Vault 34 is home to the biggest cache of supplies in all of FNV – its armory. In this guide, I’ll go over all of the steps to most easily get inside the armory.

Quick tips before you head into the vault:

• Filled with radiation. The entire vault, from start to finish, is heavily irradiated. It’s very important that you bring Rad-X and Rad Away, otherwise, there is a very high possibility that you’ll die of radiation poisoning before you make it out of the Vault.
• Feral ghouls present. There are several varieties of Feral Ghouls in this Vault. These include security guards (who wear armor), Glowing Ones (who can release a powerful radiation blast and have very high HP), and regular Feral Ghouls.
• The overseer’s Office has turrets. The Overseer’s Office, where you’ll need to go to unlock the armory, has security turrets that may be difficult to kill without armor-piercing ammo or a weapon that deals pulse damage.

Walkthrough

Entering the Vault

To start, make your way to Vault 34, located just east of the NCR Sharecropper farms. Beware of the Golden Geckos that tend to patrol the area.

Once you reach Vault 34, you’ll see a small wooden door leading to a cave. Go through.

Tip: Should you be confused as to where you’re supposed to go inside the caves, you can follow a simple trick: always ignore any path that has barrels of radioactive waste if you can avoid them. That should get you through the caves without any issues.

Follow the cave until you reach the first fork, where you must take a right.

Once you reach the next fork, follow the path where you can see beams of light emanating from the ceiling.

Upon reaching the final fork, take another right and follow the cave. You’ll see the entrance to the Vault within about a minute of walking.

Now you should have reached the Vault. Once inside the Vault, proceed to the next section.

Unlocking the Overseer’s Office

Enter the Vault and go straight through the open door you’ll see in front of you.

Jump over the railing in front of you and go through a hole in the floor in the far left corner of the room.

As you jump down, you should see a door that will allow you to exit the room you jumped into (also known as the “Systems Room”, remember where it is, as it’s right next to the staircase that you’ll need to use to exit).

Tip: While the compass is pretty useless, even if you have a quest here, the Local Map can be useful for telling where you are. The guide includes screenshots of the local map to help you navigate. If you get lost at any point, look for the bright signs that you can find above doors and in most intersections.

Take a left and follow the corridor until you see a place where you can turn right. Go there and turn right again. If you can see a flooded section, you’ve reached the right place.

Go down into the body of water and swim through the door you’ll see in front of you.

Turn to the left, you’ll see a dead Glowing One below a desk. Loot the “Vault 34 Security Terminal Password” off of it.

Go back up and keep heading in the direction you were going originally. You should eventually reach a door that leads to the Clinic. Remember this place, as you’ll need to come back here to reach the Overseer’s Office.

Go inside the Clinic and exit into the next hallway through the door you can find in the northern wall. 

Follow the hallway again until you see an open door leading to another flooded section to your right. 

Same steps as before: go into the water, swim through the open door in front of you, and loot the “Vault 34 Utility Terminal Password” a dead Glowing One who you can see below a table, this time a bit to the right of the entrance.

Exit the water and follow the corridor again until you see a door labeled “Utility” on the left. Remember this place, as you’ll have to backtrack here towards the end to get to the armory.

Go inside, clear out the Ghouls, and open the terminal that’s just to the left of the entrance.

Once inside the terminal, click “System” and then “Activate Pump Station”.

Return to where you got the Utility terminal password just a minute ago. You’ll see that the door that was there closed itself. Go through the door.

Go down the stairs, but this time, take a left just as soon as you go down the stairs.

Follow the hallway until you reach the security room. At the northern end of that room will be the security terminal. 

Open the security terminal, click “System” and then “Disengage Lock to Overseer”.

Now that the Overseer’s Office has been unlocked, you may proceed to the final hurdle: unlocking the armory.

Unlocking and Entering the Armory

Leave the room, through the hallway, back up the stairs, and backtrack all the way back to the entrance to the Clinic, where you can go to the newly unlocked Overseer’s Office, also labeled “Reactor” on the local map.

Go down the stairs and enter the corridor where you can see many doors on either side. Take the first door on the right – the one labeled “Overseer’s Office”.

Go through and enter the office. Beware of the several Feral Ghouls, the unique, named Glowing One called “Overseer”, and the turrets that will start firing at you the moment you open the door.

Loot the “Overseer’s Password” off of the Overseer’s corpse.

Turn around and interact with the Overseer’s terminal.

Select “System” and then click on “Open armory door”.

Now you’ll have to backtrack all the way back through the clinic, past the Utility door to the entrance to the Armory, all the way at the northern end of the hallway.

Enter through the Armory door and go down the stairs, then follow the “Equipment Room” sign by turning right.

Go through the room and exit it through the door in the southeastern corner of the room.

Congratulations! You made it to the Vault 34 Armory.

Unique and Noteworthy Items

There are 3 noteworthy items in this room:

• The “All-American” unique Marksman Carabine. Can be found on an overturned table in the center of the room. 

Note that there are some bugs that may cause the weapon to not spawn, or you can hit it with a bullet or with an explosion while dealing with the Ghouls that guard the room, sending it flying, sometimes even out of the room or into a piece of furniture, making it unobtainable.

You can fix this on the PC version by using the following console command to give yourself the gun: “player.additem 00106FEB”.

• The Pulse Gun can be found in a Very Hard-locked footlocker in the southwestern corner of the room. A Lockpick skill of 100 is needed to unlock the box.

The Pulse Gun is involved in Veronica’s companion quest – make sure not to sell it.

• There is a full suit of Vault 34 Security Armor on a table right next to the footlocker that contains the Pulse Gun. 

While not a unique item, it takes the number 1 spot for the best light armor in the base game, with a DT of 16. This is 1 point more than the medium Combat Armor. 

The only light armor in the game that beats the Vault 34 Security Armor is the Sierra Madre Armor, Reinforced from the Dead Money DLC, or possibly one of the Courier Dusters from the Lonesome Road DLC for utility.