When you play a game like Fallout 4, you know a tremendous amount of your time is going to be spent around a handful of important NPCs. While the game is filled with characters to interact with, some are designed to be regularly revisited in certain questlines. For players who find themselves allying with the Minutemen, Sturges is one such NPC. A simple refugee with a mind for mechanic work, he is one of the earliest friends you’re likely to make in the Commonwealth. Despite this, not a lot is known about the man. Let’s dig into the game a bit and uncover what we know about Sturges.
Save the Mechanic
Upon waking up from cryo-sleep in Vault 111, most players will head straight back to their house in Sanctuary and encounter their butler Codsworth. The robotic companion will urge the player to head into town and find some friends who can help them track down their missing son. What they find in Concord is a museum under siege by raiders and an oddly dressed man named Preston Garvey urging them for help. Fighting through the Museum of Freedom will lead the Sole Survivor to Preston’s rag-tag crew, which includes Sturges. Wearing coveralls and a pair of goggles, he has the technical knowledge to get the player into a suit of Power Armor to turn the fight around.
Most players will lead the survivors back to the town of Sanctuary to settle down. While Preston immediately focuses on rebuilding the Minutemen and sends the player off to “help another settlement,” Sturges focuses on hunkering down and rebuilding Sanctuary. He will deliver a tutorial quest on how to build your settlements and make the dwellers there happy. Afterward, he will happily hammer on walls until the end of time, his role in the game seemingly complete. He appears to be nothing more than a simple survivor looking for a place to live and with the tools to fix it up.
A Trusty Helper
Surprisingly, Sturges’ technical knowledge seems to extend beyond Power Armor and housing development. Should the Sole Survivor seek to use the Minutemen to reach the Institute, they can bring plans for a complex teleporter directly to Preston. In turn, they will be directed to Sturges, who will actually manage to interpret the instructions and aid the player in building the fantastical device. As one of the few NPCs who can complete this task for you in Fallout 4, this marks him as seemingly among the most intelligent NPCs in the game. After gathering the materials to build the teleporter, Sturges sets up shop and gets ready to send you off.
Sturges will send the player with a holotape to capture intel on the Institute. Should they complete this task and return the tape to him, he will begin formulating a plan on how to destroy the high-tech paradise from within. If the Sole Survivor uses the Minutemen to beat the main story, he will teleport in along with his fellow Minutemen and set up the end of their plan: A bomb to blow up the Institute. He will then help the Minutemen escape by taking control of the Institute’s teleporters. The man’s technical expertise continually gets the Minutemen their greatest victory, and he hardly asks for anything in return.
An Unusual Secret
Fallout 4’s biggest plot elements revolve around the existence of Synths. These artificial humans are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing at this point in their development, with most showing no outward signs of being a Synth. A neat inclusion by the developers, however, is a way to figure out exactly who is or isn’t a Synth. Should you kill a Synth, they will have an otherwise useless item on their corpse called a “Synth Component.” Humans do not have this, and Synths do. Curiously, if you decide to murder Sturges for whatever reason, you will find a Synth Component on his body.
There is no way for this information to be uncovered in a normal playthrough without killing him. An alive Sturges will never tell the player he is a synth, which implies he may not even know. It is very common for Synths to have their memory wiped, either by the Institute for experiments or the Railroad to give them a new life. We do not know who wiped Sturges’ memory and placed him among the humans. Did he replace an actual citizen of Quincy at some point and get infused with their memories? Or is the only Sturges anyone has ever known the one we meet in the game, who came to Quincy a synth in the first place? These mysteries and more remain unresolved despite Fallout Shelter Online seeming to tell us that he doesn’t know his background.
Final Thoughts
Sturges is hardly anyone’s favorite NPC in Fallout 4. Despite being involved with the main quest quite a bit if you stick with the Minutemen, he is simply an intelligent mechanic who can solve problems for the player. For whatever reason, the developers made him a secret Synth and never have this come up. In some ways, this is a mark of brilliance. The idea of Synths in Fallout 4 is meant to scare you because they can replace anyone and you’d never know. While the game doesn’t go to the extreme with this idea, tiny secrets like Sturges’ identity help create a world that is hard to trust. Despite this, Sturges is a trusted ally and shows no signs of stabbing us in the back. For now, he remains nothing but a friendly mechanic.
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