Sunset Sarsaparilla Headquarters

Sunset Sarsaparilla Headquarters is a location in Fallout: New Vegas. It is the headquarters of the Sunset Sarsaparilla Corporation. It is located north-west of El Rey Motel and directly west of NCR Sharecropper Farms.

Background
The old headquarters of the well-known and loved “Beverage of the West Coast,” this structure features a many-faceted glass bottle of the company’s signature drink, Sunset Sarsaparilla. Before the war, an urban legend circulated that if you collected bottle caps marked with a star, you could send them in to the Sunset Sarsaparilla Headquarters and receive a prize. Now, this legend has taken on a life of its own; crazed individuals stalk the Wasteland searching for “SSSs” (Sunset Sarsaparilla Stars), a fact exacerbated by an automated robotic attendant, Festus, who prompts people with an option to present their Sunset Sarsaparilla Stars. Dare you find out the truth?

Layout
As you enter the factory, to your left is Festus, a cowboy robot who asks for your Sunset Sarsaparilla star bottle caps. Asking him "Star Info" reveals the contest and triggers the quest The Legend of the Star.

Another terminal activates a maintenance robot, Mr. Janitor, who collects bottle caps around the factory, and then disposes them in a garbage can by the maintenance office he is found in. He gathers a total of over 550 bottle caps.

On the ground floor, there is a very hard locked door. Access requires you to go up one staircase and down another. Within that room is some scrap metal, miscellaneous toolbox items, and a terminal with some cryptic log messages regarding plant production line damage. There is also a miniature empty Sunset Sarsaparilla bottle on the shelf behind/inside of the barrel. Oddly, there is a second Very Hard locked door down here, but the door is clearly swung open and would have otherwise lead to a room of rubble. Opening it earns exp but nothing else.

In the shipping room, there is an average locked terminal. Activating the terminal reveals a discussion regarding an experimental delivery robot that was reportedly single-handedly running all the distribution in the Vegas area.

In the bottling room, there is a lone surviving bottling robot. When talking to him, he first talks to you as you would be his master, but after realizing you're not he becomes hostile and attacks you. If your companion discovers him first, he will instantly become hostile. Just like with most Mister Handy models, upon looting him you will be able to recover all of his spare flamer fuel.

The furthest room in the back on the 2nd level factory floor has a safe, an average locked terminal, and a hole in the floor leading to a door which remains locked until Festus is given 50 star bottle caps.

Notable loot

 * Pew Pew and a holotape, next to the dead body of Allen Marks, in the Sunset Sarsaparilla Vault during the quest A Valuable Lesson. There are about 100+ caps in each of the crates in this room, for a total of about 1,435 bottle caps.
 * A Sunset Sarsaparilla star bottle cap in an average-locked wall safe in the office with a hole in the floor.
 * Sunset Sarsaparilla bottles. There are about 67 full bottles in crates behind the active bottling robot, and about 10 more bottles outside the headquarters on the right hand side of the building behind some trucks.
 * In one of the rooms (very hard lock) there is a smaller variant of an empty Sunset Sarsaparilla bottle next to a small barrel on top of a shelf. It is the only one in the game.
 * There are over 900 empty Sunset Sarsaparilla bottles throughout the building. They can be used for making purified water if the Sink is activated in Old World Blues.

Appearances
Sunset Sarsaparilla Headquarters appears in Fallout: New Vegas.

Behind the scenes

 * On a computer terminal on the ground floor, there is an "Annual Sales Report" which references games in the Fallout series by what area they are set in: "Northeast continues to be a tough nut to crack" Fallout 3. "Things are shaping up in the North and Midwest" Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel. "As usual, performance in the Southwest is strong" Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas.

Bugs

 * The culling in this location is glitched. In the factory there are many empty Sunset Sarsaparilla bottles on the floor that will disappear when looked at directly and reappear when viewed at an angle. However, you can still pick them up if you aim at them as though they were visible. Occasionally the same happens to the security robots destroyed by the player and some other objects.
 * Moving the crates outside the door of the room in which Allen Marks is located in causes the boxes to phase in and out of view depending on angle and distance from the crates.
 * If you move the big Sunset Sarsaparilla crates from under the lamps, the lamps stay hovering in mid-air and do not move.
 * For no apparent reason, occasionally Festus will be turned around. On the back of his box there are various tags and stickers.
 * It seems that saving your game while inside the factory and turning your console off and playing the game at a later time can cause the game to be continuously loading when you try to exit this location. Loading screens may never end. A remedy that works is to load a previous save that has your character outside in the world (not an interior location) and then reloading your save in the factory. Then you can exit without worry.