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Mapping Appalachia: An Interactive Fallout 76 Journal

:pipboy:🎮🗺

October 31st, 2018

✎ Update

It’s worth noting that I did not wind up playing Fallout 76 much more. After the B.E.T.A. my interest fell off quickly as the locations and quests failed to be as engaging for me as previous Fallout games.

I do not recommend Fallout 76 to anyone.

October 30th B.E.T.A. (Break-It Early Test Application)

During the first B.E.T.A. some places I discovered along my travels were:

  1. Vault 76 - An underground bunker where the journey begins.

  2. A crashed prop-plane of some sort at a farm.

  3. The Vault Overseer’s encampment. A pretty basic camp with a fire, some workbenches, and some storage chests.

  4. A tiny shack in the woods, guarded by a lone Protectron.

  5. An abandoned water treatment plant. Overrun with Liberator robots.

  6. A large crashed plane, apparently a commercial airline. - I explored the inside and found some interesting loot. The area was also heavily patrolled by Super Mutants, and they had an encampment nearby.

  7. A pharmaceutical company’s building, with a very cool retro-futuristic aesthetic.

  8. Bolton Greens - A daycare for rich kids run by a robot, who was very concerned with preparation for “The Halloween Gala”. I took on a side quest to help for caps, which mostly consisted of reminding other robots to return to the daycare and prepare for Halloween.

  9. Top of the World - A ski resort with a more retro-futuristic architecture including a geodesic dome. I was attacked and killed by Super Mutant Skirmisher here.

ⓘ Note
At this point I respawned back at the vault.

  1. Vault 76 again.

  2. A logging plant, with logging robots still hard at work. One of them gave me some extra wood scraps, and said something like “Must. Chop. Wood. Forever.”

  3. A small town. Various factions resided here once, all long gone.

  4. An agricultural research facility, tended by many robot farmers.

  5. Poseidon - A nuclear power plant. There seemed to be a quest to get the power working again, but I moved on to explore other areas for now.

  6. A train station - A lone Protectron vendor resided here. There were no trains.

  7. The remains of Charleston, specifically the capital building. I spotted The Grafton Monster lurking around here and briefly engaged before wisening up and running away. I’ll have to come back when I’ve leveled up further.

  8. The remains of an Airport, with many broken planes, and one more large crashed airplane against the air traffic control tower. The area was teeming with Super Mutants similar to the previous crash.

November 1st B.E.T.A.

I got in another hour during the November 1st session.

  1. The Burning Mine – As the name suggests, a burnt out mine. This was the first and only place I visited in the “Ash Heap Region”. Thankfully I had already equipped a gas mask which saved me from getting lung disease many times … There was a Power Armor station here, but the game broke when I tried to enter the power armor. This area had many high level Scorched. I also acquired a shotgun here.

  2. Hornwright Air Purifier Site #02 - Some malfunctioning terminals attached to some strange looking “air purifier”, presumably there’s a quest to fix these at some point, not much else here.

  3. Uncanny Caverns - Some kind of tourist spot, I encountered a “vicious wolf” here.

  4. R & G Processing Services - Some kind of industrial plant.

  5. Spruce Knob - “The highest place in West Virginia”. I “captured” a public workspace there before moving on. There was also some kind of monorail like train station, with two cars there.

  6. South Mountain Lookout - A Lookout Tower.

Notes

I streamed most of my time on YouTube, you can watch the first day here and the second day here. I didn’t capture everything in this post.

I had fun, but had some frustration with the menus, particularly with the tab key being used to go back instead of escape. The menus for binding equippables were also frustrating, both of these lead to a few in-game deaths. I also experienced a few small bugs, but no show-stoppers.

Proximity voice chat also led to some … interesting moments, including a ringing iPhone and a McDonalds order placed from the wastelands of West Virginia 🤔

Acknowledgements

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