Archaeologist – Merit Badges Made Easy In Fallout 76

Welcome to the Archaeology merit badge guide for Fallout 76! As with all of the Possum badges, make sure you’ve earned the Possum rank before beginning this, as none of your progress will count otherwise. As long as you have a camera, this is quite an easy merit badge, and can help you make good progress towards your next backpack upgrade. With that said, and before we get into our tips and suggestions, let’s take a gander at the requirements.

1. Pass “Archaeologist” knowledge exam at an exam terminal
2. Acquire a magnifying glass
3. Collect Bones while wearing a fedora (x/15)
4. Acquire a treasure map
5. Find treasure by using a treasure map (x/5)
6. Cook Fox Jerky (x/5)
7. Take a camera picture of fossils
8. Visit Philippi Battlefield Cemetery
9. Visit Uncanny Caverns
10. Visit Wendigo Cave

If you need help with the first requirement, we’ve got a clickable tab with all of the questions and answers for the archaeologist knowledge exam at the end of this guide. Magnifying glasses are fairly common throughout the map, but let us know if you want us to add in location info, or we’ll just assume you’ve got that one down. Collecting bones while wearing a fedora isn’t too terrible, and to complete this one of the most readily available fedoras in the game is the White Wolf fedora, which you can pick up from the Imposter battle, from many player vendors around the map, or from a friend who has one (or a few dozen, these things seem to multiply like rabbits.

As for the bones, you can randomly pick them up, especially from mongrels and super mutants, but the safest and laziest way is to fast travel to Sunnytop Station (this will also knock off a requirement for the Railroad Enthusiast badge), and there are usually between 10-13 bones outside of the station near the bed and safe there. There’s also a bunch on the pool table inside the room with Meg at Crater. If you’re looking to get a bunch in one spot, then you can also travel to Braxson’s Quality Medical Supplies (east side of the Mire, or there’s the unmarked cave northeast of Freddy Fear’s House of Scares, in the same spot the Stings and Things daily suggests going to get bloatfly glands. There’s a slim chance you’ll run into a Sheepsquatch on the way, and a little bit more of a chance that roaming scorchbeasts might spot you, but most likely, the biggest challenge going to this location will be the one or two honey beasts that spawn at the cave. Kill them and the bloatflies (save the bloatfly glands for the Stings & Things daily), and there are a plethora of bones to loot in the mouth of the cave.

Acquiring a treasure map is almost impossible to avoid, and if you’re looking for where to actually go to loot them, then Dulfy has a pretty solid guide here. As a side note, this requirement entails using five treasure maps, rather than looting five items, given that you usually get multiple items per map. Luckily, if you have five maps for the same spot, you can use all five at once (still requires digging five times) and knock this one out in one trip. Cooking fox jerky is easy enough (if you wear the chef’s hat, you can knock off some Cooking merit badge requirements, too). If you use the perception perk, Butcher’s Bounty, that’ll help, but for fox meat, one of the best spawns is by Big Fred’s BBQ Shack, where Rose sends you to meet David, and one of the places you start Free Range.

There are a few places on the map that have fossils, but just south of Wavy Willard’s (a bit east of where the drawing of the slide ends on the map) has an easy one, and if you haven’t completed the Swimming merit badge, you can get all of the required pictures for that one while you’re here.

The last three requirements are to visit Philippi Battlefield Cemetery (maybe bury some remains there while you’re at it), visit Uncanny Caverns, and then take a jaunt to the Wendigo Cave.