Fallout: New Vegas challenges guide

Consumption Challenges

%26hellip;And Not a Drop to Drink

Task: Consume 100 water items. These must be actual objects in your inventory and not just drinking from a pool of water…. Or toilet.
Reward: 100 XP and Camel of the Mojave Perk.

Perk: Camel of the Mojave – All consumed water, even non-inventory water, grants +15% extra healing and hydration.

NOTE: This perk only seems to work in Hardcore mode. No noticeable improvements to healing have been observed in Casual mode. This is likely a glitch.

Sorry kiddos, there’s no easy way around this one. You’re going to have to pick up dirty and purified water from every salesman you can find and down the stuff. Obviously this works better with purified water as you can just start chugging the water down as soon as you buy it. Since it doesn’t mention anything about the water healing you, it’s rather easy to just go through it in short order.

Day Tripper

Task: Use 25 addictive chems.
Reward: 50 XP and Day Tripper Perk

Perk: Day Tripper – All ingested chems last 33% longer than usual. When paired up with the Chemist perk this duration boost can get to rather ridiculous levels.

I Can Stop Any Time I Want

Task: Take 25 more addictive chems.
Reward: 75 XP

Maybe That%26rsquo;s a Lie

Task: Become addicted to chems 10 times.
Reward: 25 XP

A quick and easy way to earn this in Casual mode is to hang out near a doctor, the Doc in the first town works, and just start popping chems. Whenever you get addicted you can simply speak to him, paying to lose the addiction. In preparation for this you can just travel the Wasteland, buying up every chem you can find. A good source for chems can be found at the Great Khans encampment.

Fast Times

Task: Use Turbo 20 times.
Reward: 0 XP and Fast Times Perk.

Perk: Fast Times – Turbo lasts you 50% longer.

Aggravatingly enough, Turbo is more or less useless without this perk but you’re going to have to use a large amount of the easily available Turbo to get it. There’s no real easy way to get this besides collecting Turbo from around the wasteland and just huffing it. Luckily this does combine with the previous challenges so that’ll save you some time.

Free Radical

Task: Use Rad Away 20 times.
Reward: 0 XP and Free Radical Perk.

Perk: Free Radical – This is supposed to provide a bonus of 3x effectiveness from Rad Away but the real bonus appears to be 20% However it is rather horribly glitched and only works for some people some of the time. It also doesn’t seem to work at all in Hardcore mode for most people.

Radical

Task: Use Rad-X 20 times.
Reward: 75 XP

Want to know how to get this rather easily while not wasting the drugs? Just head to Camp Searchlight. This location in the southeast Wasteland has a few missions for you to do but is so heavily irradiated that it’s going to take a whole bunch of Rad-X and Rad Away not to just curl up and die. Go there, do the missions and watch as you get these challenges with ease.

Desert Survivalist

Task: Heal 10,000 hit points with food.
Reward: 100 XP

This is the challenge for those Hardcore types out there. Since Hardcore mode requires you to carry food for eating at all times anyways this is a great time to go for this challenge. When you have a high enough Survival skill you can craft some rather nice healing items (or just buy them). Two very good healing items are the Wasteland Omelet, a complicated item to craft but easily bought at the Ultra-Luxe, and the Caravan Lunch, an easy to make item that grants you a lot of health back as well as a whole bucketload of Hunger. Judicious use of these two items will get you this is no time flat so long as you’re patient enough to let the healing do its work.

By taking this approach you can sell most, if not all, Stimpaks you find and simply keep a few Doctor’s Bags on hand (or Hydra) to heal your limbs. Since Stimpaks can’t heal limbs anyway in this difficult there isn’t a great advantage to them.

Dine and Dash

Task: Eat 25 corpses.
Reward: 0 XP and Dine and Dash Perk

Perk: Dine and Dash – Allows you to harvest human remains from fallen enemies. These give you a good amount of Food meter back and heal some HP. This is not considered a crime against nature if witnessed by others.

Devourer of Nations

Task: Eat 200 corpses.
Reward: 100 XP

A few notes about these challenges. First of all you’re going to need to take the Cannibal perk to even get the option to start chowing down on your foes. Secondly you’re going to need to avoid being seen by any non-companion NPC’s or they will immediately turn hostile and attack. So if you absolutely must eat every last body you come across use the right stick to pull your food out of sight. Lastly if you’re going to pick this then take it during your Hardcore run as that’s when it’s most useful.

With all that said happy dining!

Meat of Champions (Secret Challenge / Perk)

Task: Kill and consume Mr. House, President Kimball, Caesar and the King.
Reward: 0 XP and Meat of Champions Perk

Perk: Meat of Champions – Now that you’ve eaten the best you gain a bonus when you eat the rest. This grants a small bonus to your Strength, Intelligence, Luck and Charisma every time you cannibalize a human corpse. This boost lasts about 60 seconds.

As you can tell from the task description this is a fairly late game challenge completion and it’s quite a daunting task. This is rather obviously only available to cannibals on the Independent / Yes Man path as you’ll have eaten the freaking rest of the competition. But for all of the trouble you’ll go through for this it’s not exactly a useful perk. The boost doesn’t last that long so you basically have to kill someone and drag their corpse to wherever you’re going to use the stat boost. Yeah, not a very helpful sort of thing.

Dr. Wasteland, M.D.

Task: Use 25 Doctor’s Bags.
Reward: 75 XP

Tough Guy

Task: Have your own limbs become crippled 50 times.
Reward: 0 XP and Tough Guy Perk.

Perk: Tough Guy – Limb damage is reduced by 20%

These challenges can be nearly impossible to work on if you have the Adamantium Skeleton perk due to how drastically that reduces limb damage. When paired up with a high DT and DR you can almost entirely avoid any sort of limb damage. There is a trick to making your limbs an entirely superfluous issue and getting you these two challenges rather quickly.

First choose the Small Frame perk during character creation. Play through the game and whenever you have Doctor’s Bags to spare, allow your limbs to be crippled. Heal your limbs and then continue adventuring. When the time comes, pick Adamantium Skeleton to totally nullify the Small Frame disadvantage (+25% limb damage) – this will leave you with a net gain of -25% limb damage. When you finally gain tough guy you will have a total of -45% limb damage. Paired up with a high DT you will be nearly impossible to cripple which is a huge boon in Hardcore mode.

Stimpaddict

Task: Use 100 Stimpaks
Reward: 50 XP

Stim-ply Amazing

Task: Heal 10,000 damage with stimpaks.
Reward: 100 XP

While this challenge is rather self-explanatory it is very much suggested that you go for it during a regular playthrough, as the amount of healing food does in Hardcore is affected by Survival, which also impacts how much said objects refill your H20 and Food meter raising your medicine skill is a waste of time. As such it’s best to focus on healing yourself via Stimpaks during said regular playthrough and instead focusing on the Desert Survivalist during your Hardcore run.