Hard Luck Blues

Hard Luck Blues is a side quest in Fallout: New Vegas.

Synopsis
Morgan Blake, a New California Republic sharecropper, has noticed the crops doing poorly and believes there might be something in their irrigation water.

Walkthrough

 * 1) Speak to Morgan Blake at the NCR sharecropper farms
 * 2) Go to the east pump station and enter it.
 * 3) Look at the terminal and restore the network connection with a Science check of 50.
 * 4) Enter Vault 34.
 * 5) Find the terminal in the reactor room.
 * 6) Help the sharecropper farms by disabling the reactor, or help the trapped vault dwellers (led by Horowitz) by rerouting power to them.

Behind the scenes

 * "Hard Luck Blues" is a blues song first recorded in 1950 by blues/soul artist Roy Brown, for whom it achieved a No.1 on the R&B chart. The lyrics speak of a vagrant with a life very similar to that of the Lone Wanderer.
 * Based on the cut terminal entries for the East pump station, the West pump station terminal was never meant to actually lead to Hard Luck Blues but instead was meant to be a red herring to throw the player off.

Bugs

 * If you choose to save the trapped vault dwellers from Vault 34 and meet them at the Aerotech Office Park the player will have an option to ask for a reward "Vault trinket", which doesn't actually add anything to player's inventory. Furthermore - dialogs appear to be looped and bugged. The vault dwellers might not appear at Suite 300 at all despite the quest being finished and your Pipboy entry showing that you saved them. Note: Sometimes after waiting 3–4 days and returning to the office park they will appear.
 * The terminal in the east pump station may be accessible even without the required Science skill of 50; the terminal will turn on and the "WARNING" message will still be readable.
 * Sometimes the terminal in the reactor room will be locked with the message "terminal locked please contact an administrator" with no way of activating it and not being able to finish the quest. Ensure the player grabs the Overseer's password from the Overseer's corpse beforehand.