Let's Work With Others!

The Art of Cooperation

You’re Not Alone: Making First Contact

During your exit of Vault 76, and in the subsequent stumble down the hill to the south, you may get the feeling you’re not alone. This is due to the other members of Vault 76, who are also attempting to rebuild and reclaim America now that Reclamation Day has passed. This chapter gives a brief overview and pointers on how to improve relationships with your fellow Dwellers.

The Social Menu

Though you can still wander alone, why not band together with a few other like-minded power armor enthusasts?

The Social menu, accessed as part of your Map menu, allows you to view the Vault Dwellers currently active across Appalachia. The large, gray-box menu allows you to search and add friends, check in with your team (if you allied with anyone), and see who is currently active. With any other player, you can highlight their name or their yellow dot on the map, and learn some basic information about them, such as their icon, name, and level. Highlight a player, and you can:

Join: Fast-Travel to a previous friend and start exploring with them.
Invite to Team: Ask a Vault Dweller into your team, with the invitee being the team leader.
Ignore: Stop being bothered by Vault Dwellers you aren’t interested in.
Block: Completely ignore Vault Dwellers who may be hassling you.
Remove Friend: Delete a previous friend if your companionship goes sour.

If you are using a Stealth Boy, if you’re crouching, or if you have blocked another player, your yellow circle map icon may not appear.

Initial Contact

Emotes and Chatter

Meet and greet a new or old friend, and use the Emote to pinpoint yourself, too.

Greet your new friend, and folks you might pass in the woods or along the ruined roadways, with a friendly wave. Initial impressions matter, and one of the key ways to begin a conversation is via the use of Emotes. Emotes allow you to communicate with other players. Open the Emotes menu and select an Emote and trigger it. Your character completes the Emote and that same icon appears above your head and next to your Health bar on the other player’s screen if you’re already a friend. Players who can’t see you directly can still see the icon from the Emote, letting other players find you more easily.

Sharing Is Caring

Heading off to face dangers, including quests that require multiple players, is now possible. Have you tried hunting down some particularly deadly cryptids lately?

After agreeing to become a friend with someone, some sharing is immediately enabled: Objectives and quest targets with a star icon next to them (or the word Sharing) are being shared by your team leader. You are helping them complete this objective and will receive bonus rewards when they do. In addition, items with a double-diamond icon next to them are quest items for one of your teammates. Your teammate must pick up this item themselves, so let them know where it is!

Teammates helping you on a quest can fight enemies and locate quest items, but they cannot pick up your quest items or activate terminal entries meant for your quest. Also, your own icon and Health bar is shown at the bottom-left corner of your friend’s screen, and vice versa.

Trading Is Recommended

If you spot a fellow Vault Dweller with a fancy outfit, or a friendly wave, try trading with them. Later on, team up and start cranking out high quality goods at team workbenches.

Trading between players allows you to buy and sell items from each other for Caps. Walk up to another player and invite them to trade. The other player will need to look at you and also agree, so you’re both in the Trade menu.

From the Trade menu, you can select items to sell and buy. The list on the left contains your inventory, and the list on the right contains any items that the other player has for sale.

When you select an item to sell, you can set the max number of that item the other player can buy.

You will then be asked to set an item price. For example, if you set the item price to 10 Caps, and the other player buys two items, they pay a total of 20 Caps.

Making the Dream Work: Teams

Share resources (and selfies), complete quests, and build camps and workshops together. Make a difference!

Teams are groups of players made up of one team leader and up to three teammates.

You can invite another player to join your team by walking up to them and interacting with them. You can also invite players on your Friends list by using the Social menu or by selecting them on the map. The player you invite will need to open the Social menu and select you in order to accept your request.

Team Leader

The player who initially invites other players to join their team becomes the team leader. The team leader can kick players off the team or promote another player to be team leader instead. The team leader will also automatically share Group Quests. He or she has a star inside the player dot to indicate this status.

Group Quests

A team leader automatically shares some of their quests with other teammates. They will appear on the team leader’s HUD with a “Sharing” tag before the name of the quest. Teammates will see the quest with a “Shared By” tag, including the name of the player sharing the quest. Teammates help the team leader complete quest objectives and will receive bonus rewards as objectives and quests get completed. You will also receive bonus rewards as your other teammates complete objectives in their own quests, although these aren’t shown in the HUD in the same way as the team leader’s quests.

Perk Sharing

You can select a perk that will be shared with all members of your team. Enter the Perk menu, select an equipped perk that you are currently using, and share it. Now all members of your team share in this bonus! You can share perks that add up to the point value of (or lower than) your Charisma. This is in addition to any personal Charisma perks that are primarily designed to benefit your team (and sometimes everyone in the team except you), though these can be shared too!

Fast-Traveling

Finally, you can Fast-Travel to your team leader or teammates for free by selecting them or their camps on the map. This provides key advantages, as it allows far more flexibility regarding where you can travel to and lessens your Caps expenditure for doing so.

The Good Neighbor: Player vs Enemy (PvE)

Once you’ve established an impressive Workshop, pooling the resources and talents of Teammates working together, why not start a band?

What can you do in a team that you can’t on your own? A great deal. Aside from helping each other with quest revelations and completions, you can share resources and really start to specialize so that one member of your team is responsible for certain aspects of your team’s overall well-being. You can:

Divide player roles into specializations based on the player archetypes (and their attributes and available perks). Have a forager, scavenger, camp builder, cook, medic, ammunition-maker, weaponsmith, armorsmith, and a variety of other roles. Need some downtime? Play instruments, hike to vistas, move camps, become infected with mutations...all together!
Bolster your camp defenses by building camps adjacent to one another or across Appalachia so you can Fast-Travel far distances for free.
Agree to enter a large-scale location, neutralize any foes, gather all important loot, and then trade/share it afterward.
Agree to claim a workshop, during which time all four of you can build defensive structures (with the team leader being able to adjust any structures deemed less than adequate). Then these can be defended more easily from entities and other humans.
You can team up with another team and set about larger-scale explorations, removing Scorchbeasts and hordes of foes and even figuring out how to launch a nuke!
Or, if you’re ignoring all your previous Vault-Tec advice, you can turn into a bunch of bandits and cause havoc. The more of you there are, the larger the anarchy you can cause!

Quickplay PvE Matches

Expect to be invited to frantic and entertaining sessions, where you are matched with other players, ready to face the challenges of Appalachia as a team. These are events you and your team are tasked with completing. Work together! Are you already grouped up with your friends? Then the event will match you all together. Perhaps you and your team are entering the Irrational Fear event. This involves helping a struggling Mr. Handy unit retrieve honey. What could go wrong? Look for such events to pop up intermittently.

The Bad Neighbor: Player vs Player (PvP)

A simple misunderstanding can escalate into blind, ugly violence; in this case on both sides of the New Gorge Bridge.

In the very rare case that a Vault-Tec-raised human ignores all previous teachings, attempts to go rogue, and becomes a common criminal working to undermine America’s rebuilding, you and your fellow Vault Dwellers should galvanize yourselves into action and stop this atrocity! This practice is known as “player versus player” and occurs when two or more players exhibit aggressive tendencies toward one another. This won’t happen at all before you reach Level 5; you are immune to other player attacks until then.

If a previously neutral or even friendly player attacks you (or you attack them), there is no stern talking-to by the Overseer. Instead, the attacker starts to inflict a very small amount of damage on the other player. If the defending player reciprocates, and both players strike each other (with ranged or melee attacks), then hostilities commence, and the damage dealt rises to normal levels.

However, if the aggressor presses the attack and kills the innocent player, the hostile player becomes Wanted, and a bounty is awarded. The dead player must seek revenge for this to occur, and they also drop their junk, just as if they were killed by an Appalachian entity.

If you’re on a team, however, every member of the team counts for the purposes of determining if you hit another player and if they hit you back. So if you shoot another player and that player shoots any member of your team back, then that player is now hostile to your entire team. This means teams can become hostile to other teams if any members trade hits.

Hostile players now show up on your map and compass as red dots.

Wanted players now show up on your map and compass as red dots with a star inside.

Wanted Levels and Bounty Hunting

Claim a bounty from a criminal player, using their own Caps as reward!

Killing a player who hasn’t hit you back can make you Wanted. If you are Wanted, you are considered hostile to all other players, and they can strike you for full damage (as you can to them). You may be able to survive for a while, and the Caps reward (seen on your screen) increases each time you kill another human. The reward is also usually greater if the Wanted foe is a higher level than the hunter who tracks and slays them.

So, wrangle up a posse, track down that varmint, and make them pay—literally, with their own Caps and junk bag you can loot after killing them!

Word of Warning from Vault Boy!

The Appalachian Anarchists

When the rules of law have no meaning to you, expect to be ostracized from those wanting to Rebuild America. But expect bands of these miscreants, roving teams of damaged humans that actively seek to kill other Vault Dwellers. Who can forget the Appalachian Anarchists Ronnie, Gail, Vito, and Pepper? They even set up traps for the unwary:

Team Leader Ronnie would sit in the middle of a road, playing the tuba. A curious innocent (known to his friends as “Rustic Dan”) approached, puzzled at the odd occurrence. Then he was set upon by Ronnie’s teammates who were hiding in the undergrowth at the sides of the road. Accidentally firing back, Rustic Dan inadvertently agreed to PvP combat and soon paid the price for it. As he gurgled his last, Ronnie stopped playing the tuba, stood over Rustic Dan’s corpse, and gathered his collection of junk. Don’t be like Rustic Dan; watch out for Appalachian Anarchists. Or join them, and execute tricks similar to this!

Do It Yourselfie: Photo Mode

Record your progress from your first steps outside Vault 76 to the time you nuked Morgantown!

Photomode lets you take snapshots of your adventures! You can use Photomode at any time by going to the Main menu (Map). Here, you have several options to tailor the photograph to your liking. Start by finding a place you want to take a photograph, stand so the area of interest is behind you, and bring up your Photo Mode settings:

Camera Menu

This menu allows you to play with your camera settings, such as Depth of Field (shown).

Field of View: This zooms in and out, creating a tighter or wider shot.

View Roll: This rotates the camera for a rakish angle.

Depth of Field: This blurs the image, usually the background so foreground objects stand out more easily. The Strength is how blurry the background is, and the Distance and Range are how far away the blur is from the foreground and how much of the image is blurred, which can include blurring everything including the foreground!

Player Menu

You don’t need Vault Dwellers cluttering up your picture when Appalachia is calling!

Show Player: This removes you from the picture if you want a landscape-only image.

Expression: This changes your expression. Show some emotion!

Pose: This changes your pose, from a variety of categories, to add some whimsy (or brutality) to your stance.

Image Manipulation (Light Levels and Effects)

Turn a location visit into an old-timey classic with the correct clothing and camera effects. Or, just wait for a rad storm!

Brightness, Saturation, and Contrast: Fiddle with the light levels and more.

Filter and Texture: This adds a wide variety of colorizing options to your image, as well as scuffs and general texture “noise.”

Frames

Frame and Category: This enables you to add a frame around your image in a large variety of styles. Zoom the initial image out a bit so none of your photograph is cut off when you choose the frame. Note that various locations across Appalachia have their own frame, turning your photographs into postcards. You usually receive these when you visit them (they are typically landmarks or settlements). Have you unlocked them all?

Getting Arty

Turn a nondescript junk pile on a patch of ground into a well-lit masterpiece with some professional advice. Here are some tips:

Maneuver your camera into a variety of different angles, looking down from above or from the ground up.
Keep your human subjects facing the sun, so their faces aren’t shaded.
Choose a natural “frame” like the flaps of a tent or the wall of an old barn.
Keep a lookout for weather conditions and effects, as well as time of day, and take pictures at different times for different effects.
Play with your depth of field to accentuate the foreground and minimize background; this works particularly well when showing something on top of a roof or cliff.
Appalachia is dotted with strange landmarks. Take pictures of them all, from odd angles and using different filters.
The landmarks don’t have to be big; an old row boat with a skeleton in it can make for an eerie photograph, as can photographs from inside rusting vehicles, looking out.
Gain height and take risks to increase the quality and spectacular nature of your images.
Look for a vignette that already exists or document your own (by building a camp on a vista).
Signposts, bridges, rivers, curved roads, and interesting objects in the foreground to the background all help make a great picture.
Bring in other players and chart their progress, show them working, foraging, and fighting. Have you thought about a career as a documentarian?
Give your eye something to look at throughout a picture. The use of diagonal lines to “point” in the direction of background objects helps make a cohesive picture.
Make your filter effects subtle rather than overwhelming.
Use lightning storms (especially in the Mire) to great effect; if you can time your shot to capture a flash of lightning, the picture can look spectacular!
Your own life is secondary to a good picture. As you can take photographs right up to the point of your death, you can achieve gruesomely epic pictures as a foe bears down on you!

The Photo Gallery

Your photos are stored in the Photo Gallery. Access this from the Main menu, and previously taken photos appear on the loading screen. If you don’t like the way you looked when you took your profile photo inside Vault 76 and want to change it, go to the Photo Gallery. Find the photo you want to use, and select it.