Random Thoughts – Randocity!

If you’re trying to complete the Possum challenge for Leatherworker, you’re probably looking for Deathclaw Hide. Let’s explore.

[Update 7/1/2021] As of this update, Deathclaw Hide now reliably spawns as loot on Deathclaws again, though not every time. It seems that Bethesda has added Deathclaw Hide back to the possible loot drop list for Deathclaws. Because it doesn’t drop every single time, you’ll need to kill a few Deathclaws before it drops.

[Update 8/21/2020] There is a new temporary opportunity to pick up Deathclaw Hide during Meat Week. A Deathclaw spawns at the Forest’s Primal Cuts event as the final beast. This event’s location is right next to the red truck just outside Flatwoods. In addition to the Prime Meat you get from completing the event, this final Legendary Deathclaw sometimes drops Deathclaw Hide. By the way, this is the only Primal Cuts event that isn’t completely broken. The other locations I’ve attempted are entirely borked. At those other locations, the final wave of beasts never arrives causing the event to fail. This one in the Forest is properly working. If you’re wanting to collect Prime Meat for Grahm’s Cook-Out, this is the only Primal Cuts event to attempt. Meat Week (along with this event) ends on August 27th. Good Luck!

[Update 7/25/2020] As I predicted below, it seems that the Alpha Deathclaw carcasses at the fissure sites no longer drop Deathclaw Hide (or any other loot). I have visited several fissure sites, including Fissure Prime, and all of the carcasses are now empty… even when opening up the container into full screen mode AND even on private servers. This indicates that Bethesda has stopped the loot from dropping on these carcasses. The below information must now be amended to note this change in the game. Bethesda could return loot drops to the carcasses in the future, but for now loot no longer spawns on these fissure carcasses. Thanks go to reader Duggle for pointing this out.

With that said, I am still getting Deathclaw Hide from Deathclaws that you can kill. In fact, I found Deathclaw Hide on a Matriarch Deathclaw in the Abandoned Waste Dump cave today (7/25). However, I tried visiting that cave 5 more times after that and did not receive any further Deathclaw Hide drops, but did receive Deathclaw Hands (which doesn’t count for the challenge). It seems that you’re going to have to be diligent with world hopping this cave by killing the Deathclaws in this cave.

In fact, I’m beginning to believe that Bethesda may have made Deathclaw Hide a once-per-day drop from any Deathclaw. Why do I believe that? It seems that I’ve been able to find one Deathclaw Hide from the first couple of Deathclaws killed in a 24 hour period, but I’ve received no more after that from other Deathclaws. This could all be happenstance and rarity at work, but after a couple days of this loot drop behavior in a row, I’m leaning heavily in the once-per-day direction. If you’ve been able to get more than one Deathclaw Hide from killing a bunch of Deathclaws during a 24 hour period, please let me know in the comments below.

It seems that reader Duggle was able to get several Deathclaw Hides in the same session and even by world hopping. So, it seems the once-per-day drop for me was merely a fluke.

Where to find Deathclaws?

The only two places I know of which spawn Deathclaws as part of the location are the Abandoned Waste Dump cave in the Mire and the lower level Deathclaw that spawns on Deathclaw Island in the Forest (not far from Vault 76). There are mini-event locations that can also spawn Deathclaws, but these mini-event areas are randomly spawned from about 10-15 different mini-events… which makes this specific Deathclaw mini-event infrequent.

There may be one more location for a Deathclaw spawn and that’s at the Thunder Mountain Substation TM-02 in the Cranberry bog not far from Watoga. I haven’t visited this location in quite some time, but the last time I was there it regularly spawned a Deathclaw with a bunch of bugs (usually glowing ants). Updated note for 7/28/2020. I’ve recently visited this site again and I can confirm that it still spawns a Deathclaw with 4 glowing ants which the Deathclaw had killed.

Reader Duggle points out that a Mythic Deathclaw spawns inside of Hopewell Cave. I haven’t farmed this cave, but it’s worth heading into this cave and killing this Deathclaw to find out.

[Update 4/27/2020] It seems that since Wastelanders has been released, Deathclaws are once again dropping Deathclaw Hide. I found it on the Deathclaw on Deathclaw Island. I’ve also seen Deathclaw Hide drops from Radtoads. It seems Bethesda has potentially fixed the problem that caused this article to be written (see update Caveat just above). Still, these Deathclaw Hide drops seem to be rare.

Possum Challenges

The one thing about the Possum Challenges is that there’s always this “one thing” you can’t seem to find (or do). With the Leatherworker challenge, this one is no different. I have no idea why Bethesda feels the need to make these challenges drastically more difficult by limiting the ability to find the things you need. For example, the Possum Electrician challenge is entirely broken. There’s no way to actually succeed with this challenge because the ‘Restore power to a Power Plant’ challenge won’t complete no matter how many times you “Light Up” the Poseidon Power Plant  … it seems Bethesda may have finally fixed this challenge to award the point after powering up Poseidon.

With pretty much every other animal in the game, you can find their hide in the loot pile after you kill them. Perhaps not finding it all of the time, but at least 50% of the time. This would mean you need to kill a minimum two of these animals to find its hide.

With the Deathclaw, unfortunately, Bethesda seems to have taken Deathclaw Hide off of a Deathclaw’s drop list (or at least, after Wastelanders, reduced its drop rate substantially) which you only find out after spending time and ammo killing several Deathclaws. It seems Deathclaw Hide is now back on a live Deathclaw’s drop list (see update above), but it is still a reasonably rare drop. So, no longer does a Deathclaw drop Deathclaw Hide. This makes the Leatherworker Possum challenge nearly impossible… until you know where to look.

Thanks, Bethesda.

Rant Mode On

At this point, I can’t believe this is an oversight. In fact, I believe that it isn’t. I believe these changes are intentional by people within Bethesda. To consider this unnecessary change as anything more than accidental in among so many other “accidental” changes is naïve. There is absolutely no way Bethesda is this mistake prone. No way! No company makes so many mistakes in writing code. No one does this. One or two mistakes here and there I can accept as accidental. With Fallout 76, it’s been a series of mistakes after a series of mistakes after even more mistakes.

In fact, it’s almost like Fallout 76 came to exist through a series of mistakes. No one (let alone a company as big as Bethesda) makes that many “accidental” mistakes and still produces a semi-functional product. No! These changes are not accidental, incidental or unintentional. No company operates like The Keystone Cops (too young for this reference?   ⃪ click here).

These mistakes are definitely intentional! They have been introduced by Bethesda’s engineers intentionally. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps job security? No company I’ve seen introduces bugs intentionally… except Bethesda and software engineers hoping for …

Job Security

What exactly is “Job Security” in the software and technical professions? I’ll explain.

Many technical staff are not confident in their own skills or abilities. Their job insecurity sees them play games to make themselves appear “more valuable” and, thus, help their prospects with job security. Everyone wants to be considered a valuable team member. Unfortunately, playing this “job security” game in the way described below is highly unethical, but few technical staff see it this way.

By Technical Staff, I’m referring to software engineers, software designers and software coders. I also include systems administrators, systems engineers and systems architects as well. All of these technical roles have the ability to play such games to help increase their perceived “value” to the company.

No one wants to be considered obsolete by their employer. To that end, many software designers, engineers and even systems administrators, choose to keep their jobs secure by engineering their own continued necessity. How do technical employees engineer their own continued necessity? By introducing system breaking bugs. If things are “broken”, the company will continue to need someone to “fix” it.

How this situation manifests is that these folks break small things here and there. They don’t break the whole system, though they could very easily do this if they wanted. No, instead, they engineer breakage in small tertiary components. They engineer situations that are just problematic enough to be annoying, but not problematic enough to keep the product from working entirely. Though, I have worked with some folks who will and have chosen to break the entire system, bringing down the entire product for several hours.

There’s a fine line when considering breaking small things versus large things. Breaking the whole system is a firing offense. If you break the entire system such that no one can use it for hours, that’s something that will get at least one person fired. This doesn’t afford job security. Just the opposite, in fact. Breaking the entire system will get someone fired.

Breaking tiny tertiary pieces isn’t a firing offense (at least as long as the engineer doesn’t go blabbing about what they did). In fact, breaking something small is usually seen as unintentional by most bosses. After all, a boss might think, “Why would they break this tiny thing intentionally?” For this thinking logic, such small things are assumed to be a bug.

Many software engineers (and similar people in similar lower level positions) take advantage of this flawed managerial thinking logic and choose to break underlying, but very small components. Why? As this section states, job security. If small things are continually broken, the company will need someone who “knows that code” to fix it. Hence, continued employment for that person. Yes, it’s a shitty thing to do, but people also want to remain employed. When you hire bright people to write code, you also hire their scheming minds. Expect them to take advantage of such internal managerial flawed rationales to their own benefit.

How does this relate to Deathclaw Hide? It relates because the person who manages this specific portion of Fallout 76 wants to remain employed by Bethesda. If they break something small, Bethesda will eventually turn to them to ask them to fix it once enough people complain. See, job security does sometimes work… as long as they don’t get caught at it. It seems that too many employees at Bethesda are playing the “Job Security” game at the expense of Fallout 76. After all, this video game is already mostly a piece of junk. No one is going to see a few more mistakes as any more than “par for The Whitespring golf course”.

Rant over.

So where can I find Deathclaw Hide?

I’m coming to that. I wanted to rant a little about Bethesda before I got to this point. Since Deathclaw Hide no longer spawns on Deathclaws after you kill them, you must rely on loot containers and via other means.

Unfortunately, it seems that the same engineer who removed Deathclaw Hide from the loot drop list for Deathclaws also seems to have removed it from the drop list for regular containers as well. This means you won’t find it in toolboxes, wooden containers, coolers, safes or any other similar containers. I know. I’ve spent days culling through every container I could find looking for it. Deathclaw Hide doesn’t even spawn in Deathclaw nests!

I even went looking in non-conventional places. I started searching through Scorchbeast nests. Specifically, the nests in Watoga. I rationalized that Scorchbeast nests tend to turn up unusual bones and stuff. There is a nest on top of Watoga’s Municipal Building (where Mayor for a Day is located). There is also a nest on top of Watoga’s Civic Center. While these nests both spawn all sorts of goodies, such as Scorchbeast Hide, Scorchbeast Brain, Scorchbeast Meat and Scorchbeast Heart, it doesn’t spawn anything related to Deathclaws.

However, the Scorchbeast Guano piles will occasionally spawn Deathclaw Hands. Unfortunately, these don’t count towards the Possum Leatherworker challenge, even though Deathclaw Hands provide 3 leather. Go figure.

After spending time making various runs to these Scorchbeast Nests, I then had another thought.

Fissure Sites

I realized that I was going about this all wrong. Around the lip of every fissure is an array of dead animals. I also realized long ago that existing already-dead carcasses in the game spawn the hide of the dead animal.

While a Bethesda engineer decided to remove Deathclaw Hide from the live Deathclaw drop list, he/she forgot to remove it from the already dead carcasses that you can find around Appalachia. For example, there’s an already dead Yao Guai at the Abandoned Waste Dump. This permanently dead carcass spawns Yao Guai hide. If you ever need Yao Guai hide for any challenge, make your way to the Abandoned Waste Dump and pick it up. No need to kill anything. Just loot and be done.

This is why I began thinking, “Where can I find already dead Deathclaw carcasses in this game?” That’s when it dawned on me to visit the fissure sites.

Sure enough, there are already dead Deathclaw (and other) carcasses around the lip of fissures. Deathclaw Hide still spawns on these already dead Deathclaw carcasses. Yay! No need to run around killing Deathclaws if we don’t have to, eh? If you’re looking for Deathclaw Hide, you’ll want to visit the lip of the fissure sites to loot these already dead Deathclaws. The difficulty, of course, is that these fissures tend to spawn a crap ton of Scorched and at least one Scorchbeast, in addition to irradiating you. Be prepared with RadShield, RadX, Radaway or Power Armor and also be prepared to take out the enemies… or, alternatively, use the Sneak card to sneaky sneak your way in and out without being easily detected.

Unfortunately, you will only find one hide per carcass. Even then, it doesn’t always spawn. But, it spawns more often than anywhere else. Fortunately, there are 9 fissure sites around Appalachia that you can visit and check out the dead Deathclaw carcasses. At least one of them will have a hide. If you server hop, you can probably find all 5 of the hides that you’ll need to complete the Possum Leatherworker challenge.

I have found that the fissure sites are the most reliable places to locate Deathclaw Hide in Fallout 76. That is, until another engineer chooses to remove Deathclaw Hide from the loot drop list for these already-dead Deathclaws at the fissure sites, too. 😕

Update 7/1/2021, the video sizes have returned to normal. Thanks for your patience.

Good Luck.

If this article helped you, please leave a comment below. If you know of the location for other dead Deathclaw carcasses around Fallout 76 (besides fissures), please let me know where you found it in the comments below.

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