In Fallout 76, coal is a bit of an odd resource. You could easily make your way through the game without ever needing it. It can’t be found by scrapping items and, as far as I’m aware, you can’t buy it in bulk. Despite this, once you know where to look, it is surprisingly easy to find.
The only real use for coal is to create water filters. Water filters are single-use items that use dirty water to create purified water. I’ve read plenty of guides saying that purified water is difficult to find, but I’ve not had to go hunting for purified water at all; I had scavenged enough during early levels just while looking around and completing levels. Not long into the game, I found myself in Charleston Capital Building, where you pick up the plans to a water purifier. This is built in your CAMP and continuously generates purified water.
With that said, if you do need purified water, there are very few guaranteed spots for it, so crafting water filters might be your best option. And, if water filters are your thing, you will need coal.
How To Find Coal In Fallout 76
Normally, at this point, we would include a list of the scrap items that include coal. But there are none. We would also tell you that you can waste caps buying bulk coal. But you can’t. We might also give you a list of workshops where you can extract coal. But there’s no such thing.
In fact, coal can only be found by building your own extractor on a deposit, or by mining small amounts from exposed ore veins.
Where To Mine Coal
For the small amounts of coal you might need, you should only really need to find a handful of veins. You mine coal from the vein, collect a couple, and the vein is spent for a while. There are coal veins located all over the map, but they are especially common in Ash Heap, around Welch. There’s a good 8 or so veins in here.
Deposits For Extractors
Ash Heap is also home to a good half a dozen deposits. Deposits are a little better than veins. You can knock up your CAMP next to one of these and then build and deploy an extractor on the deposit. This will give you a regular, hourly supply of coal: more than you should ever reasonably need.
Gamepedia has a great map on the precise locations, but it shouldn’t take you too much hunting to find the veins and deposits. In fact, the Mappalachia section of Gamepedia has maps of locations of just about everything and is well worth checking out.
| Fallout 76 Resource Guides | |||||
| Acid | Copper | Oil | |||
| Adhesive | Fertilizer | Plastic | |||
| Aluminum | Fiber Optics | Rubber | |||
| Ballistic Fiber | Gears | Screws | |||
| Black Titanium | Lead | Springs | |||
| >>Coal<< | Nuclear Material | Wood | |||
| Concrete | |||||
| Best Armor | Best Melee Weapons | ||||
