With the exciting arrival of Fallout 76 Season 17 Skyline Valley, there’s a new area, a new main questline, and a new public event, Dangerous Pastimes, for players to enjoy.

Here, let’s talk about some things you should consider in the new season regarding Seasons System, and the most effective way to maximize your Season Rank.

Season System

To unlock the latest Season System, you now have to earn both ranks and tickets, so the obvious question is whether you’ve earned enough tickets to unlock Fallout 76 Items as you level up.

I counted the number of items on each page and categorized them by type, Fallout 1st specific plans and consumables, then general plans and consumables.

If you want to get all the items, you’ll need to pay an average of 190 tickets per page. So not consuming these items can save you at least a few hundred tickets. This is equivalent to 7 ranks per new page. But basically, you get enough tickets to redeem all the items on one page before you unlock the next page.

It seems like the developers have intentionally fine-tuned things to make sure you don’t run out of tickets. This applies from rank 1 to level 100, so within these levels, the new season plays out essentially the same as the old scoreboards. But once you get to the bonus pages, things change a lot.

Problems With Bonus Pages

In the old scoreboards, rank 100 gave you a lot of bonuses, much more than every level before it. It was meant to be a small reward for people who completed the scoreboard. The first bonus page in the new season system plays a similar role and gives you a lot of items. But now you have to pay for tickets to unlock them, and they’re very expensive.

If you add up the prices of all the items, it comes to 1250 tickets. Coincidentally, that’s exactly 50 levels.

So, guess what level you have to reach to unlock the second bonus page? Yep, level 150. So I have no doubt that this is intentional.

On average, it takes 5 ranks to get each item. But since you have now reached a rank 100, you lose score from experience. So you have to rely entirely on Daily and Weekly Challenges.

Now each rank costs 3500 score, which is 17500 score per item. Without using any Boosters or Fallout 1st, completing all six Daily Challenges will bring you 2500 score, and 8 Weekly Challenges will bring you 10,500 score. If you complete all challenges, you will get a total of 28,000 score per week. This means it will take you a little over six weeks to get all the items on the first bonus page.

The second bonus page contains consumables, which you can get repeatedly. Each consumable costs three ranks. But the problem is that you also need to unlock 95 items, which means you need to have Fallout 1st to access the second bonus page.

Most of the rewards are not worth getting through tickets, though, because you can get them through gold or playing games. The most desirable items are Score Boosters, which you can use in future seasons to speed up your score.

If you get this far, I recommend getting as many of them as you can. Carrying Boosters is pretty good if you’re constantly overloading. But for everything else, they’re easier to get through playing.

So you can see that the prices of tickets and items are carefully calculated to use the fear of missing out to encourage players to play longer. But the fear of missing out can only go so far. At a certain point, if you make the cost too high, you actually end up having the opposite effect because people simply give up on getting the items. That’s the problem with two bonus pages.

Before rank 100, you can get items without worrying too much about ticket costs. But once you try to get bonus items, ticket costs skyrocket.

Players who have already played rank 100+ with Scoreboard will continue to do so, so it won’t make a difference to them. But casual players will eventually get discouraged because you’ll have a long period where you get nothing unless you really plan ahead.

Six weeks from the first bonus page to get 10 items is too long. And the fact that you need Fallout 1st to get to the second bonus page, combined with the lackluster rewards, makes it hard to imagine anyone deliberately aiming for the second page.

Generally speaking, for casual players, it’s not worth it to try to get past 100 rank. This goes against what Season System is supposed to be trying to achieve. At the very least, the cost of bonus page tickets needs to be balanced, or the progression needs to be rebalanced to keep those casual players.

Is Fallout 1st Worth It?

Another big change is that you can spend 1500 Atoms to access Fallout 1st exclusive items. Before this, you actually needed to subscribe to Fallout 1st every month. So is it worth it?

Scoreboard itself does give you 1000 Atoms, and Fallout 1st gives you another 1000 Atoms. So in theory, if you spend Atoms to unlock that feature, you'll end up 500 Atoms ahead. You also get a total of 25% score bonuses.

If you know you'll be playing the later pages regularly, it's worth unlocking Fallout 1st right away. The score boost alone means you'll get more ranks, and you'll end up with more Atoms than you started with.

For casual players, you'll need to unlock at least Page 11 to break even, and it's all free Atoms after that. So if you think you can make it that far, it's worth it.

Best Strategies

So how should you approach the new Season Format? Here are some tips you need to know.

First, avoid redeeming items right before the end of the season so you know how many tickets you’ll have. This is especially important if you want to get items on the bonus page.

Obviously, every player will have some must-have items, and there’s nothing wrong with redeeming some. In my opinion, the new Cremator weapon is a must-have for this season, but for things like costumes and skins, you should hold off.

Second, focus on redeeming the most important items first. Everyone has different priorities, so what’s important to everyone is different. But getting the most valuable items first ensures you don’t run out of tickets.

Third, avoid acquiring any consumable items unless there’s nothing else to earn. The obvious exceptions are score boosts and atoms, which are always worth getting right away. But things like gold, nuclear keycards, legendary cores, and more, can all be earned by playing the game. Don’t spend tickets on them until you’re sure there’s nothing else to earn.

Fourth, spend Atoms to unlock Fallout 1st items, but only if you’ve played to at least Page 11, so that the extra score boost is worth it. Unfortunately, unlocking items requires tickets, and bonus items are expensive, which means you need to save up your tickets. There’s no easy way to get more tickets, so you need to make sure you don’t run out by the end of the season.

Regardless, I hope the strategies I shared help prevent people from finding themselves running out of tickets at the end of a season and missing out on items they wanted to get. Good luck!