1. Childhood - there are 3 quests:
- find an adjustable wrench for your father. The one you need is marked with a star and is in one of the chests. You can ask your father to strain his memory in a conversation (the most experience, but the aluminum brass knuckles won't give you anything, and the key is still in the chest). Or you can ask your mother and then go on down the chain with your brother, Katie, and her father. You can also simply rummage through everything.
- get medicine for Stella, the mother of the main character's friend Katie (when accepting the quest from her, you can treat her to candy - it will increase karma). You can steal the medicine (Rad-Out) from the doctor in the center of the location or convince him (it's better to convince first, then rob, so you'll have more Rad-Out left). You can, of course, buy it back, but that's not our way.
- deal with the brother's bully - Bully. The offender in the vest is in the lower right section of the residential area. He can be easily beaten or knocked out using a corkscrew (or a weapon stolen from the guards), or he can be intimidated by showing off his biceps. Dealing with the offenders alone with your brother is unmanly and will yield less experience. If you knock him out, you'll gain experience (he's apparently had enough) and your karma will decrease, and turning in the quest to your brother will grant you another boost.
And of course, loot all the chests and pickpocket all the guards (everything will come in handy early in the game). After completing the quests, Mom calls you and you go to bed. Don't put any necessary items in the drawer; they'll disappear when you wake up; keep them in your inventory.
I couldn't find any use for the soap, pencils, thread, comb, rusty fork, rusty bolt, tattered book, stones, glass marbles, seal, spoon fork...
Stronghold ointment, which increases strength, is randomly found.
2. Adolescence.
Passages to the parking lot in the upper right corner and to the farm in the lower right open; from the farm, you can access the technical floor.
We head to the farm for tasks - the guard at the crossing demands a bottle of moonshine and gives candy. First, you need to find an empty bottle - it can be found in chests, in cars in the parking lot, or asked by the mechanic Smitty on the technical floor (the passage from the farm in the upper right corner).
Smitty will ask you to assemble a filter for the moonshine still and insert it into this unit (the necessary room is reached by steps in the lower right corner of the technical floor). Assembly shouldn't be a problem—there's a corresponding button on the panel, select the desired item (currently, it's just a filter), the necessary parts will highlight, and then press "Assemble." Inserting the filter into the machine by hand wasn't possible for me; I couldn't find it from my inventory. Add candies to the machine to get moonshine—for a maximum of 10 candies, you'll get two bottles, one of which you give to the guard. You can then take the empty bottle from him if you can't find it yourself.
An interesting possibility: if you try to leave the farm past this guard without handing over the moonshine, he'll give you a light beating and temporarily store your weapon in your inventory, from where you can steal it. It's a mediocre weapon, but it'll still come in handy later—as an option when encountering undead while escaping Tartarus, to avoid getting poisoned in melee combat.
Take the daily quests from the Herald: fix the transformer, deal with the sick lavash, and bring them 12 canisters of water.
You can fix the transformer yourself, through trial and error (best based on experience), or you can dare Carol—the mechanic next to Smitty—or talk Smitty into it himself (the one with the least experience). Initially, don't mess with the transformer; you'll get an electric shock. Examine it, and a menu of further actions will open. The options change randomly; maybe a really good repair would offer a different option, I don't know.
You can fetch the water yourself, or remember that it's the responsibility of the lavash caretakers, who, by the way, will give you a clue as to the cause of the lavash's illness. If you fetch the water yourself, don't put the canisters on the ground; instead, hand them over to the caretakers (although the quest somehow counts in the other version, but I don't understand why).
While going for the water canisters, you can easily spot a broken water purification unit. The number on the unit is erased, but you can find out from a nearby worker that it's supposed to be maintained by Brutus, the father of the main character's girlfriend, Katie, who hasn't shown up for work for a couple of weeks.
We report the broken unit to the Herald; we can rat on the girlfriend's father; this will give us a nice boost in experience, reduce our karma considerably, and permanently estrange us from our girlfriend (though, according to the plot, it seems unnecessary). Initiative is punishable – we receive a quest to repair the unit.
We run to Smitty for advice; he gives us one of the spare parts—a filter—and a tip for two more. We ask any kid in the living quarters about the bracket, run him over, or solve a riddle (if you listened to your mom's bedtime story as a kid, it's easy), and find the valve in the car in the lower right corner of the parking lot.
We turn in all the tasks to the Herald; that's all the mandatory ones on this level.
A drunk black guy is standing by the left wall in the parking lot. If the main character is also black, he can be talked into talking; he'll tell us he killed a guard. You can turn him in to the Herald—experience increases, karma decreases. You can also get the black guy drunk with moonshine or anger him (kill him, or he'll run away wounded), and access to the freshly laid masonry is free. To break it, use your inventory; you'll need 6 Strength and a sledgehammer, or a hammer/wrench and more Strength (Stronghold ointment will help). The sledgehammer is in the boxes on the technical floor next to the water canisters. The guy can be moved if he's in the way.
Although, there seems to be an oversight here—when handing him over to the Herald, the guards should have broken through the wall to search for the body...
*I read about the luck perk here, but I found it later and in a completely different place, in Pearson Town.
As a bonus, help Katie collect corn (if her father wasn't sent to the Mouth of Hell, or before that), search all the chests and boxes, pickpocket the guards, and go to bed (keep the necessary items with you; they'll disappear from the chest).
3. Youth.
We need to run to the doctor to find out what happened to my father, but one of the guards intercepts us; he urgently needs medicine. There's no need to rush anywhere, we search the chests; there's an interesting item - milling cutters. You can use them as throwing weapons against the undead during the escape; it would be good to have about ten. Although, we already have firearms, and there's plenty of junk anyway; we can't carry everything.
After visiting the doctor, you won't be able to access your chest. You'll find yourself next to a guard's corpse and under the gun of another—now the only option is to run... You could find rifle parts in the parking lot, and shotgun parts near the corpse. Later, with the appropriate repair kits, you'll probably be able to assemble the weapon yourself (I never did).
We go through the caves. At the top is a wooden door, behind which is the recruit's corpse, his diary on a CD, and three boxes. Download the diary to your Pip-Boy and read it—the connection to the story will only become clear after completing the first quests in Olympus. Break open the boxes—by this point, it's quite possible to reach level 3, meaning you can pick up the Professional Thief trait.
At the bottom of the caves are several undead and a couple of boxes in the wall. Further to the left, behind an inconspicuous door in the wall, is a staircase leading out. You could, in theory, sneak up to it without engaging in combat.
Besides Olympus (which you can't approach), the only accessible location is the Metro Station .
Dr. Gromus is in the room downstairs on the right. He treats minor wounds for free and removes accumulated radiation for a small fee. You should go hunting for scorpion tails with him.
Opposite is the local leader, Bono, who first needs to gather people for a meeting, after which he will ask for help from the local agronomist and the leader of the Seekers.
Nearby is a restroom where you need to unclog the toilet. A plunger for this can be crafted later from Smitty after returning to Tartarus or found in Rainbow. The toilet contains a piece of a map that will reveal the location of the Renaissance.
Agronomist Prisley, on the lower level, needs new fertilizer, which can be collected from dry leaves, ash, an apple, and whiskey. Ash is next to a burning barrel in the northeast area, leaves are on a shelf in one of the houses and in the basement, and whiskey will appear a little later.
The leader of the Seekers, Robin, will reveal the location of the New Order and ask you to bring firewood and apples, which can be found upstairs in two areas of the location. Firewood is next to a pile of boxes near the stairs to the basement, there are no problems with apples - they are everywhere.
After this, Bono will tell you that you can infiltrate Tartarus using the Herald's cassock and will also ask you to collect 10 additional bags of fertilizer. This won't be difficult
to do as you continue exploring the Wasteland, otherwise the settlement will face a disastrous ending. Furthermore, on the lower level, there's a woman named Martha who asks you to calm her daughter Lily down. This can only be done by giving the child a sip of booze!
Crazy Joe wanders nearby, unable to find his Nadine—a quest only for the Black protagonist. Martha will tell you that Nadine died long ago and is buried near the fountain. After confirming this, we tell Joe everything—what can you expect from a crazy person?
Across the room, Hugo's group asks you to bring him powerful medications, planning to storm Tartarus—an undertaking doomed from the start, and the station's inhabitants will have to evacuate.
There's nothing else to do here, but it's advisable to periodically visit the doctor to get rid of the radiation until the Dusk Dogs sell eco-armor.
Source: nuclear-city.com.