Fallout 76: How to Get the Bow and Arrow
We show you how to get your own bow in the new Wastelanders update.
One of the newest additions to Fallout 76 in the wake of the Wastelanders update is the ability to use bows, silent, high-power weapons with retrievable ammo. We'll show you here how to get and craft a bow and arrow so that you can sharpshoot, old-school.
On this page:
- How to Get the Bow and Arrows in Fallout 76
- Where to Get Plans for the Bow
- How to Craft a Bow and Arrows
- How to Use the Bow and Arrow
How to Get the Bow and Arrows in Fallout 76
As far as we know, so far there is no way to find a bow in the wild with any reliability. To guarantee ownership of a good bow, you'll need to craft it, which means you'll have to acquire both the plans and resources to build it. We'll cover both below.
Where to Get Plans for the Bow
There's two options to getting a set of plans to craft your own bow - either to buy one, or to complete a certain quest. We recommend doing the latter, as it's relatively early on in the Wastelanders' main questline, as part of the third quest "Strength in Numbers." This'll give you plans for free, which you just need to select in your Pip-Boy inventory to read and be able to craft them at any weapons workbench from then on.
The other option is to buy them. There's two locations we know will always sell them - the Foundation and the Crater, central locations for both the Raider and Settler's respectively. They're sold here for about three hundred caps each, but considering the price and effort required, we'd recommend just pushing through with the Wayward first.
How to Craft a Bow and Arrows
Once you've read the plans, you can craft a bow at any weapons workbench, under the option "Machined Guns". You'll need the following ingredients for the most basic version:
- Adhesive x2
- Aluminium x2
- Plastic x6
- Rubber x4
- Screw x4
- Wood x10
It's certainly not too bad when it comes to rarity of ingredients, but there's a fair few of them needed nonetheless. You can also craft arrows in batches of 10, which'll require the following:
- Adhesive x1
- Aluminium x1
- Plastic x2
- Steel x3
How to Use the Bow and Arrow
The main advantages of the bow is that it's silent, and can be used for ammo retrieval (though we found the odds of the arrows actually being left on a corpse after use were about one-in-three), making it perfect for a stealth build. Sneak up towards a bandit, put an arrow in their ear, crab-walk forward and pull the arrow back out without any of his friends seeing. Then pick your next target and do the whole thing again. If you want to cancel a shot while you have it primed, sheathe/put away the bow to prevent firing needlessly.
The bow isn't anything like as good in direct, frenetic combat. It has a very poor fire rate, it can't be used while wearing power armor, and the reticle wobbles more than any normal gun, making it clearly better at long range. It's essentially an archaic sniper rifle, and should be used as such.
If you found that helpful, you should definitely check out some more of our Fallout 76 content. Mike's review of the game can be found here, or why not see what Jake thinks of the Battle Royale mode?