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How Quests Work

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A quest in Last Frontier doesn’t begin with an arrow on the map — it begins with a reason: someone at the campfire asks you to check on a lost shipment, a trader looks over your haul before opening up to trade, someone you’re talking to remembers an item and asks you to bring it. The marker shows up later — as a trace of what the character learned and what they agreed to. This article explains how quests work mechanically: where to get them, how objectives are counted, what comes as a reward, and where to keep track of it all.

Where quests come from

A quest can reach you in several ways — it depends on how its author set it up:

  • Through dialog with an NPC. The most common path: a line from the person you’re talking to opens up a task. The conversation here is already an action: it checks your standing, may notice a needed item in your pack, open up trade, or start a conflict. If the response option you want isn’t there, the reason is usually in the world, not a bug: the character hasn’t earned trust yet, isn’t carrying the required item, hasn’t started the task, or you’re talking to the wrong NPC.
  • On entering a location or picking up an item. Some quests start automatically when you enter the right map or take a certain item.
  • Automatically. Some quests are handed out by the course of play itself — for example, the newcomer’s starting quest.
  • From an encounter on the global map. While traveling, a peaceful encounter can turn out to be not a fight but a lead to a client: a peaceable NPC spawns on the spot, and you talk to them to take the task. This happens with a certain chance, and only if someone in your group has a suitable available quest.

Not every quest will be offered to you. It may have conditions: prerequisite quests already completed, a recommended or maximum level, a requirement to go solo or in a group, faction membership, rank, or reputation. One-time quests you’ve already taken, and repeatable ones on cooldown, are not offered again.

Quest types and timers

  • One-time — completed once.
  • Repeatable — can become available again after a pause (cooldown) set by the author in hours or days. This is how, for example, factions’ regular supply tasks work.
  • Timed. A quest may have a time limit. If it runs out while the quest is active, the quest fails, markers are removed, and a late turn-in no longer brings a reward.

Quest objectives

A quest is made up of stages, each with its own objectives. Some of them the game tracks on its own, as you play; the rest are credited by an action in a dialog or scene. Objective types:

  • Collect — carry on you the required amount of a specific item or family of items (medical supplies, for example). Progress is counted directly from your inventory contents.
  • Kill — take out the required number of targets by type, role, or build; sometimes only at night or only during the day.
  • Steal — successfully pickpocket a suitable victim. This is a separate path: you can’t close it out by buying or finding the item.
  • Reach a map — enter the required location.
  • Deliver — hand items over to an NPC (credited only if the goods are actually on you, and they’re taken from you on turn-in).
  • Talk, use an object, and cunning — deception, sabotage, stealth, or persuasion as the author’s path to a solution without combat.

A stage may require you to complete all objectives at once or any of them — the second option is exactly the way to give a quest several routes to a solution. In co-op, kill credit is shared: it goes to whoever landed the killing blow and to their player party members on the same map, and a kill by your companion or pet counts for you. “Collect” and “deliver” stay personal — they’re tied to your inventory.

Rewards

A reward is granted on completing a stage or the whole quest. It can be experience, money (the in-game currency), an item, as well as faction rewards — a change in reputation, joining a faction, leaving it, or a rank promotion. Completing a stage can also trigger a scene or reveal/remove a marker on the map.

But not all of the value is in your inventory. The reward can be a route (a new point on the map), information (an understanding of who to trust), or trust, after which a future conversation becomes warmer and opens a new path. A single choice sometimes triggers several outcomes in a row.

The quest journal in the PDA

Active quests are visible in the PDA. The list puts active quests first, groups them by status, category, and faction, shows each objective’s progress as current/required, and includes lines with the time remaining or the repeat cooldown. Each quest has four possible statuses: not started, active, completed, failed.

The game sends a pop-up notification when a quest is started, changes stage, is completed, or fails (a change of hidden stages shows no notification).

Markers on the map

A quest can reveal a location on your global map — it’s added to your known places and shown with the ordinary known-place marker, without a separate “quest” layer of icons. When a quest is completed or fails, its marker is removed, but a place already revealed stays known — the game doesn’t “forget” points you’ve found.

Keep in mind: the map holds the character’s personal knowledge — different heroes may have different sets of known places. And a marker cancels out neither the cold, nor the danger along the way, nor the weight of your pack, nor the trip back. The marker holds the direction, but it doesn’t complete the quest for you: you still have to reach the goal, survive the encounter, find the item, or come back with the result. Quests taken from an encounter on the map show a return point, where you head to turn the task in.