For Fallout 76 players who don’t want to pay or just don’t have the funds to buy Atoms, they can earn Atoms by completing the game’s many challenges. The game features several different types of challenges: daily, weekly, character, survival, combat, social, and world.
It should be noted that some character challenges will gift Perk cards instead of Atoms. Moreover, daily challenges only give players 24 hours to complete them and weekly challenges give players a full week. The other types of challenges, though, seem to be permanent.
Altogether, Fallout 76’s challenges could allow players to get hundreds of Atoms to spend at the game’s cosmetic store. The tasks are of varying difficulty, but they can all be completed through normal gameplay. For example, players are tasked with deploying their C.A.M.P 76 times on the map, scrapping junk for resources 7,600 times, and learning cooking recipes. There are plenty of others that will take much less time, though, such as boiling 10 water, collecting 100 wood, and taking photos at certain locations.
There are varying rewards on offer for each of these tasks, but it doesn’t seem to differ much upon the (perceived) difficulty of each challenge. For example, the game offers the same reward (40 Atoms) for harvesting 11 fruits, berries, and vegetables as it does for scrapping 7,600 pieces of junk, although the junk-scrapping would probably take a lot longer. The highest reward for a single challenge is just 80 Atoms and it seems that only two challenges in the game so far offer that reward.
The Atom challenges are a win-win for players and Bethesda. While it gives players an option to earn the currency without spending a dime, the daily and weekly challenges help Bethesda to keep active player counts high. As there are also social challenges (including making friends and joining groups), it gives entire friend groups a reason to keep playing the game.
Fallout 76 is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
