Overview
Pictures showing exact blue shield locations for refurbishing weapons.
Slums
Old Town
How to get the quests to show up
These random encounters are quite rare, but with a few things in mind, you should be able to regularly force them to show up when you want.
Things that matter:
- Can only be done in single player mode.
- Must have progressed through certain points in the main story.
- For encounters to show up in the Slums, you need to complete The Pit questline. Some people have said that you just need to have started The Pit, but I’ve never seen it spawn before completing The Pit.
- For encounters to show up in Old Town, you need to complete the Museum questline (once you exit the Museum specifically, you can find them).
- Must be daytime. Specific time does not matter.
- Must have been longer than a few minutes since you have last seen a blue random encounter. Usually 2 or 3 minutes is sufficient.
- Must be away from where the encounter spawns. Usually running in one direction for about 30 seconds, puts enough distance between you and the spawn.
- Can only spawn one repair quest per day (could possibly be longer).
Following these rules, I’ve been able to consistently trigger the repair random encounter. Other things like completing sidequests, completing escort quests (white shields), specific time during the day, looking at the ground, or whatever else, do not matter.
It’s important to remember that these random encounters are just that, random. Many locations have multiple random encounters within the vicinity, so you might trigger an unwanted encounter. If that happens, you need to move far enough away to despawn the random encounter, wait around 3 – 5 minutes, and then try again. After extensive testing, it’s also very likely that the game chooses a blue encounter and loads it in, even though it doesn’t appear on the map yet. This has the effect of often not being able to spawn any blue encounters if you go back and forth on the same route. So if you’re having trouble spawning not only the blue shield encounter, but any other blue random encounter, then either quit to the main menu, sleep, or run around in different areas to try and spawn a new blue random encounter.
I’m not entirely sure how much time must pass between spawning encounters. I know it is at least a day (in game time), but it could be as much as 3-5. But an easy way to get around this, is just to quit to the main menu, and load up your game again. That resets whatever restraint is in place and allows you to trigger an encounter immediately.
The easiest encounter to force in the Slums is the encounter in the gas station in the Northwest section Near Sunny Apartments Quarantine. You can wait in the safe zone directly north of the gas station for a few minutes, and the head south to check if the survivor has spawned. This is great because it’s short, generally pretty easy, and as XeRnUno mentioned, ends right next a safe area so you can go to your stash and pick up more weapons. It also has the benefit of being super close to another blue shield, so it’s potentially possible that you have just that much higher chance to spawn one of two blue shield encounters, rather than one.
The easiest encounter to force in Old Town is the one in the Northwest section. This takes place in the same area where the legless spider quest does (gathering meteorite chunks). If you follow the river to the east, once you walk under the overpass, you can sit in the ravine on the other side. Other than the initial Toads that are perched along the rocks, no other zombies spawn down here, and there’s no random encounters as well. After a few minutes, go back to see if he’s spawned by the boat. If not, you might need to wait a bit longer.
Thanks to XeRnUno for the last three locations, and thank you for reading!