There have been a ton of negative things to talk about when it comes to Fallout 76. Last week, on the game’s one month anniversary, I recapped a number of them. But as I tried to relay in my review of the game, there’s good to be found in Bethesda’s multiplayer survival game as well.
When the game works and players are able to use its tools and systems to express themselves amidst the post-apocalyptic sprawl, it can really be quite lovely. One player’s monorail campsite is a perfect example of that.
You’d hardly know this campsite, created by Fallout 76 player burtethead, wasn’t intentionally put there by Bethesda. The map’s southern edge holds some of Fallout 76’s more beautiful and haunting monuments to the past: the remnants of a once great monorail.
Burtehead constructed their camp inside one of the remaining pillars, a project that took dozens of hours according to their post on Reddit.
“The space here is about 5 pixels wider than the floor pieces, so it was very difficult to get it lined up just right,” burtethead wrote when describing the camp’s front entrance, which is wedged between two huge, rusted red steel beams. “But 18 hours later here we are.”
The narrow dwelling is a celebration of tiny, post-apocalyptic living, with burtethead managing to make the most out of the platform’s limited square footage. So much of Fallout 76 is big and open, which lends itself to player-built camps that are messy and strewn about.
Since moving campsites requires packing everything up, there’s also an incentive to not get too fancy, but burtethead pulled out all the stops.
That’s especially evident in the second story loft area, a makeshift study that doubles as a workshop where burtethead somehow managed to cram every important type of crafting bench into the same small room. They also created a large porch area farther up the pillar complete with a set of instruments for impromptu jamming.
My favourite detail, though, is the single switch for all the lights hooked up to the power generator, which makes it possible to go into blackout mode instantly. Burtethead jokes in their post that this is to avoid attracting attention if they see other players getting too close on the map.
Burtethead’s creation was also only made permanent thanks to recent fixes to Fallout 76’s building system. Previously, players never knew whether the campsite they’d spent hours building up would still be there when they logged back into the game.
If the spot where they’d built it was already taken by someone else when joining a new server, their camp would automatically be broken apart and put back into storage. Burtethead notes that this exact thing happened to them early on in the creation of their Monorail bungalow.
“Build here if you want, it can’t be destroyed anymore like the first two times,” they wrote, showing other players where they can find the the architectural wonder if they’re ever in the right server neighbourhood.
There are a lot of problems with Fallout 76, but base-building isn’t among them. While there remain issues with players being able to build and hang out together, cool solo projects aren’t impossible, though few will be lucky enough to ever encounter something like burtethead’s out in the wild.
Comments
13 responses to “Possibly The Best Player Camp In All Of Fallout 76”
Literally the worst part of Fallout 4.
Well done Bethesda.
You didn’t like the build mode, it was probably one of my favorite parts building defended self sustaining settlements.
But Preston bloody Garvey made me want to nuke every single one of them.
FO76 made me miss Preston and Marcy.. MARCY!!!!
God that woman was a cow, They patched it so she was non-essential but I would of preferred that she just stop treating you like your going to betray them, like after everything you do and she keeps being a bitch.
I could sort of understand it. They HAD been betrayed by people who they thought were there to protect them.
I always visit Quinncy ruins and visit their house and give them Kyle’s baseball cap. meaningless in game but it sort of fits.
I liked it. it just didn’t do anything purposeful. Walls didn’t matter as the AI would spawn inside.
Really? I had some issues with some locations on my map, but my Sanctuary was completely walled off and nothing ever got in.
The super mutants would all run towards my Vault side gate and get cut to pieces by turrets.
it was a combination of spawn location being tied to player spawn and a pathing ‘feature’ that would let enemies morph through walls if they were unable to find a path after x attempts.
Your’e better off just putting a tower o’ turrets in a high point on the settlement.
Yeah. I’d wall off crops and eqipment in ways that made it difficult for the enemies (and settlers) to get a line of sight on, then add a gravity-defying layer up top of high-visibility turrets, eventually with missiles.
The spawn points are fixed but not visible, there’s a mod you can get that visibly shows where they are in-game. They’ll only go through walls if there’s no valid path to find, which is so you can’t just wall everything off. If you combine the mod with the pathfinding knowledge you can build solid bases that won’t get spawned inside.
yes I know and used that mod. but it still meant you had to meta the base so that mobs wouldn’t spawn inside, and I also didn’t think it necessary to include here as I thought it implied we were talking about vanilla Fallout settlements.
I liked the settlement building, there just wasn’t any real point to using most of the defence mechanics.
It’s the people playing that makes it worth it. I’ve enjoyed my time in West Virginian Wasteland but the characters (players) you meet and the stories told of players antics that I find most interesting.
I never thought it would be a smooth ride but there’s always bugs in Bethesda games and online just adds to it, I mean I got locked out of the ending of New Vegas but was able to find away around it due to the freedom given and it became one of my most memorable gaming moments.
And wasn’t the whole point of this game that player’s made their own story