If you thought Fallout 76 couldn’t get any more nihilistic, there’s now a campsite that burns players alive if they don’t solve math problems fast enough.
It’s the latest creation from Fallout 76 player Korindabar, one of the game’s most notorious builders. Korindabar is responsible for a number of “trap” campsites that lure in unsuspecting players and punish them for their naivete. They’ve made haunted churches and deathclaw mazes, but their latest is arguably one of their most sinister projects, reenacting the cruel logic of a Saw movie inside a school classroom. Here’s how it works.
When players walk into the classroom, they see “Page 9 math homework due Monday” written on the blackboard, while in the back of the room an innocent-looking door reads “tutoring room.” If they go inside, Korindabar immediately locks it behind them. The walls are scattered with messages, including “Open door to live” and “230*10+2.” After a few moments, Korindabar then presses a switch to activate flamethrowers lining the room, while a bloatfly in a room above them prevents them from fast-traveling out. The only way to escape is by entering the correct four-digit number into the door’s keypad.
Korindabar shared a video of the trap in action on YouTube, and while the flames don’t kill players right away, it clearly startles them, in some cases enough where they start to panic and forget to complete the simple calculation to get out. “Stimpaks and radaway buy time but the only way to survive is to solve the math,” Korindabar said in a post about the camp on Reddit.
Trap campsites like these have become much more common in the game in the past few months, likely in part due to Korindabar’s earlier examples. Most of them tend to go for maximal brutality, killing players who are doomed from the start. “That can be funny sometimes but usually there isn’t much sport to this,” Korindabar said on Reddit. “Where is the game? Where is the excitement? If every time you flip the switch you already know the outcome it leaves no suspense…no thrill. A game needs to be winnable.”
But Korindabar isn’t in it for the griefing. If a player dies in his classroom, he waits for them to come back, then lets them grab their dropped belongings and do the math in piece without the locked doors and fire.
“I tried my best to only throw the switch once I felt they had an understanding of the task at hand,” they said. “By the final build I had a pretty easy-to-understand game created but test results show that many people have trouble doing math when suddenly being burned alive.”