Black Mountain

Follow this Fallout: New Vegas walkthrough to ascend Black Mountain, deal with Super Mutants and Nightkin, and confront Tabitha in the 'Crazy, Crazy, Crazy' quest.

Fast-travel back to Sloan and follow I-15 to the north-east while keeping your eye to the south-east. Eventually you’ll pass an elevated concrete landing with a metal shack and a crane on it, and shortly beyond this, just in front of a blue and yellow truck bed, you’ll find a road leading south-east up into the mountains. Follow this road up into the hills and eventually you’ll be pestered by a Super Mutant named Neil, who will warn you of the dangers that lie ahead. Apparently a band of crazy and rather unintelligent Super Mutants and Nightkin dwell atop the mountain, led by one particularly batty Nightkin named Tabitha. They’re a menace to everybody nearby, and they give mutants a bad name, which makes Neil partial to their removal… something he’ll help you with if you succeed at a [Speech 50] check. Either way, this starts the quest Crazy, Crazy Crazy.

As Neil said, these Mutants infest the mountain, and their patrols will be a serious impediment to any non-mutants trying to reach the compound atop Black Mountain. If you were able to eradicate Deathclaws, however, you can handle Super Mutants, and these Super Mutants are a great source of loot and XP. They’re well worth exterminating, and after you clear Black Mountain the first time, feel free to come back every time you need Caps, XP, or when you just want to get into a good fight. It’s a great place for high-level characters to earn stupid amounts of Caps by selling the heavy weapons (Heavy Incinerators, Light Machine Guns, Miniguns and Super Sledges) they carry.

First things first, however, you’ll need to climb the mountain, reach the capitol of the “State of Utobitha” and deal with its dictator with her totally really hair. If you convinced him to help, Neil will be waiting for you near a shanty town near the summit, but he was free to pass unmolested. You won’t have such a luxury. You can sneak up the mountain and avoid the road - and most of the Super Mutants - but there why pass up these lucrative fights?

Follow the winding road past Neil’s shack and make your way north, north-east to the first switchback. Pass some barricades where several Super Mutants lurk and loot a metal shack beyond the barricades, west of the road, wherein you can find an Ammo Box and Footlocker. Be wary of cloaked Nightkin, as they like to lurk behind cover and wait for prey to walk past; you can sniff them out with VATS, even if you can’t target them while they’re cloaked.

Take the first switchback behind the Super Mutant checkpoint you just cleared, passing between two flaming barrels along the way east. If you continue east you’ll find a pass off the road to the east which you can ascend to bypass a large strip of road. If you take this route you’ll have to disarm some Bear Traps and avoid falling rocks, both of which are quite a bit less valuable than the loot the Super Mutants along the road to the south will drop.

If you want to follow the road and gain wealth, continue south past another barricade, killing whatever Super Mutants are nearby. If you continue off the road to the south as it turns north you’ll find a fence which leads to the irradiated crater where you found the first Brotherhood patrol, occupied by Centaurs, including Moe. All of these critters should be long-since dead by now, so it’s really just a shortcut between Black Mountain and Hidden Valley.

Continue past the next switchback to the north, then make your way beyond another barricade, following the road until you find some stacked barrels off to the west, behind which a Nightkin often lurks. Keep going north along the road making your way uphill where you’ll start catching some RADS. If you look to the north-east you’ll find a slope leading up to a radio tower, which is another shortcut to the shanty town above. Either go up the slope or continue around the next switchback to ready the shanty town where you may encounter as many as half a dozen Super Mutants.

Exterminate the Super Mutants and continue south through the shanty town, all of which is lightly irradiated. Avoid a crater (which is more heavily irradiated) and find a building along the road south of said crater. In this building - which uses a ruined satellite dish as a roof - you’ll find three trunks, two blue trunks (one of which is locked [Average] and a metal one, the first two of which contain a mess of Bottle Caps while the third contains a Minigun and some 5mm Rounds. In addition to this loot you can find a Transceiver on a desk near the metal trunk. If you activate it, you’ll get to talk to Tabitha. If you say “Aren’t you the super mutant from the radio? I’m a huge fan.” she’ll send all the nearby Super Mutants to your location. On the other hand if you succeed at a [Speech 75] check you can trick Tabitha into sending down her Nightkin to attack any Super Mutants nearby… or you can use this as a means to kill them yourself or at least lure them away from the Black Mountain compound at the summit. If you lured the Nightkin away by tricking Tabitha with a [Speech 75] check you really don’t need to bother with this, but it’s yet another option. You can alternatively ignore Neil and continue onto Black Mountain yourself and just murder all the mutants inside. A less elegant solution, but a solution nonetheless.

Head south to the fenced-off B