Wasteland 3 Wolfe's Hunt Quest - Should you kill or release the escaped synth?
As you complete missions in Wasteland 3, periodically your radio controller Ramirez will alert you to new quest opportunities back at HQ. One of the first of these is the Wolfe's Hunt quest.
Next to the Patriarch statue at HQ, you’ll see Wolfe’s synth-hunting band of mercenaries. He’s tracked a dangerous synth back to Downtown Colorado Springs, but after a “snafu” led to civilian casualties, the hunters were turfed out by Sheriff Daisy.
Wolfe is a returning character from Wasteland 2, where he was a recruitable companion - but he's still not the friendliest. He's not happy with how things went down in Arizona, which might explain his nickname "NaCl", aka Sodium Chloride, aka Salt.
Now in Colorado, he’s come to your outfit of Rangers to finish the job. If you accept, make you way to Downtown and speak to Daisy.
Wasteland 3 Wolfe's Hunt Quest
In the Marshal station off Pillory Square, ask her about Wolfe and she’ll clue you in to recent events, saying that Wolfe shot up the street near the museum.
Head over to the Museum on the east side of Market Square in town. To enter, you’ll have to pick the Lockpick 3 lock on the southern side of the building.
Inside, it’s full of creepy animatronics and displays from The Patriarch’s past. On the other side of the room to where you enter, there’s a Mechanics 3 generator you need to fix to open the central door. There’s a ton of great loot inside the office it unlocks.
Now, in the top left corner of the room - there’s something that’s not quite right. In with the Monster Army animatronics, there’s one that’s dressed like a Marshal - curious.
Walk up and speak to the Animatronic. You can either attack, use Nerd Stuff 4 to stun it, or speak to the Synth.
If you speak to it, it won’t respond but keep up the pressure and it’ll speak to you.
Now's your chance to make your decision:
- You can’t arrest the synth, it says you can either let it go or kill it.
- You can let it go by telling it to dress as a refugee and escape.
- Or you can turn it off permanently with bullets, blowing it up straight away if you stunned it with Nerd Stuff
If you kill the synth, Wolfe will want to use Ranger HQ as a synth-hunting base of operations. Which you can either accept or decline. Accepting gives you access to more synth-hunting bounties.
If you let the synth go, Wolfe will get mad and leave - even if you lie and say it escaped on its own.
Cynically, if you kill the synth, you get XP, money, and new bounties as a reward. If you let it go, you just get the XP.
This is probably one of the toughest moral decisions you’ve had to make so far. The synth definitely doesn’t deserve to die, but is dangerous and, if you let it go, you will find out that it has killed again. You'll have to live with that, even if it's in self-defence.
However, historically in the Wasteland series, Synths are some of the main bad guys. If you’ve played the previous games, then you’ll probably have an easier time frying it - even if it has been deliberately made to sound like a child to fool you.
Ultimately it's your decision to make based on the consequences listed above.
Once you're done, it's probably time to head out into the wilderness for the Unwelcome Guests quest - which is the final part of Full House.
Or if you're a little further on, then you might be strong enough to take on your first Buchanan child in The Zealot quest.
For more on Wasteland 3, check out our character build guide.