Fallout: New Vegas – Desert Survivalist Achievement Guide

A brief guide on collecting the achievement called Desert Survivalist in Fallout: New Vegas in a timely manner.

Introduction

Hello, this is a quick guide on how to get the desert survivalist achievement quickly. I found this achievement to be really annoying and was surprised to find there was no guide explaining how to complete it in a reasonable amount of time. This is my first guide so please bear with me.

The goal is to heal 10,000 damage with food, we’re not going to do that, it takes entirely too long to take and heal that much damage using only food. Were going to abuse how fallout counts healing for achievements, it’s really simple you don’t actually have to heal any health from food so long as you are hurt and consume 10,000 damage worth of food you will get the achievement.

So the hard part is going to be collecting all that food, no one wants to spend all their caps on food nor do they want to fast travel and sleep to buy said food. The simple solution here is not to eat food, drinking water counts towards the healing with food stat and is much easier to collect in massive quantities.

This guide is meant for players who have already completed old world blues DLC.

Requirements

• Old world blues DLC
• A survival skill of at least 30 “80 is recommended but not required”

How-to Guide

First, you will need to have completed the old world blues DLC this is vital so you can freely travel between the Mojave wasteland and big mountain, how you choose to end the DLC has no impact on this guide.

After the DLC is finished if you have not already collected Sink Project: Sink holotape and Sink Upgrade: Water Production holotapes find them.

Next, you will want to head over to the Sunset Sarsaparilla headquarters, depending on what your survival skill is will determine how much work you have to do. Your job here is to collect empty bottles there are around 400+ bottles in the loading dock room, 125+ bottles in the bottling room, and around 100+ bottles scattered around the rest of the building.

If your survival skill is below 30 there will not be enough bottles here to get the achievement. The number of bottles required based on each skill bracket is as follows:

• skill 10 = 1,000 bottles
• skill 30 = 667 bottles
• skill 50 = 500 bottles
• skill 80 = 400 bottles
• skill 100 = 334 bottles

After you have acquired the number of empty bottles corresponding to your survival skill bracket return to the big mountain and go talk to the sink, the sink will have an option to turn your empty bottles into purified water.

Now that you have the purified water deal damage to yourself, this won’t work if you have full health. After taking damage open your pipboy and drink all the water do not close the pipboy until you have drunk all the water.

Congratulations assuming the game didn’t bug out you should have the achievement.