How to get and use the Manwell Rifle in Fallout 4

Fallout 4‘s next-gen update may have come with a substantial offering of free Creation Club content, but it doesn’t cover everything. The Manwell Rifle Creation is among those that are still premium, adding two powerful rifles that remain viable into the endgame… albeit with a few hoops to jump through.

If you’ve already put the credits down, actually getting your hands on the paired weapons will involve perception, patience and a whole lot of Nuka-Cola Quantum. Interestingly, this is one of the only Creation Club mini-quests to offer a choice at the end, although the consequences aren’t exactly significant or far-reaching.

How to complete The Quantum Stag in Fallout 4

Once the Creation is downloaded from Fallout 4‘s in-game store, its quest The Quantum Stag will begin as soon as you next load into the game. You’ll be tasked with trudging up to Outpost Zimonja, a small settlement site in the northern Commonwealth that’s fairly out of the way for most players. Once there, follow the quest marker west to discover a note in a ruined house. As Creation Club quests don’t have any voiced dialogue, for whatever reason, this note is the sole explanation you’ll get of what’s going on.

Evidently, a hunter and his son have been in pursuit of a mythical creature known as the Quantum Stag, an ordinary radstag that’s mutated from Nuka-Cola Quantum exposure similarly to the Nukalurks from the Nuka-World DLC. As is so often the case, they’ve failed, and it’s up to you to retrace their steps and take down the beast.

Once you’ve read the note, all that’s left is to follow the trail of breadcrumbs… or rather, the trail of Nuka-Cola Quantum the beast apparently has in place of blood.

It’s hard to miss the Quantum splatters on the ground. Much like the eponymous drink, they’re a bright, glowing blue that rather stands out against the drab browns and tans of the Commonwealth landscape. Not too far from the house you found the note in, you’ll find the corpse of the father who wrote said note—and more importantly, the Manwell Carbine right next to his body. Take down the mirelurks who killed him, loot the Concentrated Nuka-Cola Quantum from his body, pay your respects if you wish, and then get right back to the trail.

In a similar fashion, the trail will soon lead you to a camp set up by the hunter’s son, this time killed by a swarm of bloodbugs that you’ll also have to dispatch. Loot the son’s corpse to find the matching Manwell Rifle and another note outlining his plan: Luring the Quantum Stag with concentrated Nuka-Cola Quantum and taking it down while it’s distracted. You can see where this is going, can’t you?

Follow the marker to a nearby pond and dump the Concentrated Quantum you picked up from the father’s corpse, then hide in a nearby bush. Before long, the fabled Quantum Stag will show up to have a taste, and you’ll be faced with the quest’s core dilemma: Do you take a shot at the stag with your fancy new rifle, or feed it your remaining Concentrated Quantum to tame it?

If you kill the stag, it will drop a unique head that you can mount at any of your settlements, but if you spare it, you’ll be able to send it to any of your settlements alive and well. Neither of these choices has any gameplay impact, so it’s purely down to what you’d rather decorate your settlements with, although your nicer companions like Curie will prefer sparing the stag. Either way, you have two brand-new guns!

Is the Manwell Rifle worth it in Fallout 4? Answered

Here, we get to the meat of the problem—quest aside, is the Manwell Rifle worth Bethesda’s asking price of 400 credits (about five USD)? While the quest is insubstantial, the guns—both loosely based on the real-world Model Eight Remington rifle—pack quite the punch. The carbine can be customized to support semi-automatic and fully automatic configurations, while the rifle will remain a long-distance, slow-firing killer that gets even more effective if you slap a scope on it.

For a real-money asking price, however, you might be better off just turning to a modded alternative. I recommend the Service Rifle, which brings back the eponymous rifle from Fallout: New Vegas where it filled much the same niche as the Manwell.

Of course, if you have five dollars burning a hole in your pocket, you could do worse, especially since the next-gen update itself was free. It’s certainly a better use of your credits than the horsepower armor.