Fallout 76 is all about levels and equipment, but there are always smarter methods to leveling up and rooting out bottle caps than the standard old grind. While generally busying yourself with quests and events can percolate a steady stream of XP and cash-flow, maximizing your time means a faster route to end-game content and the endless hunt for Legendary gear. Whether it’s a handy loop ritual, a specific location packed with tough enemies, or some clever workarounds to ensure players make the best use of their time rambling through Appalachia, there’s usually a smarter way to work the system.

As Bethesda’s newest entry in the fan-favorite Fallout series, Fallout 76 has prompted a less-than-brilliant critical response. Existing as something of a spin-off prequel, it provides the first ever multiplayer-only Fallout title, with gameplay that mixes the looter-shooter, survivalist, and open-world sandbox FPS genres, to decidedly mixed results.

Related: Where to Find Black Titanium in Fallout 76

Navigating the massive map of Appalachia as a low-level sole survivor scrub is hard, but leveraging a few methods to maximize your XP gain and bottle-cap accrual can help hasten the process. Screen Rant is here with a comprehensive guide to ensure that new players know the best way to rank up and get rich.

Regarding Fallout 76's Exploits & Glitches

Before we can get into some ways to boost your progress, it’s important to grant some attention to the curious and unintentional functions that are available to exploit in the game as it is. Bethesda may have fixed a few of these problems with the most recent patch, but the overall vulnerability of Fallout 76 to experimenting players has revealed a few potential fast-tracks to massive bounties of XP and caps.

Some players might see methods like the Home Defense Perk exploit (patched out, as of this writing, but it’s possible that it may still work in certain cases and locations) and the item duplication trick as outright game-ruining cheats, but that’s on the developer to polish out prior to launch. Nothing in this guide will make use of these techniques, but players can obviously search for and experiment with them at their discretion. That being said, the game’s focus on combat makes leveling in Fallout 76 mostly consistent through conventional means, with caps accrual a slightly slower affair without coordinated strategies.

The Whitespring Resort Caps Stash Run

The Whitespring Resort is a dangerous area on the border of The Forest and The Savage Divide. A golf club community teeming with gleaming green lawns and all manner of friendly robots defending the grounds, it’s otherwise a diverse ecosystem of enemy mobs, including Legendaries. It’s not uncommon to find Legendary variants of ghouls, radscorpions, scorched, and other higher-tier threats in the building interiors and parking lots, making Whitespring a dangerous locale for lower-level solo players, though these players can hide behind the resort’s automated defenses when outnumbered.

Beyond the generally high yield for combat in Whitespring, it’s also known as a fantastic source for “caps stashes,” or boxes of bottle caps laying in plain sight. Collaborative Redditors have put their minds to a few terrific maps detailing these stashes, allowing players to design their own Whitespring stash-loops, which can produce upwards of 1000 caps per trip. Additionally, players will usually find golf outfits throughout the interiors, which are low-weight and high value items worth trading with vendors for caps as well.

Note that the Whitespring run, helpful as it is, also runs the risk of being partially looted by another player, since caps stashes are replenished on an unspecified schedule. Server-hopping might help in this regard, though the popularity of the farming technique make this caps run a go-to for many players.

Your best bet is to earn and equip the Fortune Finder Perk card, which will alert you when in the general vicinity of a stash with a unique sound. If a region of the Whitespring run isn’t prompting those sounds, you can save time normally spent checking empty stash locations and just head to another area in the region, or change servers.

Fallout 76's Nuke Events

Speaking of Whitespring: ever wonder why it’s always being nuked these days? Bombing the resort has become de rigeur in the current Fallout 76 meta, thanks to the massive amounts of mutatable Legendaries which can then be found all over the area. Lower-level solo players with decent radiation gear (like the hazmat suit or some Power Armor) can join in on the fun too, so long as they manage to ding any enemies being rounded up by the power-leveling death squads who flock here during events.

The most recent Fallout 76 patch on December 4^th may have nerfed some of the XP yield, but it’s not uncommon to find yourself still gaining a handful of levels in 30 minutes of nuked Whitespring play, along with a decent chance to obtain Legendary weapons and armor pieces. Considering the state of Fallout 76’s patch schedule, it’s likely that Bethesda will further tweak how nukes function in this area but, until then, go hog-wild anytime you see that big red circle pop up on Whitespring.

Other decent nuke event locations include: Morgantown, Eastern Regional Penitentiary, Watoga, and Clarksburg.

Vendortron Runs

The math breaks down like this: there are 7 factions in Fallout 76, all of whom stock 200 caps in their vendor budget which replenishes every 24 hours. If you have 1400 caps’ worth of assorted vendor trash, those caps can be yours through daily trade, with minimal caps spent on fast-traveling if you plot your course right, or opt to just travel most of the route on foot.

The map image above can give you an idea of how things break down. Specific paths between the different vendors depend on a number of factors — for instance, accessing the unique Enclave faction vendor in Whitespring requires players to complete a fetch quest — but, so long as you can figure out which vendors are accessible, you can go about designing a path to hit as many different ones as possible in a single load screen. For instance: Lewisburg Station >> R&G Station >> Whitespring Locations >> Watoga Locations >> Harpers Ferry

This route to obtaining caps is the most straightforward one, but incorporating a preferred vendor run gives players a nice “daily quest,” of sorts, and 1400 potential caps will allow you to purchase a new plan or two from the inventories on offer. Here’s some specific tips on vendor standards that can help properly prepare for one of these runs:

• You can’t sell: ammo, notes, most common crafting components (like steel or wood), pre-war money, or holotapes.
• You can sell non-scrapped junk, weapons, apparel, aid items like stimpaks and prepared food, bobbleheads, mods, bulked scrap, and some premium crafting components.
• Vendor caps pools are instanced per player, not per server, which means that server-hopping does not replenish vendor caps.
• Grahm is a unique Super Mutant vendor whose caps pool isn’t faction-aligned, but his location is randomized daily and somewhat unpredictable. He does favor roads, though, and carries 200 caps for trade.

Don’t forget: although Legendary weapons and armor pieces can’t be scrapped at benches, they can be sold to vendors. Make sure to sell any undesired Legendaries to vendors (or other players), rather than leave them to take up valuable space in your Stash.

Page 2 of 2: Best Fallout 76 Events to Farm

Best Fallout 76 Events to Farm

 

Not all Fallout 76 events are created equal, but specific ones can yield higher rewards than others. Note that each event, once completed, can potentially restart in approximately 60 minutes, so if you can’t find a specific event, just try another server or pursue another objective until it becomes active once again. Certain unique events may not spawn on every day, though.

• Uraniaum Fever (Blackwater Mine): Defense event which will pit playeers against multiple Mole Miners, including Legendary variants.
• One Violent Night (Sons of Dane Compound): Best completed with a team, triggering the event requires players to make a lot of noise in the bar, and optionally be under the effects of alcohol. The event will spawn a large quantity of ghouls, as well as a unique Nightstalker cryptid. Defeating the Nightstalker barehanded rewards a unique Legendary machete, the Nailer.
• Jailbreak (Eastern Regional Pentitentiary): Not the toughest event, but manageable with an early to mid-game build, featuring lots of Super Mutant enemies.
• AWOL Armaments / Census Violence / Surface to Air (Cranberry Bog region): All three of these events have a chance to spawn in Cranberry Bog. They’re designed for later-game character builds, but all three have reasonably high chances to reward the player with plans legendary gear.

Fallout 76 Perk Cards and Aid Items

There are a few aid items which provide XP boosts, as well as increases to Luck and Charisma. While most alcohol items generally offer a slight Charisma boost, some do not, so read the item descriptions in your Pip-Boy carefully.

Additionally, note that XP boosts obtained from aid items do not stack with each other, though they will stack with other XP boosting sources, like the Well Rested status effect and the Inspirational Perk card. Essentially, with a little bit of planning, you can engineer an additional 30% XP gained for your trouble.

• Canned Meat Stew: +5% XP
• Cranberry Relish: +10% XP gain
• Ribeye Steak: +20 carry weight (helpful for vendor runs)
• Corn Pone: +2 Charisma
• Sweet Roll: +3 Charisma
• Awesome Opposum Bacon: +2 Luck
• Appalachili: +2 Luck
• Iguana Soup: +3 Luck

Perk Cards which increase XP and cap gain potential:

• Inspirational (Charisma): Adds +5% XP gain for you and your team, and can be upgraded to level 3 for +15%. What’s interesting is that — in the current patch, at least — this bonus seems to apply to solo players as well.
• Hard Bargain (Charisma): Better buying and selling prices at vendors.
• Travel Agent (Charisma): Fast travel is 30% cheaper.
• Chemist (Intelligence): Craft twice as many chems for the same resources.
• Pharma Farma (Luck): Adds a “Search” option when looting chem containers that has an increasing chance to reveal bonus chems. Upgrading to the level 3 version increases chance to 80%.
• Scrounger (Luck): Adds a “Search” option when looting ammo boxes that has an increasing chance to reveal bonus ammo. Upgrading to the level 3 version increases chance to 80%.
• Can do! (Luck): Adds a “Search” option when looting canned food containers that has an increasing chance to reveal bonus canned food items. Upgrading to the level 3 version increases chance to 80%.
• Cap Collector (Luck): Slight chance to find more caps in a caps stash. Upgrading to the level 3 version increases chance to 100%.
• Super Duper (Luck): Slight chance to obtain double yield when crafting. Upgrading to the level 3 version increases to 30% chance.
• Green Thumb (Perception): Doubles the amount of flora looted, which can be crafted into food to sell.
• Fortune Finder (Perception) Adds directional audio when in the range of a caps stash.

Additional notes: the SPECIAL stats Charisma and Luck provide a sweeping and general increase to XP and potential caps gained. Charisma adds a bonus to both XP and caps gained from group quests completed, and Luck increases the chances of finding better loot in containers and on enemy corpses.

The Intelligence stat seems to increase XP gained on a sliding scale, though this is an unannounced feature and may possibly be yet another bug.

And, finally, don’t ever leave your C.A.M.P. for a journey without earning the Well Rested status effect of +5% to XP gained, easily obtained by sleeping in a bed. Happy hunting!

More: Fallout 76 Guide: All Known Power Armor Locations

Sources cited: Vendors and Whitespring caps stash maps sourced from the r/fo76 Subreddit (OPs u/Channel5Gaming and u/Bunny-Films, respectively)