Quests

Fallout 76 shipped without a single living person in it. Every voice was a recording, every quest-giver was a robot or a corpse, and the loudest complaint at launch was that the world felt empty. Everything Bethesda added afterwards was, in one way or another, an answer to that.

Which means the quest list is a history of the game repopulating itself, and sorting our fifty quest pages by who is waiting at the far end produces a genuine ladder: nobody, then a faction, then a town, then one person who moves into your camp. It also explains the shape of our own coverage, because forty-one of the forty-five individual quests we have written up arrived after launch.

Nobody at the other end

The original campaign is a chase after a woman you never meet. You leave Vault 76 on Reclamation Day, find the Overseer's C.A.M.P. under a bridge, listen to her log, and from there you follow her recordings across Appalachia through twenty-five chapters to Death From Above. Our main quests walkthrough covers the whole chain in one page, from First Contact and Thirst Things First through Into The Fire, Key To The Past, Bunker Buster and Officer On Deck.

One detail from that page is worth pulling out, because it is the hinge the whole game turns on: every quest in the chain is soloable except the last few, which need other players. The story that begins with you alone in an empty vault ends by requiring a team, and that is the game telling you what it actually is.

Three of our pages exist purely because that era had puzzles instead of people. The Fire Breathers Test hands you all seven Knowledge Exam answers at the Charleston Fire Department. The Hornwright Industrial Exam does the same for the Senior Executive test. The Gauley Mine Code is a six-digit number and a note board. No characters, no dialogue, just a terminal and the correct answer.

A faction, but no face

The next rung up is the base game's side content, where somebody clearly used to be in charge and is not any more. Our side quests guide collects them, including Cold Case, Tentative Plans, The Motherlode and Mayor For a Day.

• Order of Mysteries is the fullest of them, a complete faction chain from Into the Mystery to Mistress of Mystery, run entirely through the records of an order whose members are all gone.
• Miner Miracles ends with you building the Excavator Power Armor at Garrahan Mining HQ, which makes it the base game's clearest example of a quest that pays in equipment rather than in people.
• Scavenger Hunt sends you after the Berserker's Pickaxe in a military compound.

A town that showed up two years late

Wastelanders is where people arrive, and it is the single largest block in this bucket: seventeen of our quest pages belong to its main story, which is one continuous heist aimed at the gold reserve inside Vault 79.

It opens quietly. Wayward Souls introduces Lacey at the Wayward and Duchess's problem with Batter, and The New Arrivals has you warning the newcomers about the Scorched disease and helping make a vaccine. From there it splits between two settlements that do not like each other, the Raiders at Crater and the Settlers at Foundation, and the middle stretch is you doing favours for both.

The heist has a real ending rather than a fade-out, and both of the last two pages turn on a choice about who keeps the money. That matters more than it sounds, because the gold becomes Gold Bullion, a second currency you spend at vendors afterwards, and finishing the Wastelanders questline is what switches it on.

One Wastelanders quest sits outside the heist. Hunter for Hire asks you to build a camp and a weapons workbench for Mort and then defend the Wayward from bandits, which makes it the only quest in the bucket that requires you to have read our locations guide first.

The Brotherhood arrives and issues orders

Steel Reign is the smaller follow-up, four pages, and it swaps the heist's messy improvisation for a chain of command. Duty Calls has you raising a flag at Valley Galleria and collecting turret-busting gear from RobCo Research. Missing Persons is a search for Marcia Leone that turns into a rescue. Out of the Blue is a Fort Atlas lab with three code panels. The Catalyst is the fifth and last of them, ending at West Tek with Blackburn and a decision.

All four hand you a choice at the end rather than a cutscene, which is the pattern Wastelanders established and the one the game has kept.

One person, and they move in with you

The top of the ladder is the ally questlines, where the reward is not gear or caps but somebody who lives at your camp afterwards. Two of them have enough of a chain that we have written the steps up individually, and our companions guide covers how recruiting works.

Beckett is the Raider you pull out of Blood Eagle Prison. His chain runs fifteen quests and we cover nine of them: Narrow Escape to rescue him, then Out of Key, Traitor's Demise, Supply and Demand, Bot of Gold, Sibling Piracy, Needs of the Many, Eye for an Eye and finally Thicker Than Water, which is a maze under Watoga and ends with a conversation about his brother. His chain is also the one that pays the Final Word.

Commander Sofia Daguerre is the longer of the two at nineteen quests, and we cover eight: Crash Landing follows her distress call to a bunker in the Mire, then The Woman Who Fell to Earth, One Small Step, Bring Home the Beacon, Past Expiration, Who Sat Down Beside Her, Lab Rat and Mission Out of Control, which ends at Sugar Grove deciding what happens to an AI called A.T.H.E.N.A.

Both chains end in the same place structurally: the ally comes to live at your camp, and once the storyline is finished you can flirt with them. Our Daguerre romance guide is candid that her line runs eight to ten hours before you get there, and that you can break it off afterwards with a conversation.

Everyone on the server at once

The last group is not a rung on the ladder so much as the floor underneath it. These quests do not care who you are; they fire on a timer or on proximity and pull in whoever happens to be nearby.

• Daily quests number twenty-seven across Appalachia, and our page lists every one by region with its rewards. They include the four Refugee dailies, drop quests like Lost and Found and Request Government AirDrop, and oddities like Dross Toss and Cop a Squatter.
• Event quests are the MMO piece: they appear at a spot on the map, everyone in the area shares the objective, and the rewards run to legendary weapons and armor.
• Random encounters covers everything that happens without being started, from hordes and supply drops to the competitive multiplayer modes and dozens of miscellaneous triggers.

It is worth doing the dailies for a reason our mechanics guide explains at more length: daily and weekly tasks are the main faucet for Atom, which is the currency the cosmetic shop runs on, and they reset on their own whether you were there or not.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to do the main story before Wastelanders?

No, but the two read very differently if you do them in the wrong order. The base campaign is about finding out what happened to everybody; Wastelanders is about the people who turned up afterwards. Starting with the second one skips the emptiness the first one is built around.

Can I finish the main quest alone?

Almost all of it. Our walkthrough is explicit that the chain is soloable until the last few chapters, which need a team, so plan to have friends or a public group available before Officer On Deck and the launch sequence.

Which ally should I recruit first?

Beckett, if you want a weapon out of it, since the chain ends in a unique .50 cal. Daguerre if you want the longer story, since hers is nineteen quests to Beckett's fifteen and our romance guide rates it the better of the two.

What do the exam and code pages actually save me?

Guesswork on a terminal with a lockout. The Fire Breathers and Hornwright tests both gate real progression behind multiple-choice questions, and the Gauley Mine and Vault 79 door codes are fixed numbers rather than per-player ones, so they work exactly as written.

Why are there so few base game quest pages here?

Because most of the base game's quests are collected in the main quests and side quests roundups rather than given a page each, while nearly every post-launch quest has one. Forty-one of the forty-five individual quests in this bucket come from Wastelanders, Steel Reign or an ally chain.