whitespring Gold Club
• Mama Dolce’s Food Processing
• Red Rocket Filling Station
• Observatory
• Riverside Manor
• Mount Blair Trainyard
• Thunder Mountain Power Plant
• Watoga High School
• Hornwright Summer Villa
• Middle Mountain Cabins
• Vault-Tec Agricultural Research Center
• Hornwright Estate
• Appalachian Antiques
• Hornwright Industrial Headquarters
• Watoga Emergency Services
• Tygart Water Treatment
• New River Gorge Bridge-East
• Helvetia
• Dyer Chemical
• The Whitespring Resort
• Sugar Grove
• Sugarmaple
• The Freak Show
• Tyler County Fairgrounds
• Grafton
• The Whitespring Bunker
• Glassed Cavern
• Camden Park
• Eastern Regional Penitentiary
• Point Pleasant
• Vault 94
• The Crosshair
• Clarksburg
• Vault-Tec University
• Wendigo Cave
• Deathclaw Island
• Whitespring Service Entrance
• The General’s Steakhouse
• Wade Airport
• Watoga Municipal Center
• Big Bend Tunnel West
• Watoga Civic Center
• Kanawha Nuka-Cola Plant
• West Tek Research Center
• Overlook Cabin

Fallout 76 may be a shared world survival action game, but it is also an open world game. And you know what that means—that means that the world of the game is actually full of trinkets and objects for you to track down and collect for yourself. These include Magazines, Nuka Cola Quantum, and keys. This guide tells you where to find all of them.

MAGAZINES

Okay, so this is a bit ridiculous. There are 12 (twelve) magazines to find in this game, which doesn’t seem too bad, but there are no fixed locations for them. There’s a possibility that you might find a magazine at one of the locations listed below; if you don’t, try one of the other ones, or log out and log into a different server.

All of which is to say: this is a probability, not a certainty. Good luck:

• Vault 76
• Twin Pine Cabins
• Top of the World
• Vault-Tec Agricultural Research Center
• Groves Family Cabin
• Darling Sister’s Lab
• Land view Lighthouse
• Hunter’s Ridge
• Transmission Station 1AT-U03
• Marigold Pavillion
• Gauley Mine
• Tyler County Fairgrounds
• Deathclaw Island
• Morgantown:
  • High School
  • Airport
  • Trainyard
• Vault-Tec University
• Grafton Dam
• Horizon’s Rest
• Sutton
• Silva Homestead
• The Giant Teapot
• Bolton Greens
• Greg’s Mine Supplies
• Camp Adams
• Kanawha Nuka Cola Plant
• Summerville Docks
• Torrance House
• Riverside Manor
• Charleston Capitol Building
• Blackbear Lodge
• Becker Farm
• Belching Betty
• Camden Park
• Nicholson’s End
• Mount Blair
• Mount Blair Trainyard
• Forward Station Delta
• Sons of Dane Compound
• Wendigo Cave
• Sunnytop Ski Lanes
• Sunrise Farm
• Bailey Family Cabin
• Lewisburg
• Safe N Clean Disposal
• Mosstown
• Site Charlie
• Blackwater Mine
• Tanagra Town
• Hawke’s Refuge
• Quarry X3
• The Thorn
• Watoga:
  • Watoga Transit Hub
  • Watoga Emerency Services
  • Watoga Civil Services
  • Watoga Estate
  • Watoga Shopping Plaza
  • Watoga Municipal Center
  • Watoga High School
• Lost Home

KEYS LOCATIONS

There are a fair few keys in this game that you can find to gain access to new areas or safes. These areas and safes are almost always hiding a lot of great loot and crafting material for you, so it’s worth it to try and get there and see what you can find. Below, we have collected locations for some of the keys that give you access to new areas:

• East Bridge Key: New River Gorge Bridge
• Principal’s Safe Key: In his office, on top of a table
• Principal’s Office key: In the bathrooms next to the gym
• Horizon’s Rest Armory key: Middle shack of the tower
• Horizon’s Rest Jail Cell key: Highest shack near the tower
• Safe Key: Port-a-potty to the west of the North Kanawha Tower
• West Bridge Key: Roller coaster cars in Camden Park
• Responder’s Bravo Station Key: On Rocky
• Loading Dock Storage Key: National Isolated Radio Array office building
• Room 6 Sunnytop Ski Lanes: Behind the reception desk

NUKA COLA QUANTUM

One of the collectibles you can find in Fallout 76 is Nuka Cola Quantum. The following are all known locations for it:

• Garrahan Estate
• Vault 76
• Watoga High School
• Darling Sister’s Lab
• Abandoned Bog Town
• Green Country Lodge
• Kanawha Nuka Cola Plant
• Camden Park
• Monorail Elevator
• Hornwright Summer Villa
• Whitesprung Resort

Fallout 76 may be a shared world multiplayer survival shooter, but you know what else it is? It’s also an open world game, which means its world is chock full of things for you to find. Sometimes these can just be pretty spots and locations, which is great, but other times, you can also actually run into useful and meaningful loot that will help you survive and prevail in the Wasteland.

In this guide, we deal with finding some of that stuff.

HAZMAT SUITS

Hazmat suits can help you survive areas with high amounts of radiation. Given that said areas often have some of the best loot tucked away within them, you do want to go there, even though the radiation can literally kill you. That’s where the Hazmat suits come in.

• Poseidon Energy Plant WV-06
• Emmett Mountain, outside the tunnel (damaged)
• Emmet Mountain, locker room
• Emmet Mountain, generator (prototype)
• HZ-21 Federal Disposal Field

UNIQUE APPAREL LOCATIONS

There’s also unique apparel and armor you can find for yourself in this game. There’s nine items we’ve discovered you can find in the game so far, typically tied to the completion of quests:

• Last Bastion: Complete the Officer on Desk quest
• Eye of Ra: Complete the Mistress of Mystery quest
• Worn Veil: Complete the Mistress of Mystery: Into the Mystery quest
• Silver Lining: Complete the Tentative Plans quest
• Prototype Hazmat Suit: Complete the Tracking Unknowns quest
• Stand Fast: Complete the Early Warnings quest
• Trail Warden: Complete the Bureau of Tourism quest
• Garb of Mysteries: Complete the Mistress of Mystery Quest: Initiate of Mysteries quest
• Veil of Secrets: Complete the Mistress of Mystery Quest: Into the Mystery quest

TREASURE MAPS

Finding Treasure Maps can lead you to the location of, well, Treasure. However, it’s not quite that easy, since you have to find the map, decode it, and then follow it to the destination it leads you to. However, all of that effort can be worth it, and in the end, you can get some truly meaningful items for your effort.

The video playlist embedded below walks you through finding the Treasure Maps in Fallout 76.

Fallout 76 may be a multiplayer survival action game, but it is also an open world game, which means it has an obligation for you to find all sorts of stuff littered through its expanses. And the good thing is, here in this guide, we tell you where to find said stuff through said game’s said expanses.

THE PERFECT STORM 10MG SMG

The Perfect Storm is a unique weapon that can cause three seconds of burning damage after each shot, which means it is definitely something you will want on your person. But how to find it?

• Go to the cartoon crocodiles icon marked on your map, in the northeast corner of the lakes area. Find the robot named Miss Annie, and initiate the Cold Case quest
• Find the park security terminal and read through it until you are told that the holotape with a clue on it is locked away in the security office safe. Make your way to the safe and lockpick it. It needs a lockpick skill of 0 so you literally can’t fail this, come on
• Play the tape, make the way to the mountain talked about on it, then go to the underground Employees Only area, to find the second clue inside the cabinet. Follow this to the mailbox right next to the ride on the mountain, and go to the Slither Slide
• Following this trail of clues gets you to Clarksberg Post Office. DON’T GO HERE WITHOUT A HAZMAT SUIT.
• Access the terminal and search for the address associated with Box 012. Go to said address, access the terminal to read through the diary entries, and be directed to Grafton Dam.
• Fight the mutants, find the five clues here, go to the Woods Estate, read the note on the desk on the upper floor, and return to Miss Annie, who will then give you this weapon. I really hope it was worth it (it is).

PERK MAGAZINES

Again, much like previous Fallout games, Fallout 76 has you find magazines. But in this game, they are Perk Magazines, finding which can give you buffs and bonuses that can greatly enhance your chances of survival in the world. The perks they give you are temporary, but they can still be helpful in the game’s hostile world:

• Backwoodsman Perk Magazine: This bunch gives bonuses to crafting and cooking.
• Guns and Bullets: Similarly, these ones give you bonuses for guns. And bullets.
• Live and Love: These ones give you teamwork bonuses, so to say. You get extra XP, extra cash, and so on, when you play and cooperate with a group
• Astoundingly Awesome Tales: These ones aren’t limited to a specific kind of perk, they give you a whole range of them. If you’re looking for a specific kind of perk or bonus, these ones are the ones you don’t want
• Grognak the Barbarian: These ones, much like you might have suspected, give you melee detective bonuses

ALIEN BLASTER

The Alien Blaster is literally useless, and is meaningless beyond being a cool Easter egg, but if that’s what you want, then hey, that’s what you’ll get and who am I to stop you.

To find it, head off to route 97, and you will see a butterfly show up on your map/compass. Follow it, go west, stay to the east of the lake, find the destroyed house with the ramp leading to a bathtub, and find it inside the bathtub.

Fallout 76 is greatly simplified over previous Fallout games, which had so many mechanics and systems for the player to keep track of, but it does retain some of the things that players fell in love with the franchise for. After all, this is a post nuclear apocalypse, so you shouldn’t be surprised if you find yourself running into nuclear radiation induced disease as you trudge your way through the Wasteland.

Diseases, however, can have a bad effect on you, and it’s best to get rid of them as soon as possible before their effects get compounded, since that just means you’re easy pickings for all the hostility that is out there in the big bad world.

DISEASES

Depending on what disease it is, you can catch it in one or more of the following ways:

• Drinking Dirty Water
• Traveling through toxic areas without a Hazmat suit
• Eating raw food
• Swimming in radioactive water
• Sleeping on rollout beds or thin mattresses
• Getting attacked by an enemy carrying a disease

Diseases can have multiple bad effects on you:

• Swamp Itch reduces your Charisma by 2
• Parasites mean you suffer periodic food loss
• Dysentry causes periodic water loss
• Shell Shock causes you to lose Action Points
• Bone Worms means you take 50% more limb damage

Diseases can be cured in one of two ways:

• Have anti-biotics
• Find or craft Disease cures

Diseases will last through death, so these are the only ways for you to shake them off, other than you trying to outlast them (every disease is temporary).

MUTATIONS

Diseases are temporary, but mutations are permanent. You usually get them from being exposed to excessive radiation, but there are other ways too:

• As mentioned, from standing near or in areas of excessive radiation without a Hazmat suit
• Eating non purified food
• Drinking non purified water
• Breathing in toxic gas
• Being attacked by enemies carrying radiation

Mutations usually have a positive effect and a negative effect:

• EGG HEAD: +6 Intelligence, but -3 Strength, -3 Endurance
• MARSUPIAL: Increases Jump height and +20 Encumbrance, but -4 Intelligence
• EMPATH: Teammates take -25% damage, but you take +33% damage
• CARNIVORE: Meat gives you double benefits and no diseases, but you can’t eat vegetables anymore
• EAGE EYE: +2 Perception, but -2 Strength
• HEALING FACTOR: +300 Health regeneration, but -55% Chem Effects
• PLAGUE WALKER: A poison aura creates around you, increasing the more diseases you have; BUT you suffer the negative effects of the diseases you carry

Fallout 76 is the first game in the series to embrace multiplayer, which means we now have other players running around the place that you have to deal with. There are good and bad sides to this—on the good side, you get to play through the game with your friends, team up and take on events, quests, and monsters together, work together in the wilderness, and trade and make each other stronger. On the other hand, you have to put up with griefing, abuse, and just the general toxicity that comes with online gaming in general.

Trading

You can trade with any player in Fallout 76, and you can trade anything in your inventory. Walk up to the player you want to trade with, and press Y/Triangle. This sends a friend quest to the other player. Once they accept, press Y/Triangle again, which sends them a trade request. Once the other player accepts, you can each see each other’s inventory. Offer up items you want to trade, and the other player will offer items they want to trade. Once you are happy, you just initiate the trade, and there you go.

You can also sell your items (by setting Cap prices), buy items (if the other player sets a Cap price for what they offer), and give them away (set a Cap price of zero for what you want to give away).

Blocking Players

If for whatever reason, a player is so toxic (more toxic than the nuclear waste in the game) that you don’t want to deal with them, there’s a simple way to block them. Pull up the menu, press R1/RB, scroll to their name on the list, and select Block. That’s it. You never have to deal with them again.

Kicking Players

While players in your instance of the world stay in your instance of the world (unless you block them), you can at least kick them from your party, which also means they can’t rejoin unless you send them an invite. Similar to blocking them, pull up the menu, press R1/RB to go to the social menu, find their name and select Kick.

Muting Players

If you’re okay with still playing with a player, but just want them to shut up, kicking or blocking them can be excessive. In this case, just pull up the social menu, find their name, and select Mute. Blessed silence.

Fallout 76 obviously has several major changes from previous games in the series, but it is in the end still a Fallout game. And as a Fallout game, it’s one that involves you having to deal with the nuclear fallout (get it?), and also involves nuclear bombs in some capacity. Specifically, you can, uh, launch nukes. At other players. Humanity truly learned nothing from the nuclear apocalypse.

So in this guide, we deal with purifying contaminated water, as well as launching nukes.

PURIFYING WATER

You can and do find Purified Water as an item in the game world, but obviously that’s in short supply, and you might not always have it when you need it. The thing is, though, you’re not out of luck, you can simply take Dirty Water, which is far more plentiful, and work with it.

To purify water, you will need—stay with me here—a water purifier. There are three ways to get one:

• You can buy one on the Atom Store (but you need a smaller purifier to make use of this one, so, uh, don’t?)
• One is behind the mayor’s office in Grafton
• One can be found upon completing the Overseer’s quests

Once you have the purifier, you need to use it along with whatever Dirty Water you have over a cooking station, and that’s it. Your water is now purified. Drink away without worrying about any more harmful rads killing brain cells.

LAUNCHING NUKES

So, you can launch nukes at other players in the game, you psychopath. To do that, you need to get a launch code. But the thing is, much like in real life, the government in Fallout was smart enough not to just have one lying around. Instead, you need to find pieces of them from unique enemies in the world—specifically, Feral Ghoul Officers and Scorched Officers, who are the mutated remnants of military officers who had been trusted with the codes once long ago.

So, here’s the problem—these enemies can spawn anywhere in the world, and they may or may not be carrying the codes you want. You need three of them, one for the installations at Site Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie. This can be a big pain. Thankfully, there’s some factors to mitigate the randomness somewhat:

• Scorched Officers hang out around Points of Interest and Locations a lot
• They also are on the outskirts of The Forest
• They carry radio backpacks with tall antenna on their back, which makes them easy to spot and identify. Making things better, the antenna flashes a red light constantly, and lets out a constant pinging sound

Once you kill the officers and retrieve the code, you get all three silo sites marked on your map. The issue is, the code could be for any of them. The code also expires at the end of the week, when new ones are generated. Your job then is to find a way to enter each silo.

But it doesn’t end there either: you’ll find an elevator that can lead you down to the actual launch site, except you can’t access it. No one can. It needs a military handprint to work. To get around this, you need to join the Enclave, and then join in military exercises to get a commendation.

So far so good. Here’s another issue—the codes you get are encrypted, and scrambled out of order. The only thing for you to do is either to try to puzzle out the decoding yourself with your group, or wait till later in the week, when the Enclave will have encrypted most of the codes in their surveillance lab.

Okay, once you have these decoded, enter the silos, but here comes the hard part. Make sure you don’t go there alone. Make sure you are all well stocked and equipped. Beat the enemies, which are as high as Level 50, and solve the security puzzles (including using ID cards to disable biometric checks, repairing and rebooting the radiator room, destroying mainframe computer cores, and defeating the Launch Commander bot).

After all of this, you finally get to the Control Room, where you get to launch the nuke. Was it worth it?

Fallout 76 may be a multiplayer survival shooter, and therefore a hell of a departure from how and what the series has been so far, but ultimately, it is still born from RPG roots. Which means that it has an interlocking mesh and interplay of mechanics and RPG systems that are far beyond than most sort-of RPGs on the system manage. There are actual differentiated stats, with perks unique to them, leading to different kinds of builds, there are multiple weapon types, each differentiated, leading to further divergence based on what you weird, and more.

This guide is meant to walk you through these RPG systems and mechanics for Fallout 76.

PERKS

Fallout 4 went perks only for its leveling system, and perks are more important than even there in Fallout 76. This is because since this is now a multiplayer shooter, perks are what you use to differentiate your character and gain possible advantages over other players.

There are 205 new perks in the game, spread across the S.P.E.C.I.A.L tree—that’s Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck. Each perk can be leveled up further, and upgrading it enhances and compounds its effect.

However, perks aren’t the same as they were in Fallout 4. In Fallout 4, you picked a perk for yourself (or upgraded an existing one) upon leveling up. In this game, you don’t get a perk unless you equip it in the form of a perk card (said card can then be upgraded, as stated previously).

As stated previously, there are 205 new perks, plus upgrades, in Fallout 76. The video below explains them all, in S.P.E.C.I.A.L order (meaning if you want to view a perk for, say, Intelligence, skip ahead a bit).

Of course, not all 205 perks are actually meaningful. Some are categorically really bad ones that you can and should ignore, instead of burdening yourselves with them, while some are the ones you should focus on at all costs. The video below also walks you through which ones to focus on, and which ones to avoid.

WEAPONS

There are multiple different weapons in Fallout 76, as was also the case in Fallout 4. Which makes sense—this is, after all, a loot shooter, so having loot is necessary. Fallout 76 actually includes multiple classes of weapons:

• Melee weapons
• Throwing weapons
• Pistols
• Rifles
• Shotguns
• Heavy weapons
• Laser rifles

Additionally, there are “unique” weapons like the alien gun, or the M2 Browning, that have unique properties. All together, there are a lot of weapons for you, as a player, to discover. Over 40 new ones await, and more are probably hidden away in the world somewhere. The video below will walk you through all the new ones you can find in the game, and which ones to focus on.