Patch 22 brought Daily Ops to Fallout 76, and for many of us, that’s our new favorite thing to do. But for others, especially those who many not have a regular group to play with, the Daily Ops might seem a bit intimidating to jump into. Further, there are combat modifiers or “mutations” for each Daily Op that changes up the traditional rules of the game. To make things a bit easier to manage, we’ll have a few quick pointers here.

Every day at 1pm Eastern time in the United States (5pm GMT), an hour after the daily challenges reset, the new op for the day will be introduced. For now, the only mission available is Uplink, which requires players to secure various uplinks and defend them, defeat a final wave of enemies, and then take down the area boss. Enemies will only be from a single faction, but could include Blood Eagles, Super Mutants, or Robots. The event can take place in The Burrows, The Burning Mine, Valley Galleria, or Vault 94. While there are two “mutations” per daily op, the Uplink event always includes the Piercing Gaze, which means enemies can always detect you, rendering stealth ineffective. The full list of mutations includes:

Piercing Gaze: Enemies have greatly enhanced perception of players
Volatile: Enemies will explode on death
Active Camouflage: Enemies will be cloaked when not attacking
Resilient: Enemies can only be killed by a melee attack
Freezing Touch: Enemy attacks will freeze players

While the Daily Ops are repeatable as many times as you’d like, and you can use them to farm XP and ammo (if you’re using a ranged weapon, enemies will drop whatever ammo that uses, except for fusion/plasma cores), the best rewards can only be obtained once per character per day, assuming you can manage to beat the event quickly enough. Those interested can find a full list of the current rewards further down.

Etiquette

Before you start a Daily Ops, or join a Daily Ops public team, there are a few things to take care of. First, make sure you’re actually ready to jump in, so other people aren’t left waiting. Get your perks set up (for example, on my sniper I remove my stealth perks, and add in damage resistance perks), eat and drink if you need to, and make sure your gear is in good repair and that you’re not overweight. If you intend on swapping your weapons/armor to match the type of enemies you’ll be facing, take care of that. Once you finish the mission, if you’re not intending on running any more, then maybe give your team a thumbs up, and then leave the group.

Managing Mutations

Most of these mutations are fairly straightforward, and common sense can carry you through without us rambling on. The Resilient mutation, however, is the one that’s been causing the most difficulty for people. Basically, what this mutation does is prevent ranged damage from actually killing the enemies, but it does not prevent ranged damage. With that in mind, you’ll either need some melee players on your team, you’ll need to use your gun bash to finish enemies off, or have a spare melee weapon with you. For one reason or another, many players have been failing to read the description of the mutation, but you’re already a step ahead, so that shouldn’t be a problem for you.

Running Uplink

Most of the Uplink Daily Op has a similar twist to the old Vault 94 Raids in that you don’t need to fight most of the swarms of mobs that you’ll come across. Your main objective is to move quickly to each of the uplinks, and stay close by while they activate. Once you and your team know your way around each of the maps, you can have one or two people go to the first activation location, and get it started, and everyone else go to either Alpha or Bravo, which won’t be marked yet. The initial one should only take a few seconds to activate, as long as you’re not getting knocked around by enemies. Once that’s active, Alpha and Bravo targets will show up. While you’ll need to activate both eventually, they can only be done one at a time. These take a couple of minutes to activate, and the more team members are in close proximity, the faster they can be activated. Given that you’re running against the clock, it’s generally not wise to step too far away from these. Again, you don’t need to kill anything for this part. The XP is great, as are the ammo/stimpak drops, but surviving and staying close to the objective is what is most important.

After both Alpha and Bravo have been activated, you’ll run to the indicated area, which is usually fairly central to the location you’re in, and wipe out marked targets. Generally ignore the enemies that don’t have the objective icon above their head. Once you eliminate the group, the final boss will show up, and you’ll need to take them down, hopefully finishing below the eight minute goal to get the best chance of scoring some sweet loot. Note that the final bosses can hit pretty hard, and there are likely to be a bunch of other enemies around as well, so if you’re a bit squishy, maybe pop some chems and some stimpaks to stay alive here.

After you’ve killed the boss, a timer will start that will give you about four minutes to loot the area, if you so desire. Again, there’s plenty of good ammo and chems that drop from the enemies, and given the rush you were in before, it might be worth retracing your path and picking things up, but if you just want to grab your rewards and leave, a prompt will appear on the screen allowing you to do so.

Rewards

When you complete a Daily Op, you’ll always receive a care package of ammo, legendary gear, grenades (why must you give us more grenades, Bethesda?), and chems, and the first time you complete the time challenges each day, you’ll have a chance at getting rare plans and cosmetics. For those interested in the details of the first batch, a fancy Reddit post gave us pretty much everything we need to know:

If you are under Level 50, you will not get any of the new stuff, you will only get plans for base game weapons, armor (both normal and power armor), and the plans you would receive from workshop claiming/defending.

If you are Level 50 or above, the odds of receiving an item are first determined by the rank you finish the daily ops: