Mother of Invention

Mother of Invention is a main quest in the Fallout 76 update Steel Dawn.

Background
After interviewing the petitioners for Knight Shin, the Vault dweller is granted provisional access to the interior of Fort Atlas, along with directions to Scribe Valdez. She requires help in investigating some of the mysteries of ATLAS Observatory.

Walkthrough
The quest starts automatically after the previous one completes. Scribe Valdez is located on the upper level of the fort, overlooking the main ATLAS device. She will reveal that she does have some work she needs done: The bowels of the observatory have not been thoroughly inspected and she could use the dweller's help in investigating the substructure. After accepting the assignment, she will ask the player character to head on into the substructure and meet her there.

Inside the substructure, she will explain that the goal is to find documentation that can shed light on the state of the project and its mission. An Intelligence 4+ option allows for remarking that reading the plan is the first step of any good work, which she agrees with (and remarks that good work ethic like that is a way to ingratiate one with her).

To complete this assignment, the player has to locate three parts of the ATLAS decommission reports:
 * On the cart just down the corridor immediately after descending the ruined staircase.
 * By the skeletal remains near the core.
 * On the work table behind the core.

After delivering them to Valdez, she will remark on the state on the project and reveal a portion of what the facility was doing before the War, before catching herself. With Charisma 8+, the player character can convince her to reveal the whole truth and learn about the atmospheric experiments. The scribe will then ask for help performing a hardware inspection on the facility.

The release valve will trigger an explosion when turned, the wiring at the base of the ATLAS core is chewed through by rodents and spawns a horde of them, while the diagnostics terminal offers a breakdown of the status: Core processing unit is defunct, intake valves are ruptured, ion focus is misaligned, and the induction loop has a flux disruption detected. The scribe will summarize the damage in the after-inspection talk, and ask questions as to their status. Correctly answering will earn points with her towards a positive recommendation.

After the pop quiz, she will ask the dweller to extract some components for analysis at the lab. These are:
 * Ion focus, located at the base of the machine. Requires Agility 8+ to remove intact.
 * Pressure gauge
 * CPU

Behind the scenes

 * The quest name is based off of the phrase, "necessity is the mother of invention."


 * When extracting the "mysterious component" from the Atlas machine core, the player character is given the option to quickly swap it out with a heavy sack of dirt. This may be a reference to a scene from the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Indiana Jones steals an golden idol from a temple in Peru. He tries to stop any traps that may be activated by removing the idol by quickly replacing it with a bag of sand, but this fails, similar to what happens in-game.