Treatment

Fix broken pipes around Megaton is a minor Fallout 3 quest. When you ask "What needs to be done around here?", Walter refers to broken pipes around Megaton. He asks you to fix them. When asked why he can't fix them, he says he hasn't got the time.

The pipes require a Repair skill of 30 or better to fix.

The pipes that have to be fixed are leaking water from them. The locations are as follows...

1. On top of the Children of Atom. Reached easily by jumping down from the right corner of the fence by Craterside Supply. 2. On the hill where you enter. Right by the staircase to get to your Megaton house. 3. Hill opposite of where you enter Megaton. On the hill that leads to the Common House.

When the pipes are fixed, Walter offers to buy scrap metal from you to maintain them. He will give you 10 bottlecaps per Metal Scrap item, or if you contribute them for free to him, you'll get positive karma.

Also you get 5 XP reward per scrap metal. This XP value can be very high if you contribute many scrap metals at once if you're well rested, and have the perk Swift Learner.

If your starting intelligence is at least 5, a simple way of completing this is to take Mentats, then equip the Vault 101 Utility Jumpsuit, which will give you the 30 repair skill required.

Bugs
This quest can become glitched and become either impossible to complete or, in some cases, even start it. After much debate and experimenting (as it doesn't appear to happen in every game) it has been found that the quest giver Walter can fall to his death. His dead body will be found behind either the Brass Lantern or the Doctor's Clinic. This quest is repeatable, so if at some point in the future he dies, you are out of luck. It's completely random if this happens or not and has been observed to be very rare, but it is still a possibility.

On the PC version you can fix this as follows:


 * 1) Enter Walters house (this is done to make sure he is resurrected in the right location
 * 2) Enter the console by pressing the tilde key ~
 * 3) Type prid 00003b59 and press enter
 * 4) Type resurrect and press enter
 * 5) Type enable and press enter
 * 6) Sleep for 24 hours if you don't see him right away