A playthrough of any Fallout game is hardly ever going to go as expected. There are far too many variables, random events, emergent situations and, naturally, programming bugs for any two adventures to tell the same story. The games themselves are so massive in scope that nearly anything is possible, and for players that want to push the envelope to see just what feats of absolute madness they can accomplish, they offer an absolute wealth of ridiculous situations to create and pursue.
Though controversial (if you’re a fan of understatements) in delivery, Fallout 76 is no exception to any of the above standards. And really, did you expect anything less? It’s a wacky, bizarre, and sometimes outright insane Bethesda title through and through, bringing to the table its very own array of ludicrous quirks to reinforce the usual procession of open world shenanigans you’d expect from both the series and the developer.
So rest totally assured, it is definitely still a remarkably wild wasteland out there in the West Virginian countryside. But if you’re curious as to just how wild, get comfortable and hang with us for a few minutes as we explore twenty five of the craziest, weirdest and most ridiculous things you could ever hope to do in Fallout 76. Got some ideas of your own? Well, don’t be shy— share some of your stories in the comments below.
Turn Yourself Into An End Game Boss
Rather than take to Reddit and complain about the “lack of content” like everyone else, one player took it upon himself to, well, become the content that we were lacking. Meet Reddit user SatelliteJedi, who proudly proclaims, “I am your raid boss, I am your content.”
To make the long story short, this guy generated a 1,200 cap bounty, then built a miniature “raid dungeon” with traps, locks, and even a few of his friends as body guards. Apparently he repeated this process several times and was met with quite a bit of success, much to the delight of the players that decided to take him on.
Totally Break The Game (For You & Everyone Else)
I try my best to avoid low hanging fruit, but sure, let’s talk about bugs in a Bethesda game. But let’s focus on the fact that bugs, exploits and the like are no longer localized to your own, private, self contained playthrough of Fallout. Now they impact everyone on your server, if they don’t bring down the server entirely.
The number of ways that you can do this is staggering, whether its peddling unreleased content into the game world via the developer room, launching enough nukes to crash the server or utilizing the “unlimited carry weight” glitch to store enough items that is renders the server unstable. At least Bethesda’s doing what it can to mitigate the possibilities with every patch.
Engage In A Gentlemanly Duel
Saying that Fallout 76’s PVP system is bizarre is putting it very, very mildly. Rather than the edge of your seat, dramatic, and tense encounters that you’d expect from a survival oriented game, being attacked by another player is usually treated as a sort of “challenge” that you can accept by attacking them back, or simply ignore and carry on with your day, as they do immensely reduced damage until you return fire.
While this earnestly seems more like a baffling design decision than anything else, the idea of people only politely engaging in consensual combat across Appalachia is actually sort of hilarious, if not outright ridiculous.
Turn Into A Wanted Crook
While the PVP in Fallout 76 isn’t nearly as open and pervasive as you’d expect, you can still do bad deeds to other players, such as stealing from their resource nodes, picking their locked doors, or just repeatedly assaulting them despite their clear aversion to dueling. All of this can result in you having a bounty on your head. If you’re really looking for some intense PVP, then this is the way to make it happen.
The bounty is a cap reward that is lifted from your pocket and awarded to whoever can bring you down, and it grows as you continue being a bad dude. It is displayed to the entire server with a big red icon displaying just how many caps you’re worth next to your approximate location, so needless to say, you’d better be ready to have a fight or five on your hands.
Get A Job At The Theme Park
Because everybody needs a day job! The attractions are still up and running over at Camden Park, but the robotic attendants need a little help to perform some maintenance and keep things lively. That’s where you come in.
It’s nothing major, it’s just that you’ll need to perform some minor identity theft and get yourself into a stolen uniform in order to clock in. And yes, you actually need to clock in so you can get to work. It’s all pretty absurd, but it turns out the job market tends to get pretty dry after a nuclear apocalypse. Go figure.
Make Friends With A Deathclaw
The Wasteland Whisperer and Animal Friend perks are back in Fallout 76, and, as par for course, it feels like most people just sort of ignore the fact that they exist. Which is pretty unfortunate, because there’s a great deal of fun to be had using them this time around.
You can actually send your tamed pets back to your camp to defend it, making it a wonder that so many people pass this up. I mean, what says “stay off my lawn” more effectively than a pet Deathclaw roving the perimeter? Some boring old machine gun turret? Yeah, I didn’t think so either.
Become An Amateur Cryptozoologist
We definitely scored a host of cool, bizarre new creatures in this relatively awkward new chapter of the Fallout saga, primarily due to Bethesda’s admittedly rad decision to include real life cryptids in the bestiary this time around.
Cryptids are monsters based in real world legend, folklore, or myth, such as the Mothman, Flatwoods Monster, and Wendigo. There’s even a daily quest obtainable at the Hunter’s Shack located in the Mire that revolves around tracking a set few of them down. The terminal there offers some limited bits of lore surrounding these rare creatures, as an added bonus for any adventurers.
Confirm The Alien Conspiracy
Be the hero that every tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist needs you to be and set out to prove them right! As in previous Fallout titles, the Zetans are still poking around post nuclear Earth, and are probably wondering why we decided to torch the whole thing. If only any of those conspiracy nuts were still around to gloat about how right they were.
Some of the more indirect confirmations of their existence in Fallout 76 are the Alien Blaster and the Flatwoods Monster, as, spoiler alert, the Flatwoods Monster is obviously a Zetan, or at least totally related to them given his appearance and space suit.
Become A Five Star Chef
The list of cooking recipes that you can obtain and put to use in Fallout 76 dwarfs those we’ve seen previously in New Vegas and Fallout 4, encompassing hundreds of food and drink items with an incredibly wide variety of ingredients.
Some of them are, admittedly, pretty redundant, providing the exact same statistics and bonuses as others. And it’s really difficult to not have a chuckle at how unreasonably fancy some of them are. You can really pull off some feats of culinary excellence in the wasteland, such as Deathclaw Wellington, or Mirelurk Cake with Bloodleaf Aioli. Sous vide, anyone?
Join An Elite Group Of Fire Fighting Monster Hunters
After the bombs fell, survivors that belonged to various emergency services banded together to form the Responders, a group of skilled people dedicated to protecting and serving even as civilization went to ashes around them.
One elite group within them was the Firebreathers, a gung-ho gang of dudes in firefighter gear that have made it their business to delve into abandoned mines and take on the new threat of the Scorched. By following the Responders quest line, you can become one! Assuming you pass the insane initiation ritual involving fighting a bunch of hive minded Scorched zombies in a mine that’s been relegated to a blazing inferno. Fun times!
Join A Secret Sorority of Spies
The Mistress of Mystery was a fictitious femme fatale featured in the universe of the Silver Shroud radio show, which you probably remember pretty well from Fallout 4 as one of the more hilariously ridiculous strings of side quests. Well, it turns out that she may not have been as fictitious as we were initially led to believe.
Exploring the Riverside Manor southeast from Charleston will yield an expansive underground base from which she operated a network of talented spies, and it’s still operational enough for you to enlist yourself and start unraveling the mystery behind the Order of Mysteries.
Reenact The Civil War
Because why not? In the area of Prickett’s Fort, in the far north corner of Toxic Valley, you can sign yourself up for a PVP enabled event that will cast you as a Civil War reenactor taking either the side of the Confederacy or the Union and competing with other players to get the better slice of the event’s rewards.
In my experience, this event rarely has any attendees, so you may want to bring a few friends along for the ride if you’re looking to get involved. It’s definitely a lot more fun that way, to say the least.
Build A Trap
With Fallout 76’s CAMP system, we’re finally able to show off our cool, personal bases to friends and strangers. Or, y’know, potential victims, as reddit user Vault101manguy saw the situation.
Utilizing locked doors and a diabolical set of traps, he decided to lure new players into his “church” one at a time and lock them inside, proceeding to set off a series of flamethrower traps while he menacingly closed in on them with a cultist blade. It’s tempting to feel sorry for his victims, but it’s even more tempting to praise this man’s genius and creativity when it came to finding his niche within the game.
Eat Really Old Hot Dogs
I’m not sure what the exact logic was behind hot dogs surviving the nuclear apocalypse, and yet here we are enduring this dystopic outcome. For the various packaged and preserved foods you can scrounge up over the course of the game, it almost makes some vague sort of sense. Hot dogs survive far worse in our digestive system, after all. But hot dogs, left out and exposed to the elements? Really?
Regardless, eating disgusting ancient tubes of processed meat is definitely a thing you can do. I’m not quite sure why you’d want to, but they’re not too hard to find should you feel the craving.
Play A Game of Wasteland… Er, Wastelad
There are actually quite a few in game holotapes that allow you to play several mini-games right on your Pip-Boy, usually Fallout style renditions of old school classics like Space Invaders, but none of them are so intricately designed as this nod to Fallout’s spiritual godfather, Wasteland.
Recruit a party of colorful characters and set out to take on Chairman Cheng in this text-based RPG adventure, just be careful to remember that you’re still actually playing Fallout 76, so your hunger and thirst meters are still ticking away while you’re playing the game within the game. Insert Inception or Matrix reference here, whichever tickles your fancy more fervently.
Put Together An Awesome Space Marine Cosplay
With big, hulking suits of power armor, and futuristic, overpowered weaponry, it’s pretty easy to see some thematic overlap between the universes of Fallout and Warhammer 40,000. Who doesn’t want to patrol the Wasteland in honor of the Emperor? It’s a match made in heaven. But we’re definitely not the first people to make that connection.
Reddit user Greyfox1625 evidently experienced this firsthand with a pair of Space Marine cosplayers in Whitespring, after they came to his rescue in blue, “Ultramarine” painted power armor and wielding a Dawn of War soundboard to really bring the whole scene together. For the Emperor!
Eat Your Enemies
Safely referred to as a “fan favorite” perk due to the overblown and comical animations associated with it, the ability to consume your fallen foes to replenish both your health and hunger meters is practical, if nothing else… What are you looking at me like that for? This is the wasteland, baby. Anything goes.
It’s even more hilarious when you utilize your charisma to share this perk out to your entire group, effectively creating a small tribe of players that routinely and immediately nourish themselves with their conquered enemies. Needless to say, this does have some slightly disturbing role playing implications.
Deliver Telegrams (A Few Hundred Years Late)
Neither rain nor snow, nor nuclear fallout keeps the robotic Mr. Messenger from his appointed rounds. If you happen to catch “The Messenger” event popping up on your way from one locale to the next, make a point of stopping by and helping out if you can.
Apart from fattening your wallet, you’ll also get to listen on as the robot delivers his “important” message to… well, no one, apparently, as most of the recipients are long gone at this point. There are a lot of West Virginian residents that are way, way past due on their electricity bills, apparently.
Build An Impressive Collection of Stuffed Animals
Fallout has always appealed to our inner hoarder, tempting us to collect and stow every piece of junk we come across during our travels just in case it happens to come in handy later down the road, if not just to satisfy our need to build an impressive collection of random stuff.
Fallout 76 really drives this point home with such a massive array of collectibles, including an incredible smorgasbord of collectible stuffed animals. The sheer variety of teddy bears alone is almost intimidating, just mind that you don’t scrap them for parts by accident. Now Bethesda just needs to get themselves in gear and give us a way to display our collectible treasure troves.
Climb The Corporate Ladder (At Hornwright Industries)
Corporate bureaucracy… corporate bureaucracy never changes. That’s how it goes, right? I could’ve sworn it was something like that. Regardless, it rings pretty true if you happen to wander into the Hornwright Industrial HQ and begin the side quest you’ll find yourself saddled with upon entry.
You’ll engage in such exciting tasks as taking an entry exam, padding (or outright stealing) your resume and getting hired on to the company as a senior executive! I know, it’s all so terribly exciting that you’re getting a bad case of the jitters. The quest is at least worth completing, that much I can promise you.
