Fallout 76’s New Caravan System

Last Tuesday (9/17/24 for Readers From The Future) the defining feature of the Milepost Zero update finally launched: the caravan system. I’m going to be honest and admit I haven’t engaged with it heavily since it has been quite the work week and gaming time has been in short supply, but I did get it started and wanted to go over the basics and why I’m actually excited about a system that adds infinite escort quests to the system. I mean don’t we all hate escort quests? I usually do, but so far not here.

First let’s talk about the meta a little bit. The basic idea is you send out a “caravan” (which is a single brahmin, at least at the start — brahmin’s being the 2-headed cows in the Fallout world) and it follows a path while attracting a ton of enemies that you have to kill to keep the brahmin safe. The brahmin basically does it’s own thing but you can interact with it to hurry it along which makes it run for a bit. I’m not yet sure if there’s a downside to using that too often.

The brahmin has a health bar and if it dies, the caravan fails and you have to start over.

So thing 1: a while back the devs changed the Medic affix (we call them affixes now, right?) to be a straight up healing effect. It used to be (I think, I can’t remember for sure) that having a Medic weapon increased the effectiveness of stimpacks and other incoming heals. Don’t shoot me if I’m wrong about that; I just remember that whatever it did, it was of no interest to me, the solo player. But speaking of shooting, what it now does is heal friendly players/NPCs. I have a legendary Medic’s shotgun that I held onto for no particular reason, but now I can use it to shoot my brahmin to heal it. It’s nice to have a use for the Medic’s affix.

Thing 2: When you start a caravan, it becomes a Public Event for that server that works like any other Public Event. Folks can teleport to you and help you protect your brahmin. That’s good both because more public events means more fun playing with others, but more importantly is that this Season the devs have added a post-Season Level 100 task where you get bonus Season XP when you complete 3 public events, and this task is repeatable (I’m told, I haven’t gotten to 100 yet). So this means folks wanting to grind the season pass past level 100 are going to want to do lots of Public Events and having a steady stream of them via the caravan system should help a lot with that.

So I kind of like how caravans pull together the Medic affix stuff and this new Season pass task. OK enough, let’s talk about the caravan system itself.

So the basic idea is you get involved with someone running an outpost that sits at the very south edge of the Shenandoah region that was added last June. You hire on as help and for every successful caravan you run you get paid in a new currency called “Supplies.” You can then spend Supplies to upgrade the outpost, hiring and upgrading workers who… I don’t know what they do yet, I only have one so far! I guess they make things more efficient/convenient? Eventually, as I understand it, you’ll take over the outpost and can decorate it and such; it becomes another base for you. From the very start it has some crafting stations and stuff so is a nice place to hang out anyway.

I’ve been a bit bored with Fallout 76 after maxing out my stats and getting good gear and putting together a build that could kind of take on almost anything aside from nuke-spawned world bosses. But the first time I ran a caravan, I died! It was awesome! The routes are somewhat dangerous just in the number of enemies, at least at first. I am still trying to suss out how many of the enemies spawn due to the caravan and how many are just there and are attracted to it (the point being the latter might not have respawned if you run a 2nd caravan immediately). It isn’t that any one of the baddies are particularly challenging, it’s just that there are a lot of them and you kind of have to get stuck right in if you want to keep the brahmin safe. No more leisurely picking baddies off one by one from a distance.

There’re also some Legendary enemies mixed in so you get some decent drops from doing them, which is always a plus and more so with the new Legendary Crafting system.

Caravans come in 3 sizes, small, medium and large. I’ve only done Small & Medium so far and honestly they didn’t feel that much different to me. Your first caravan of the day (?) is free if you go with small or medium. Subsequent caravans cost you caps to spawn, more caps for bigger caravans and the price increases with each subsequent run. While this might sound like a bad thing, Fallout 76 has a cap limit of 40,000 caps and I’m always near it, so spending a few hundred to a few thousand caps to run a caravan doesn’t seem like a big deal. I would guess the system is there to prevent folks from chain-running caravans for 48 hours straight, maxing out their outpost, and then complaining that there wasn’t enough content in the new system.

So overall and at first blush, I’m pretty happy with the new caravan system. We’ll see if it holds up as an entertaining way to spend time after I’ve dug into it more. It’s just really fun to have an open world event that brings in a variety of enemies (who, by the way, sometimes start fighting each other, allowing you just to hurry the brahmin along and out of range). For a filthy casual like me it appears that it’ll take me a while to get the outpost fully staffed and upgraded, and you know how I love progression systems!

Fallout 76 Season Level 200

Today is the last day of the current Fallout 76 Season which started back in June. (I think it was June 12th.) Tomorrow we all start back at 0 (after re-downloading the entire game this patch — the devs are trying to make the client smaller which is requiring a complete re-download). I haven’t watched any data mining videos this time out so I’m not sure what is in store for the new season.

To recap how season progression works (or at least, how it worked this season) in Fallout 76, you gain season experience by doing various daily and weekly tasks, and you earn 25 “Season Tickets” per season level. Every few levels from 0 to 100 a new page of prizes unlocks and you purchase whatever looks interesting with these tickets. Level 100 is considered “Complete” and then you get into “Bonus Levels.” Nothing more unlocks until level 150 when you get a selection of purchasable “consumable” style items, and you can buy these over and over as long as you have the tickets. These are things like Atoms (for the cash shop), Lunchboxes (which offer buffs when consumed) and Perk Points (used to level up Legendary Perks).

I was determined to get to level 150 and spend my tickets on Perk Points to level up those Legendary Perks and I did it. (That’s the final page of the season pass at the top of this post.) In fact yesterday I hit level 200. I’m past where all the Legendary Perks that I use are maxed and I have tickets to spare. Trying to decide what to spend them on. I could bank Perk Points in case I decide to switch my Legendary Perk cards, or I could spend these tickets on one of my alts. But 200 seems like a good stopping point so I am NOT logging into Fallout 76 today, for the first time since June.

I have some personal struggles around becoming obsessive about things and chasing these season levels has become something of an obsession. For the past month or so I’ve never really played Fallout 76 for fun. I’d just to log in, do the Daily & Weekly Tasks as efficiently & quickly as possible so as to max that Season level, then I’d go play something else for enjoyment. That’s how I ‘broke’ Fallout 76 for myself. On the one hand there’s a certain level of satisfaction in having hit this goal but on the other hand… why?

My character now is so OP that not much in the game makes me break a sweat. There’s group content I can’t solo because it requires doing several things at once, but in terms of combat only the world bosses that result from dropping nukes even offer a challenge. Bethesda says they are aware of this and they intend to add more challenging content soon.

But even without challenging enemies I could be playing for fun. Doing quests and content I haven’t done, trying new builds, or working on my CAMP to make it cool. But by forcing myself to do those tasks every time I log in, Fallout 76 has become just another chore for me to do every day, and I’m really sad about that.

This next season I’ll be aiming to hit 100, at most, and that only if there’s something really interesting on the level 100 unlock page. And I know that hitting 100 is pretty easy, if I could hit 200 this time, so I won’t sweat missing days now and then.

There’s also a new crafting system to explore and I’m going to burn through a TON of Legendary Items I have been saving which is going to empty my stash and my backpack so I won’t have to deal with being over-encumbered all the time.

Basically the promise I am making to myself is that, for this coming season, I’ll play Fallout 76 for the fun, not for the metrics or the challenge of hitting some arbitrary number.

Being a Newb And A Veteran At The Same Time Is Weird

Remember when I said I was done posting about Fallout 76? I officially retract that!!

So as mentioned, I’ve started playing Fallout 76 on Steam. Since Bethesda doesn’t offer any kind of cross-play or cross-progression, that meant starting over. These days you can start at level 20, which I did, but really the first 50 levels of Fallout is newbie-ville. I hit 30 last night. I don’t really have a build, I’m constantly low on ammo, I have no mutations, and I haven’t even really picked a weapon type to focus on yet. I use whatever I happen to have ammo for. Taking down a non-trivial enemy can take 3 or 4 reloads of a weapon.

But I haven’t stopped my Xbox Fallout 76 character. There I have a build that is very solid. I have quality gear, a ton of mutations (including marsupial that lets you jump really high) and more ammo than I know what to do with. Only the toughest enemies take more than 1 full clip of my railway rifle and many things get 1-shotted, though the railway fires so fast I usually waste a couple of rounds. On Xbox I’m level 320 or somewhere around there.

Currently there’s a two week campaign running where at the top of every hour there is a Mothman event at Pleasant Valley (where the legend of the Mothman first arose, apparently). The bulk of this event is guarding 3 pyres from enraged cultists. On the Xbox I generally pick a pyre and defend it easily. In fact other players just kind of get in my way. I find the event rather boring really, as there is zero challenge to it. (But. y’know, LOOT!) After the pyres are defended you have to get up to a rooftop to commune with the Mothman, which I do via just jumping a couple of times thanks to the marsupial super jump.

So after doing that, I log off the Xbox and log onto Steam and an hour later the event happens again and I fast travel to it and OMG it is SO hard! I basically have to be carried. The enraged cultists can kill me pretty quick, half the time I run out of ammo, and when I don’t it takes me so long to kill 1 cultist that 2 or 3 others in the same wave will have done serious damage to the pyre. I absolutely need help. Heck I even struggle in the preliminary part of the event where you’re killing deer and regular cultists. Then when the pyres have been defended and it is time to get up on the roof? I have to follow a bunch of ramps and stairs to get there and often, since I’m always encumbered, I don’t get there in time to commune with Wise Mothman! So sad. At least I still get the “Event Completed” but I don’t get the Mothman’s buff.

Going from one experience pretty nearly directly to the other just feels so entirely weird. I realize in a lot of ways you’d have the same experience just playing an alt, but playing Fallout 76 on the console feels different from playing on the PC, too. Plus on console I use a controller and on PC mouse and keyboard. So even things like the muscle memory I have from Xbox don’t really translate to the Steam version. It’s like a different game, only it’s the same. LOL

Honestly I find being the struggling newbie on Steam is more fun. I think part of the reason I’ve somewhat drifted away from the Xbox version of the game is I just get bored. I have a ton of quests to do but the combat in them is so easy that they all start to feel like fetch quests. Only when someone drops a nuke and an end-game boss comes out to play do things get really interesting. It was a hoot being really powerful for a while, but eventually you start to miss that challenge, y’know?

At QuakeCon there was a Fallout 76 panel and they did mention that they are aware that there is not enough difficult content in the game and they heavily implied that more will be added, so I’m looking forward to that. Until then I’ll keep being the newbie on Steam, getting underfoot and in the way of the old pros who could probably solo the event without too much difficulty!

A Curious Little Fallout 76 Movement Bug

While I never signed up or declared my intention to take part in Blaugust, on August 1st I got some FOMO and wrote a post. Then another on the 2nd, and another after that and here we are half-way through the month and I’ve kept it up. But my batteries are running down, mostly because half my team at work is on leave or vacation just as the summer lull is ending and projects are starting to heat up. One team member comes back next Tuesday so I THINK if I can get through to then, I might make the full month, but this week has been tough. (Plus GamesCom is next week which should provide plenty of blog fodder.)

All of which is a preamble to a short little post about a curious bug I ran into in the PC/Steam version of Fallout 76. Yes, now I’m playing Fallout 76 on Steam…did I mention that here? First I was going to play it on GeForce Now but then I got hooked (again!) and decided to install it locally.

So I was having a great time of it for a while, then suddenly I lost the ability to move. I was playing with a controller and at first thought it was a controller bug. I would turn and look around a bit and then suddenly I’d start moving again. I figured that was my cue to get used to playing with mouse and keyboard. But the same thing happened even after I’d set the controller aside. It hadn’t happened when I was playing on GeForce Now, though. And I noticed it seemed to happen more when I was in a building than when I was outside. I had installed a mod that was supposed to improve wide-screen support, so I disabled that (honestly I didn’t notice much different anyway…but FO76 could really improve its wide screen support). That didn’t fix the bug. But through continued messing with it I discovered that it mostly happened when I looked down to loot a body, and looking up at the sky would often fix it.

Screenshot of the fallout76prefs.ini file
If you’re playing the Xbox Windows version of Fallout 76, look in Project76Prefs.ini instead

To keep a short post short, it turns out it was a framerate issue. When I looked down at the ground, or when I was inside an enclosed area, the framerate went so high the that game just seemed to freak out and couldn’t keep up or something. THAT was when I remembered that I’d followed YouTuber AngryTurtle’s advice to change a setting in the Fallout76Prefs.ini file. The specific setting was iPresentInterval=1 which we were told to set to iPresentInterval=0 to make the game run much better. Which in fact it does…it apparently turns off the FPS cap and the game’s built in VSYNC. But it maybe does TOO good a job?

The solution is either to just turn that back to 1, or to use the Nvidia control panel to cap the framerate. I did the latter, setting max framerate to 144 fps which is what my monitor runs at. I had a bit of screen tearing when I looked down and ran, so I also turned on Nvidia Vsync. That fixed the issue for me.

It was just such a weird bug that rather than annoy me, I found it kind of amusing and fascinating (OK I mostly felt that way AFTER I solved it). If any devs wander by I’d love to hear a theory as to why too high a framerate would make a game engine just sit down and cry like this!

Screenshot of my nvidia control panel settings for fallout76.exe

Fallout 76 News From Quake Con

I thought I was done talking about Fallout 76 for a while but now we have some actual news courtesy of Quake Con, which is happening this weekend.

The next update, called Milepost Zero, is coming on September 3rd, which means the current season runs for 3 more weeks, ending on September 2nd. I can snag a lot more Perk Packs if I keep doing all the daily and weekly tasks for those three weeks!

In addition to the new season, there’s a new Legendary Crafting system that I’m a little wary of. It comes out on Sept 3rd as well. The general idea seems to be to give us more control over what we craft (right now it is pure RNG where we spend Legendary Modules and just HOPE we get the mods we want) and that’s a good thing, but the system is on the test server now and they seem to still be iterating and changing it in pretty big ways, and three weeks isn’t all that much time. I’m just a little worried the system is going to be wonky when it first launches, though I’m confident it’ll keep getting refined and improved after launch.

I haven’t played on the test server (since I play on Xbox) but it sounds like you’ll need to scrap Legendary Items that you get as drops for a “very small” (quote from one of the dev team on a Quake Con live stream) chance that you’ll learn the recipe to craft the mod for one of the Legendary Perks that were on that item. This leads me to believe that when the system is brand new, none of us are going to be crafting Legendary Gear for a while since first we’ll need to scrap a ton of stuff to learn the recipes. Fortunately I’m in a pretty good space for Legendary Weapons right now. The Legendary Mods you craft can be traded to other players so some lucky players who unlock recipes early are going to be rolling in caps from selling Mods.

There’s also a new game system coming for the update where you run a branch of the Blue Ridge Caravan Company. I haven’t seen a lot of details about that but it sounds like you’ll have to put together an Outpost, similar to your C.A.M.P., and then you can spawn caravans and will have to escort them to keep them safe. Other players can join in and help with the escort and these are intended to be farmable so I guess you’ll be able to fire them off as frequently as you want. I’m sure we’ll get more details on this system closer to launch.

Now that I’ve been doing a lot more PC gaming I’m kind of tempted to switch to the PC version of Fallout 76 for the new season. (I sure wish Bethesda would offer cross-progression for both FO76 and Elder Scrolls Online!) Tempted, but not sure it is wise. I have a lot of time invested in my Xbox account, and I bought a full year of Fallout 1st back in April so it is probably silly to walk away from the 7 months of remaining paid-for time. Maybe I just should dabble on PC this next season with an aim towards moving over completely sometime in Winter or next Spring, but not doing so until I have a PC character semi-established. Not sure I want to play without Fallout 1st, though… I guess I have time to sort this all out, though.

Anyway that’s it for today. A quick Fallout 76 post for a lazy Sunday!

One Last (?) Fallout 76 Seasons Post

For the throngs of you who are fascinated with Fallout 76 Seasons (there are throngs of you, right?) I wanted to share just a few last odds and ends on the topic.

If I were participating in Blaugust this would be a great way to fill a day but since I am definitely NOT participating in Blaugust, this post is just essential information you NEED in order to plan out your Fallout 76 season! (You’re buying all this, right?).

So I got my last Legendary perk maxed the day after my last post on this stuff, and I finally took note of some numbers. You get 25 tickets for every season level. The Perk Point prize costs 75 tickets, so every three levels you can buy another one. A very conservative estimate is that you can easily earn 6 seasons a week, and you’ll probably earn more.

It’s hard to say for sure how many seasons/week you’ll get since there are a lot of variables. For example Fallout 1st subscribers get 1 extra Daily Task. You can pop a SCORE booster to get a 25% in Season exp for 24 hours. And every day you get 2 free “Re-rolls” that let you randomly replace a task with another task, and when you do this you SOMETIMES get an “Epic” task that is worth more points.

But here’re some numbers because who doesn’t love math!? At least at the level I’m at (153 or so) it requires 3500 exp to advance a seasonal level. Doing all the daily tasks with a Fallout 1st subscription but without SCORE boosters or re-rolling for Epic tasks gives you 3,441/day at high seasonal levels (that caveat is because by the time you hit Season Level 100 you’ll have a permanent +25% exp buff from items you earn in the season, assuming you’ve chosen them…and why wouldn’t you?).

So if you log in daily and do all the dailies you’ll get 24,087 exp per week. Then for the weekly tasks, you can earn another 13,125 exp. Total season exp = 37,212/week which means 10 levels per week, IF you’re willing to log in every day. It generally takes me about 2 hours to do all the weekly and daily tasks on Tuesday, and probably 30 minutes a day for Wed-Mon to do just the daily tasks. That’s after playing a while and knowing where to go to get what. Tasks like “Collect 2 teapots” can take 2 minutes if you know where to find teapots, or an hour if you have to search for them. (Though the Fallout 76 wiki will tell you right where to go for most things.) Spoiler: Helvetia has a few teapots in various store windows and display cases.

If you really want to max things, use a SCORE booster late on a Tuesday and then get all the Dailies and Weeklies done on Tuesday, and do Wednesday’s Dailies early while the SCORE booster is still in effect. That’ll add about 5000 exp to your weekly total. But 6 levels/week feels like a pretty comfortable number to aim for and something you can hit without building your schedule around Fallout 76 Daily/Weekly Tasks.

My next bunch of Perk Points will go towards the Master Infiltrator perk. This is the only Legendary Perk I use that isn’t a straight SPECIAL attribute point perk. It gives you a rank of 3 in both lockpicking and hacking, which is a great quality of life perk. Otherwise every time you want to pick/hack you have to stop and equip the appropriate perk cards (or leave them on all the time and suck up 6 points just to do these activities). Since level 3 is the max, ranking up this perk just lets you auto-pick/hack things without playing the mini-games. If I never have to manually pick a lock again, that would make me very happy, so that’s my next goal.

Anyway, I guess I’m pretty much done with my current VATS Commando build for now. At the top of this post is where I landed in terms of Special Points and Cards. Perception, Agility and Luck are kind of my main stats and they were already maxed. I added some Strength mostly to get more carry weight, some Charisma so I could slot in Tenderizer Level 3 (+10% damage to a target for 10 seconds after you attack it) and some Intelligence mostly for exp buffs. I don’t really have many Intelligence perks that are important for my current combat build, aside from Nerd Rage. Stuff like Fix It Good is only of value when you’re repairing stuff, and I have a Crafter build I switch to for that, but I had to slot SOMETHING so…

Next goals, I guess, will be to start on another build. Or maybe do some questing. We’ll see.

A Fallout 76 Milestone: Season Level 150!

I did it! I actually did it. I made it to level 150 in the current Fallout 76 season. Since the middle of June I’ve been logging in every day without fail to do the daily and weekly tasks, and for the first part of the season (eg levels 1-100) I spent a couple hours each week grinding out exp by buffing the heck out of my Intelligence and XP Bonuses and beating the hell out of level 100 Super Mutants in West Tek.

As of this afternoon I’m at level 150 with 2,450 tickets saved up. I need 850 perk points to level up the Legendary Stat Perks I’m using to level 5. There’s a repeatable Season Pass item that gives 25 perk points for 75 tickets. Which means… I can’t quite get there. If my math is right I should be able to trade in tickets for 800 Perk Points.

Hold on a moment while I go do that…

…and done. I have 123 Perk Points left over (I had some in reserve) and need to get to 150 to max my last stat Legendary Perk card. I can keep earning season levels and with them, tickets. So unless Bethesda suddenly announces the season is ending this weekend, I should finish maxing out that perk in the next couple weeks.

So here are my Special stats when I logged in today:

My SPECIAL stats at the start of the day:
STR 27
PER 34
END 8
CHR 18
INT 27
AGI 31
LCK 27
SPECIAL stats before I started spending

And my allocated SPECIAL points and the perks I’ve been using:

Special Points Allocated:
STR 8
PER 15
END 3
CHR 6
INT 9
AGI 15
LCK 14
And here are my SPECIAL points and perks before I began.

Then I went off to buy and spend Perk Points and now here’re my allocated SPECIAL points and perks:

SPECIAL allocation after spending tickets:
STR 12
PER 15
END 3
CHR 6
INT 13
AGI 15
LCK 15
Allocated SPECIAL points and Perks after the spend

And finally my current SPECIAL points. I have a few temporary buffs going but nothing crazy. As long as I keep my health low via being radiated this is about where I’ll be:

SPECIAL stats after spending:
STR 37
PER 39
END 10
CHR 23
INT 40
AGI 26
LCK 33
SPECIAL stats with mutation buff, perk buffs and a few food/drink buffs

I have more Intelligence than I really need for Perk Cards, but every point of Intelligence = 2 or 3% more experience gained, which is why I have that all buffed up. I’d love to do something more interesting than GOOD WITH SALT in Luck but then my food spoils so quickly. We’ll see, though.

Anyway, I’m pretty proud of this accomplishment not because it was hard, but because it required persistence, and I struggle with being persistent about projects like this. It is very, very common for me to get bored or distracted and just drift away but this time, at least, I stuck with it.

So the questions now are: will Fallout 76 continue to hold my attention now that I’m more or less maxed out on progress? I can continue to farm gear and hunt for god rolls and such but progression will be subtle from this point out, unless I’m missing something. I do have to admit that for the past few weeks I’ve been logging in JUST to do the dailies and weeklies and not really playing any more than that as, yes I’ll admit it, getting to 150 was feeling like a chore or a commitment rather than something to do for fun.

But now that I am there, I’m glad I made it. I think I’ll get that last legendary maxed and then maybe give the game a rest until the big update and the new season starts in September. But we’ll see!

Legendary SPECIAL Perks for Newbies – Tales From the Fallout 76 Wasteland

I’m still playing Fallout 76, pretty much exclusively. We’re coming up on another short monthly recap, folks!

My new character, created shortly after the TV series ended, hit level 200 last night. That’s actually slow progress compared to most Wastelanders but I’ve just accepted that I’m a slow, methodical gamer and there’s no upside to comparing myself to others. Level 200 sounds crazy high given that the level cap at launch was, iirc, 50. But I’ve seen plenty of characters with 4 digit level numbers.

The old hands consider levels 1-50 like some kind of long tutorial and generally consider you a newbie until level 100. Level 100, by the way, seems to be the level cap for mobs, excepting a very few bosses that are maybe 110?  But gear maxes out at level 50. So think about that. At level 50 you stop getting attribute increases (S.P.E.C.I.A.L. points in Fallout terms — you’ll have a total of 56 at level 50) and stop getting higher level gear. And now you have to go fight a level 100 super mutant. At level 50 I could not imagine how I’d ever get strong enough to fight level 100 mobs. At level 200 I take out a level 100 super mutant with 3 or 4 rounds from my rifle.

Mind you, I’m talking bog standard level 100 super mutants but still…

So how does that work? How do you get stronger after level 50? Well it’s kind of a combination of your build, your gear, mutations, food and chem buffs, and legendary perks. That’s a lot, and I’m no pro, nor do I want to write a 10,000 word post no one will read, so today let’s just talk about the Legendary Perk system.

Legendary Perks

Legendary Perk interface from Fallout 76
Here’rs part of my level 200 character’s Legendary Perks interface

Legendary Perks are a special kind of Perk Card that you put in Legendary Perk Slots. You don’t have to go find Legendary Perks cards; you get them all as soon as your character is ‘born.’ But you don’t get your first slot to put them in until level 50. Then you unlock additional Legendary Perk slots at (going from memory here) levels 75, 100, 150, 200 and I think the last one is at level 300. So by level 300 you can slot 6 Legendary Perks.

In all there are 26 Legendary Perk Cards, and there is a list of them over at the Fallout 76 Wiki. I won’t claim to know off-hand what they all do, but specifically there are 7 that add to your SPECIAL values, one for each attribute. This is, as far as I know, the only way to get more SPECIAL points beyond the 56 you have at level 50.  Each SPECIAL attribute maxes out at 15 (well there’s some nuance there but we’ll leave that for another day) so if you’re running a build that already has the Strength attribute maxed at 15 and you slot the Legendary Strength Legendary Perk card, you can now reduce your Strength attribute to 14 and use that extra point on another attribute. The Legendary Strength Perk will keep your strength at 15.

Legendary Perks can be ranked up 4 times, and the SPECIAL cards add +1, +2, +3, and finally +5 to the relevant SPECIAL attribute as you rank it up (values not cumulative, unfortunately). That means if you use all 6 of your Legendary Perk slots on Legendary Special perks, and rank them up to max, you’ll have another 30 SPECIAL points. That’s going to take you a while to hit though. Step 1, you have to get to level 300 to unlock all the slots. Step 2, though…

And Now, Some Possibly Correct Math

Then the real work begins: ranking up those Legendary SPECIAL cards. You do that via Perk Points. OK so where do Perk Points come from? Perk Points come from scrapping Perk Cards. You choose 1 Perk Card per/level, and if the level is divisible by 5, you get a “Perk Pack” of 4 random cards. Every card scrapped gives you 2 points/card level. If you scrap every card you get, you’ll get 18 Perk Points/5 levels which works out to 3.6 Perk Points/level.  Your level 1 Legendary Perk cards are free, as mentioned. Then it take 50 Perk Points to rank them to level 2, 100 to rank them to level 3, and 150 to rank them to level 4. That IS cumulative, so it takes 300 Perk Points to max out a card. So that’s about 83 levels. 83.33 exactly, and there are 6 of them, so by level 500, you’ll have them all maxed. Of course it’ll really be more than that because you’re going to want to USE many of your Perk Cards. Non-legendary Perk Cards are ranked up by combining duplicates and have a max rank of anywhere from 1 to 5.

Anyway I’m going down a silly math rabbit hole. Point is, it takes a lot of levels to max everything. But wait, there IS a shortcut! Fallout Seasons! I’m only now enjoying my second Season so I can’t speak with authority on this, but in both seasons I’ve experienced there have been bundles of Perk Points given as part of the Season Rewards. This season there is a repeatable 25 Perk Point bundle (the equivalent of 8-9 levels worth of scrapped Perk Cards) at level 150. THAT is the golden goose of leveling up Legendary Perk Cards and that is my goal this season.

By the way a couple of other Legendary Perk cards that can be very useful early on are Master Infiltrator which, for 1 Legendary slot, gives you a 3 ranking in hacking and lockpicking. That frees up 6 slots in your build if you’re lazy like me and don’t want to swap out cards every time you need to unlock or hack something. Second is Ammo Factory; great if you’re someone who crafts their own ammo and who is always running short. At level 1 it gives you an extra 50% of ammo when you craft, and if you rank it up to 4, an extra 150%.

Oh, one last thing about Legendary Slots; they are account-wide. So if you have them all unlocked and then roll a level 1 alt, they will come out with all 6 slots ready to be filled. They’ll have to rank up their own Legendary Perks, but at level 1 (or even 20, since you can now start at 20) having an extra +1 for each SPECIAL attribute would be really handy.

Back to my journey, I started with Master Infiltrator then did Intelligence and Luck since those are both always handy (currently every point of Int = +3% experience) and then added Strength and Agility just because. I still need to do a lot of ranking up, though! At level 300 I’ll probably add Perception.

OK that was a lot about Legendary Perks, but at least I scratched the writing itch I was having!

I am still very new to the game, so if you are an old pro and I got anything wrong, please let me know in the comments and I’ll make corrections where needed!

Spring Cleaning Event – Fallout 76

There’s an event running in Fallout 76 called “Spring Cleaning” and I was talking about it on Mastodon and figured maybe I’d share the same info here. As a relative noob to Fallout 76 there were some details that tripped me up, so in case they trip other people up, too, I figured I’d share the little I know.

Getting Started

To get started, open up the Atom Shop and look in the Skins section. There should be a “Free” bug on it to help guide you. In the Pip-Boy tab you’ll find an Abraxo Cleaner skin, which is free. Buy that and log in.

Screenshot of the Atom Shop showing the needed skin
Here’s the skin you need

Now find an Armor station, and go to the Modify tab. Find your Pip Boy and you apply this new skin to it as a Paint Job. Just leave that on for the next 2 weeks while the event runs.

Screenshot of the armor station modding screen
Mod your Pip Boy!

What To Do?

Open your map and then open the goals UI. On the Xbox you do this with the right arrow button. It’s the same place you see challenges and such.

Screenshot showing week 1 of the Spring Cleaning task list
Here’s the Week 1 List

As you can see, I knocked out 5 of them last night and got some nice utility-ish rewards. You can find brooms, soap and Abraxo cleaner in kitchens and bathrooms around the wasteland.  Spoiler[ Outside of the Whitesprings Mall, near the north entrance, is a Maintenace building that has almost everything you need. ] A quick way to do the “Scrap” tasks is to create bulk items, then just scrap them. It’s a little cheat-ish but hey.

The Monkey Wrench

There is one monkey wrench thrown into the works if you’re just coming back to Fallout 76. For two of this week’s tasks you need to use the Cremator weapon, and as far as I know you can only get that via Seasons Rewards, and it is on page 4 of the Seasons (you need to be Rank 22 in the Season to unlock this page).

Screenshot of season rewards, page 4, showing the require Cremator
The Cremator is a gift from Page 4 of the Seasons Scoreboard, unfortunately for newly returning players

Given that the event runs for 2 weeks, you might (I haven’t done the math) be able to get to page 4 for week 2 if you use Score Boosters and such, but I of course don’t know if these tasks vanish at the start of week 2 or not. Basically if you haven’t been playing you probably can’t complete all the tasks (well I guess you could purchase levels in the Season Pass if you REALLY wanted to) but the interim rewards like Repair Kits and Perk Card Packs still make it worth doing, given how easy it is.

Stay safe out there, 7-6!

Fallout 76 Custom Worlds: I Don’t Get It

Quakecon is happening as I write this. I wasn’t really following it because my FPS days are long behind me, but then a Tweet about Fallout 76 slid down my timeline. They’re adding something called Fallout Worlds. I do play Fallout 76 now and again so I had to go watch the YouTube presentation:

So the brief recap in case you don’t have time to watch the video: they’re adding custom world settings. Examples included build anywhere and unlimited ammo. Basically tweaks to the rules of the game so you can change up your experience. That sounds pretty neat…until you get to the huge caveat.

When you play on a Custom World, the game makes a copy of your character for that world. This is now a completely separate character and any progress you make does not translate back to the ‘standard’ worlds. Basically it is a one way cloning trip.

This feels to me like a Public Test Server where you can tweak the ruleset. I can see it being a fun diversion to go into a custom world with unlimited ammo and extra enemies and just blow shit up for a while, but long term I just don’t see the point.

Credit for this and header image: Bethesda.net

There are two ways to play on Custom Worlds. Every month Bethesda themselves will spin up a Custom World with some ruleset they find interesting. Anyone can play on these, and after a month they get shut down (and your character gets deleted) and a new Custom World with a new ruleset gets created. The one month duration is a starting point and they say they’ll adjust that to be shorter or longer based on player feedback.

If you’re willing to pay, “Fallout 1st” members (Fallout 1st is the optional subscription service for the game) can create their own Custom Private Worlds. Same rules apply: you get a copy of your character that, once created, stays on that world. I guess the difference here is you can leave that world up indefinitely and only play on it, which makes the system a little more appealing.

I’m still not sure the cost of playing on a custom private world is worth it. Normally you can play on your Fallout 1st Private World today, then decide to jump into the public server with the same character tomorrow. You can move back and forth whenever you want. But as soon as you make that Private World custom in any way, your character is locked there.

So yeah, I just don’t get the appeal, beyond a short term diversion to screw around with. I get WHY these limitations are in place. It’d be super easy to make a custom world and twink the hell out of your character and then go back into the public world super buffed. But because of that issue, I just don’t see why they’ve devoted the resources to creating this new feature.

Can anyone educate me? If you’re excited about the feature, please let me know why in the comments.

Custom Worlds is sccheduled to launch on September 8th.