The Heist of the Century quest is a quest that is required to complete the Dead Money add-on for the Fallout New Vegas game. During this quest, the main character must sneak into the Sierra Madre vault, get as much information as possible and meet with Elijah.

For convenience, use summary:

Detailed walkthrough of the quest "Robbery of the century"

If you went through this addition to Fallout New Vegas, then you know that the main task of the plot of the add-on is to obtain the wealth that is stored in the Sierra Madre casino vault, this wealth will not go directly to the main character, he is just a tool in the hands of Elijah, who made the whole plan and uses the protagonist as a puppet in it.

In this quest, the main character has a chance to turn everything in his direction and become not a puppet, but a puppeteer. And finally, find out what kind of secrets and riches the Sierra Madre casino hides, for the sake of which such a storm was started.

Task #1: “Compose a passphrase to open the door”

To start the quest, you need to say a code phrase in the voice of Vera Keyes to the speaker, who is located next to the elevator, or rather, even a code combination made up of three audio recordings performed by Vera. In order to get these recordings, the main character needs to get to the computer located in the main lobby and use it to download 3 songs of Faith, after these songs are used to unlock the audio lock.

This is interesting: if Kristin is still alive, then you can ask her to say the password.

Task #2: “Get into the Sierra Madre vault”

Approaching the entrance to the vault, the main character will be unpleasantly surprised that the security system is still working and, apparently, it is active, such a conclusion can be drawn from the included force fields, the roar of a siren overhead and six barrels of automatic turrets aimed at the main character.

This makes us understand that we can’t go head-on here, so we leave for the office premises and through all sorts of different air ducts, service passages, corridors used to repair terminals and security systems, we continue to move to the storage.

You can also get into the vault with the help of Christine, you just need to ask her about it.

Task #3: “Find out all the secrets that are stored in the vault”

Once in the vault, you can start looking for secrets and immortal treasures, because that's what you came here for. Inside the vault itself, there is an assortment of weapons, armor, money, chips... and the legendary "Treasure of the Sierra Madre": 37 gold bars worth 10,539 caps each, for a total of 389,943 caps. There are also many weapons in the weapon cabinets, as well as several copies of power armor.

As soon as the main character enters the vault, the vault door immediately closes, cutting off the way back. You can turn off the already rather annoying alarm from the security service terminal, which can be found in the vault.

Now you can go and find out the secrets of the vault, for this we need a vault management terminal, after reading the information in it, the main character will learn a lot of interesting things.
After reading the last entry left by Frederick Sinclair, the protagonist learns that this vault was not built as a safe for treasure, but as a bunker where a certain number of people could survive the Great War. After the main character reads all the information he needs, Elijah will get in touch with him via intercom and they will have an interesting conversation.

It is important: don't be too greedy and don't try to get access to Sinclair's accounts, the fact is that this is a trap, falling into which the main character will die.

Mission #4: “Defeat Elijah”

After a brief digression into Elijah's motives, after talking about his genius, and after talking about how much the protagonist and Elijah could do together, the protagonist needs to start trying to lure Elijah into the vault. He doesn't want to do it at first, but use your persuasion or threats or bluff and get Elijah to go down into the vault.

After Elijah descended into the vault, the main character will have to kill him, this is very difficult to do, because Elijah has good weapons and a lot of experience. But still, do your best and defeat Elijah.

Task #5: “Additionally. Quietly leave the vault, locking Elijah in there”

An alternative to killing Elijah would be to imprison him in the casino's vault, for this you need to quietly slip into the elevator in which Elijah will arrive, but this is incredibly difficult to do.

Task #6: “Get out of the Sierra Madre before the collar explodes”

After the death of Elijah or his being taken to the vault, the collar put on the main character will start to give unpleasant signals, that is, the countdown will begin until his self-destruction, and, accordingly, the self-destruction of the main character's head. Therefore, hands to feet and run away from the Sierra Madre storage. After running out of the casino, we go to the Brotherhood of Steel bunker, from which it all began. In the bunker, the main character will hear the final recording from Vera Keyes, and that will be the end of it.

Elijah or Father Elijah is the main villain in the Dead Money add-on to the Fallout New Vegas game.

According to the plot of Fallout New Vegas, Elijah was born in the Brotherhood of Steel in California. Since childhood, he was interested in the structure of objects and soon wanted to improve the technology of the Brotherhood, which went against the official ideology. That's why Elijah was sent to start a new chapter in the Mojave Desert. Initially, Elijah planned to settle on the Hoover Dam, but, having found out that it was occupied by the NCR troops, he decided to settle at the Helios 1 solar power plant. Here he discovered information about the pre-war weapon - Archimedes - a laser beam directed by a satellite from earth's orbit. However, Elijah failed to launch it - the NCR troops attacked the station. Elijah ordered his brothers-in-arms to hold the station for as long as possible, but his second-in-command, the chief paladin, ordered the troops to retreat. Since then, there has been no information about Elijah, except for a note to Veronica Santangelo.

Meanwhile, abandoned by his people, Elijah headed for the Big Mountain, an ancient scientific complex. Here he first caught a signal from the Sierra Madre. When he reached the source of the signal, he found a cloud corroding living flesh. With his help, Elijah would be able to realize his plan to create a new world. However, in order to take advantage of all the charms of the Sierra Madre casino, it was necessary to get into it. And this could only be done by simulating a holiday at its gates - then the automatic system would open the doors and turn off the security. To this end, Elijah began to trap travelers in the Wasteland and put exploding collars on them - to force them to do what he wants. With this tactic, Elijah manages to get inside the casino, but is trapped inside. To gain freedom, he again needs to imitate a holiday, in which his assistant Dog, who remains at large, should help.

According to the plot of Dead Money, the main character will fall into one of the traps set by Dog to catch the victims. He soon finds himself at Will with a collar around his neck. Elijah makes him her toy, forcing him to perform various tasks through commands on the PipBoy. To reopen the doors of the casino, Elijah orders to find three more unlucky ones - the super mutant Dog, the ghoul Domino and the former scribe Christine Royce. With their help, the courier creates the appearance of a holiday and the doors of the casino open. Having penetrated inside, the entire team is sedated with gas. After the main character comes to his senses, Elijah orders to kill his associates or change the settings of the collars, as their signal interferes with the opening of the secret vault. After the protagonist decides the fate of his friends, Elijah sends him straight to the vault. Once you have control of the entire complex, you have two options:
- take the side of Elijah and send a deadly cloud to the Mojave Wasteland, destroying all its inhabitants;
- go up against the villain and either kill him or lock him up forever in the bowels of the casino - in any case, this will be the end for Elijah in Fallout New Vegas.

Sierra Madre is the most beautiful, most luxurious and majestic casino in America. Its construction took many years - and everything was ready for the amazing opening ceremony, but ... But on the day when the doors of the casino were supposed to swing open, instead of fireworks, the sky was lit up by flashes of nuclear explosions.

The casino was enveloped in a strange - as if rusty - cloud. An unknown gas rose from the ground, turning those who fell into it into strange ghostly creatures, but leaving buildings and mechanisms unscathed.

Hundreds of years have passed since then. The Sierra Madre still stands in the middle of the desert in clouds of rusty fog, keeping its secrets and treasures - America's most luxurious, odious and deadly trap...

start over

The beginning of the first addition to Fallout: New Vegas is not striking in originality: after loading, a message appears that the level limit has been increased by five, and the pip-boy picks up a radio signal inviting you to visit the "pearl of the desert." Signals from nowhere - how familiar, right? The current one comes from a radio in the previously sealed "abandoned bunker of the Brotherhood of Steel". It is worth getting too close - gas, clouding in the eyes, lost consciousness, woke up ... And where am I? Where did all the things from the backpack go, what is the “talking head” above the fountain and what does it want?

Welcome to Sierra Madre!

Elijah's father is a fugitive elder of the Brotherhood of Steel who disappeared in an unknown direction after the defeat of the Brotherhood at the Helios-1 power plant. Here, it turns out, where the old man has gone... I would like to give him a couple of affectionate words from his old acquaintances, but this will have to wait: bribes are smooth from the hologram, and something rubs the neck so badly...

The collar with an explosive charge, which our courier acquired against his will, will poison his life for a very long time (and very strongly, it should be noted). The collar explodes if you try to remove it or refuse to cooperate with Elijah. And the worst thing: the collar really does not like it when a working radio is nearby - it beeps for a few seconds, warning of danger, and then - boom!

To get rid of an explosive object, you will have to follow orders - and there's nothing to be done about it. And they, in principle, are simple: find the rest wearing collars, gather everyone at the fountain, wait for further instructions. Well, let's search. And let's see where it takes us.

ghost people

The surroundings of the casino are a labyrinth of streets, lanes and lanes. After the usual open spaces of the Mojave, it is noticeably cramped here. You have to navigate almost by touch: a cloud of rusty gas does not transmit sunlight well, and in the town there is constant semi-darkness everywhere. The map in the pip-boy helps little - to understand what is shown on it, you can only with great luck. And task markers are not always exactly placed.

Gas has another property in its dense accumulation, health begins to deteriorate at an alarming rate. And this is if you do not have hardcore mode enabled ... and if it is, the life bar will decrease constantly- and, accordingly, you need to constantly think about how to recover. The simplest method - to sleep for an hour - almost does not work in the Sierra Madre. On the beds and mattresses inside the Cloud, the hero will not sleep, so all hope is to get water, food, stimulants and antirads to cope with the consequences of eating infected products.

The situation is slightly simplified by the vending machines standing around the town, which seem to produce food out of thin air. But not for nothing, but for chips from the Sierra Madre casino. Moving deeper into the city, you can find new "issue codes" for vending machines, which both expand the range and allow you to feed vending machines all sorts of junk (ancient clothes, packs of cigarettes) in exchange for chips.

But everything would be too simple if the local dangers were limited to the Cloud and the possible death from starvation. Former builders still roam the streets, turned into strange creatures hostile to all living things. The Ghostfolk are hunched figures in chemical defense suits and can be very dangerous opponents due to their way of moving with unexpectedly high and fast jumps that make it difficult to aim, as well as incredible survivability. To safely put a ghost to rest, you need to deprive him of some part of the body. Hands, feet or heads, it doesn't matter. Only then can you be absolutely sure that the enemy will not rise again.

Under the cloud

All the prisoners of the Sierra Madre are assembled.

It seems that the developers of Dead Money drew inspiration from the Silent Hill series - the Cloud is very similar to the fog there, and the ghostly inhabitants of the Sierra Madre look like cultists from the fifth part. And each of your unwitting companions (the very three collars that Elijah requires to find) has his own reason why he ended up in an abandoned city. The company comes out, to put it mildly, unusual: a super mutant with a split personality, a dumb and scarred girl and Dean Domino - once the star of the scene, the "king of swing", and now - a caustic and intemperate ghoul.

The fate of this trio can be very different, depending on the actions of the player. Do you want to understand what brought them to the Sierra Madre? Do you have the patience and skills to help all three? Or just use them, as Elijah's head advises from the holographic cloud, and solve their problems in the old effective way: no person - no problem.

There are a lot of options for the development of events, and after the completion of the storyline, a traditional set of slides awaits you, telling what happened in the end - and, perhaps, very transparently hinting at events that have yet to happen. However, there is also an option in which, after the end of the story of Dead Money, the story of the courier also ends.

Unraveling the mysteries of the abandoned casino did not take too long - but it was interesting to solve them. An unusual environment, a gloomy abandoned city where danger lurks around every corner, unusual companions, an unusual story... A kind of game within a game, a break from the fussy running around with shooting and talking and the usual showdown between the NCR and the Legion.

MANAGEMENT

Prisoners of the Cloud

The three characters you'll meet in the Sierra Madre that you'll have to work with to get out of there can both help in combat and teach the courier new abilities.

Dog / God

A super mutant with a split personality. Inside one body, two completely different minds are trying to get along. And although the body is large, they are very, very crowded there, so for the most part you will communicate with them in turn, independently choosing who you need more.

Dog- a loyal soldier of the Overlord from the first Fallout, always ready to fulfill any order of the owner. When the Master was destroyed, the Dog lost the meaning of life. Rather, this concept for him came down to the word "food".

Changes in the "dog" life came with a man named Elijah. The former elder of the Brotherhood has replaced the Dog of the owner - and now the voice of the old man invariably brings to the surface precisely the “dog-like” layer of consciousness.

God- in contrast to the Dog, he is selfish, reasonable and prudent. Where his other half rushes forward, not making out the path, he makes cunning plans. And the main one: how to completely take over your own body and how to get rid of the old man, whose voice inevitably awakens the Dog.

You can reach God's consciousness by playing a recording of his own voice in front of a mutant.

Like each of the companions, the super mutant, if accepted into the group, gives the hero a special ability. But since there are two personalities in one mutant, there are also two abilities. If God travels with you, the hero stealth will improve and on him traps stop responding. The dog is eats your enemies, preventing them from getting back on their feet. When he eats at least one ghost, ask how exactly he deals with them, and during the conversation you will receive an ability that allows you to kill ghostly people without tearing off their arms and legs.

Dean Domino

The old ghoul remembers a lot and can tell a lot about anyone who wants to listen to him. In the end, he was present at the construction of the Sierra Madre casino and was supposed to perform at a concert in honor of its opening, but everything did not turn out at all as he had hoped.

Over the long years of living inside the Cloud, Dean has learned to deal with gas - and he will transfer some of this knowledge to the courier if he is near him. When Domino is in a group, the Cloud's damage is reduced by a quarter. Also, Dean can teach you how to mix martini "Sierra Madre" is a drink that temporarily increases a hero's strength, stamina, and maximum health. In order for the ghoul to share the recipe, you need to talk to him about his secret stockpiles scattered throughout the town.

Christine

The mute girl was once a knight of the Brotherhood of Steel and was supposed to kill Elijah, and now she is forced to obey him. In order to communicate normally with her, the courier will need high intelligence and perception (both parameters are at least six units). But for those who can understand her gestures and facial expressions, Christine will tell a lot about the places we have yet to visit and the people we will meet in future additions.

As long as she's on your team, the collar will respond to radios and speakers with a delay and explode a little later. In addition, she can teach the courier counterfeit Sierra Madre casino chips. One nuclear battery and two pieces of scrap metal will give you as many as fifty chips. Unfortunately, nuclear batteries are rare in the vicinity of the casino (which is not the case with the Mojave wastelands). And if you remember that in the abandoned bunker of Elijah there is a vending machine that accepts chips, the ability to produce them yourself will come in handy.

Weapons of the Sierra Madre

All the equipment that we are used to in Mojave remains in the abandoned bunker of the Brotherhood of Steel and inside the Cloud and, alas, will not help the courier in any way. We'll have to look for and use what comes to hand.

Police Pistol- The standard weapon of the Sierra Madre security forces. Uses .357 ammo commonly available in the Wasteland. It differs from its relative from Mojave (revolver .357) in increased damage from one shot and faster reloading - the drum is reloaded not by one cartridge, but by a clip at once. Most likely, he will be a faithful companion of the hero who specializes in firearms - there are quite a lot of cartridges for him, and there are enough pistols themselves, so there should be no problems with repairs.

Outside the abandoned city, it becomes a purely collectible rarity, because even fanatical fans of revolvers will prefer more powerful and large-caliber examples to it.

Automatic Rifle- a fully automatic rifle that uses .308 cartridges, and in packs, and the necessary cartridges in the Sierra Madre are extremely limited. And there are no enemies worth spending them on... But when you return to the expanses of Mojave, the ability to shoot with large-caliber bursts may come in handy. This rifle is more accurate than other automatic weapons in the game and at medium distances will quickly feed the enemy with lethal doses of lead. But, firstly, it very quickly becomes unusable even with an established improvement in the safety margin, and secondly, it can only be repaired with the same rifle, a repair kit, or from repairmen for money. The first option is unlikely - nowhere, except for the Sierra Madre, you will not find such a trunk.

Cosmic Knife- high technology in the service of the national economy, a knife made from a material intended primarily for use in spacecraft. It cuts rather weakly - better than an ordinary knife, but worse than army samples. There is not much choice in the Sierra Madre, so knife lovers will have to make do with what they are given. However, characters with a repair skill of 25 can take knife and two packs of Abraxo cleaner- and at the workbench, clean the blade of rust to increase damage and the chance of critical damage.

Unique scheme Cosmic knife super-heated can be obtained by hacking one of the terminals in the casino (for example, in a room with a workbench - so as not to go far). The blade, heated to 451 degrees, not only deals more damage, but also periodically sets enemies on fire. However, it is still weaker than the cleaned version, but the chance of critical damage is much higher.

Knife spear- the usual weapon of the ghostly people, a spear, the tip of which is all the same "space" knives. In terms of damage, it almost matches the greatsword found in the Mojave. But with a spear, the hero acts faster. To assemble a more powerful variant, you will need a repair skill of at least fifty, a roll of adhesive tape, a regular spear, three cleaned space knives, three packs of Abraxo cleaner and a free workbench.

Throwing knife spear- is interesting only because it is the most powerful weapon of this class in the game. With a damage of 42 units, it beats a regular throwing spear by almost a dozen. But, as always, except in the vicinity of the Sierra Madre, there is nowhere to get spears, and even there they are found only in the clutches of ghosts. You can try to collect them in reserve, but is it necessary? One is enough for the collection.

gas bomb- one of the varieties of ghostly people likes to throw such things. Explodes powerfully and sets fire to enemies in the radius of destruction. With an explosive skill of 40 units, these bombs can be made on a workbench on your own. To do this, you will need a sensor module, electronic waste, adhesive tape and an igniter. How a fire extinguisher with a piece of C-4 screwed to it is obtained from all this is not clear, but somehow it still works out.

The disadvantage of the bomb is that it cannot be used in V.A.T.S. Due to the unobvious whim of the developers, it is considered more like a mine than a grenade, and for proper use you will have to get the hang of throwing a heavy balloon correctly.

bear trap fist- A great weapon for fans of hand-to-hand combat. The bear trap attached to the glove compresses upon impact and literally tears the enemy to pieces. Its increased damage to limbs is especially useful in fights with representatives of the ghostly people, because it is worth seriously injuring a ghost's arm or leg, as it will instantly fall dead.

Holorifle- You will receive this rifle from Elijah as soon as you get to the Sierra Madre. A strange hybrid of a pump-action shotgun, energy weapons and holographic technologies for those who have energy weapons as their main skill, this is a real gift: after all the improvements, the head rifle is second only to weapons using Gaussian technologies in terms of damage, but at the same time it fires four shots before reloading, unlike Gaussians who have to change batteries after each salvo, being distracted from the sight. In addition, the optical sight of the golovinka has the same property as the optics on the "Rat-toy" - it automatically adjusts to the lighting, allowing you to shoot equally successfully both in the daytime and in the dark.

Just remember that the gift is given once and you will not find such a rifle anywhere else - so hold on tight and try to keep it in the best possible condition.

Abilities that are always with you

Dead Money allows the character to grow another five levels and adds several new abilities, available whether the character has been in the Sierra Madre or not yet.