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How to get Fallout 76's best armour
Improve your chances of survival by getting your hands on this armour.
Exploring the Appalachian Wasteland in Fallout 76 is no walk in the park. Not only are there Scorched beasts, Milelurks, and Super Mutants to contend with, but you’ll also have to fend off other players looking to score some extra caps from killing you.
What you’ll want to do then is find some decent armour as quickly as you can. This will help you to boost your damage resistance, ensuring you have a better chance of survival against whatever the wasteland decides to throw your way.
We’ve assembled the following Fallout 76 armour guide to teach you all you need to know about crafting the different armour types in the game and where you can pick up your very set of own power armour.
The importance of outfit perks
You can find gas masks at Lady Janet’s Soft Serve
© Bethesda
Before we talk about armour, though, it is worth mentioning Fallout 76’s outfits first. Outfits are clothes you wear over standard armour sets and they too come with their own benefits to take advantage of. Some great examples of them include hazmat suits and gas masks.
Hazmat suits are great for reducing radiation damage, whereas gas masks in the game can be used in the southern part of the map to avoid contracting diseases like sludge lung. You can find Hazmat Suits at the Poseidon Energy Plant WV06 in the western area of the wasteland, while there are couple of gas masks to be found at Lady Janet’s Soft Serve to the east of the Ferris Wheel on the left-hand side of the map.
How to craft and modify armour
Modify your armour with scrap
© Bethesda
There are a bunch of different armour sets for you to craft in the game and each of them is highly customisable. However, you’ll have to learn how to make them first, through finding plans in the world (usually located around workbenches) and unlocking better perks.
This means that, to begin with, you’ll only be able to make one type of armour – the light leather armour set. The base stats of this armour set will depend on what level you decide to craft it at, but you can always upgrade and modify it later on if you have enough of the necessary scrap. Options include being able to boil and treat sets or alter pieces to make them sturdier or heavier, or lighten the weight of armour sets to avoid encumbrance. The more plans you unlock, the more options you will have available.
It is a good idea, then, to keep upgrading your current armour, while looking out for plans to better sets like wood, metal, and combat armour. You can also find armour out in the world, usually on the bodies of Super Mutants, Ghouls, and Scorched humans, or randomly in chests.
How to find power armour frames
The Raider power armour
© Bethesda
At later levels, you will probably want to get your hands on something a little tougher than the standard armour sets. This is where power armour comes in. Power armour sets are, without doubt, the best armour you can get in the game, allowing you to soak up way more damage than usual as long as you have enough fusion cores to power them. You can find them in several locations, including in the following areas:
- Aaronholdt Homestead
- Abandoned Mineshaft 4
- Camp Venture
- Clarksberg
- Eastern Regional Penitentiary
- Forward Station Delta
- Garrahan Mining Headquarters
- Hornright Industrial Mining Company
- Kanawha Nuka-Cola Plant
- Lewis & Sons Farming Supply
- Morgantown Train Station
- Moundsville Penitentiary
- Point Pleasant
- Poseidon Energy Plant WV06
- Robco Research Center
- Silva Homestead
- Vault 63
Something to note, though, is that you won’t be able to wear most power armour pieces until you are at a certain level (the lowest requirement we found was level 15 for the Raider power armour at the location pictured below). So it is a good idea to store any pieces you find in your personal stash for safekeeping until you have hit the required threshold, as they will likely weigh you down.
You can find the Raider power armour here
© Bethesda
Regardless, you will still be able to put on the power armour frame and enjoy some of the benefits that comes with wearing power armour, like greater strength, less fall damage, and reduced exposure to radiation.
There are four different types of power armour sets that you can find randomly out in the world. These include T-60, T-51, T-45, and Raider power armour. As far as we can tell, these will all spawn randomly between the different locations. They are ranked in the following order from best to worst:
- T-60 (334 damage resistance, 304 energy resistance, 350 radiation resistance)
- T-51b (300 damage resistance, 300 energy resistance, 181 radiation resistance)
- T-45 (233 damage resistance, 227 energy resistance, 227 radiation resistance)
- Raider power armour (160 damage resistance, 160 energy resistance, 160 radiation resistance)
Learning the Excavator power armour blueprint
Finish Miner Miracles to get the Excavator power armour blueprint
© Bethesda
There are also a few other sets that you can only get from quests. One of these is the Excavator Set, which is positioned between the T-45 and the Raider power armour set in terms of efficiency (162 damage resistance, 162 energy resistance, 234 radiation resistance).
To get the Excavator power armour, you’ll need to complete the questline Miner Miracles, which you can activate at Garrahan’s Mining Headquarters if you look at any of the Excavator posters near the entrance. The quest requires you to go inside the headquarters and read two terminals, avoiding the super mutants and mole men that spawn here. The first terminal is located in the reception area and the second is in the area to the left as you enter, where you’ll also be able to find a power armour frame.
Reading the second terminal will teach you how to craft the Excavator power armour set, but you’ll then need to find the required materials to build it, more specifically the black titanium ore that isn’t the easiest to find.
The simplest way to do this is to go to the Gorge Junkyard workshop to the west of Morgantown. The workshop there has a harvester that will slowly produce black titanium in bulk, which makes collecting it a far less tedious and less dangerous job than killing Mole Miners or Deathclaws. Just make sure to build up some defences around the workshop first, as the resource is guaranteed to be in high demand among other players.
How to get the X-01 power armour
You need to go to the Abandoned Waste Dump to get the X-01 power armour
© Bethesda
The X-01 power armour is the second strongest power armour set in the game, with 332 damage resistance, 374 energy resistance, and 374 radiation resistance.
It is obtained through joining the enclave, a late game quest that you can initiate by completing the Bunker Buster quest at the Abandoned Waste Dump on the eastern side of the map and starting the questline One of Us. It is quite a lengthy quest and requires players to be at around level 50 in order to complete it, so don’t go rushing off to get it straight away as you probably won’t have much luck.
How to get the Ultracite power armour
There's a Brotherhood of Steel outpost at Abby’s Bunker
© Bethesda
The best power armour set by far is the Ultracite power armour, which boasts a whopping 453 damage resistance between all its parts, as well as 393 energy and radiation resistance, minus the chassis.
The Ultracite armour, much like the X-01 variant is intended to be an endgame item and is acquired from the Brotherhood of Steel questline. You can start this questline at Brotherhood of Steel outposts in the world, like the one at Fort Defiant or Abby’s Bunker –again, it is extremely difficult to get and you won’t be able to take full advantage of the suit until much later on, so it might be worth holding off on your plans to get it until you have a crew of other players or some decent weapons to take on some of the higher-level enemies in the areas around the quest.
