Permafrost Hopes and Dreams Quest: All 3 Recordings

Short answer: Hopes and Dreams is a side quest in the Bunker quest line. It has four objectives — find three recordings, then listen to a radio message — and it pays out no rewards. You complete it around Bunker 21, with the three recordings located at the Military Area.

What kind of quest it is

Hopes and Dreams sits in the Bunker chain rather than the main story. Quest data lists its type as a side quest and its chain as Bunker, and it is marked as having four objectives, all of them required. It is not a branch you can skip past to the ending; it is an optional thread that fills in the world's backstory while you travel between the areas the main quests already send you to.

The in-game journal prompt for the quest reads "I must find House Camp and possibly other survivors." That is the character's stated motivation, and it points to why the quest exists at all: the recordings are meant to explain what happened in the area, not to hand you gear.

The four objectives in order

The objectives come one at a time, and each one has to be finished before the next appears. The order is: find the first recording, find the second recording, find the third recording, then listen to the radio message. All four are required, and the quest gives you no rewards when you finish.

The final step is specifically a radio message named "Hopes And Dreams: Looped Radio Transmission" in the data, which is why the last objective reads "Listen to the radio" rather than "find". If you are stuck at three of four, you have almost certainly collected all three recordings and simply have not triggered the closing radio step yet.

Where the recordings are

The three items are listed as Hopes And Dreams: Recording #1, Recording #2 and Recording #3, and all three are placed at the Military Area, which sits inside the Bunker 21 area that the quest points you toward. That does not mean they are stacked in one room — each one advances the quest when picked up, which is the clearest sign you found the right object rather than a random audio log.

Bunker 21 is described as an exploration zone. Exploration zones are journal discovery areas: entering one names the place in your journal, which is also how you confirm you are in the right region before you start hunting for the recordings.

A note on the objective count

One source lists the quest as having four objectives; another lists its objective count as one while showing the same four steps inside that block. The difference is a formatting artefact of how the two sites group steps, not a disagreement about the actual quest. Four steps, three recordings and one radio message is the consistent picture across the material.

The quest data carries the build tag 0.44.2.4634-milestone. That is the version the data was read from, so if a step does not match your game, your build may be newer — the developer has been patching quest logic since launch. 待确认.

Rewards and why there are none

Quest data is explicit that Hopes and Dreams rewards no rewards. That is not a bug and not a missing field — it is a story quest, and its value is the recordings themselves plus the journal entries they unlock, not items or currency. If you are chasing gear, this is not the quest for you; if you are following the world's story, the recordings are the point.

The journal writes short lines as you progress, including a couple of puzzled observations about what happened in the area. Those entries are the payoff the quest is actually offering, so reading them as you go is worth the detour.

Timing it around other content

Because the quest sends you to Bunker 21 and the Military Area, the practical approach is to fold it into a trip you were already making rather than crossing the map for it alone. Cold exposure makes every long run expensive, so pairing an optional quest with a main-route stop is the efficient play.

If you have not reached that part of the map yet, you can leave Hopes and Dreams for later — but do not push it to the front of your queue. The developer's Known Issues list warns that prioritising Hopes and Dreams can block progress elsewhere: on the High Frequency quest the instruction is to build the radio station at your base before repairing the tower radio, and racing ahead on Hopes and Dreams is named as a second way to stall that chain. The quest itself still gates no reward of its own. The mechanism is not explained, and whether the same warning applies to other quest chains is 待确认.

A caution about quest items

Since launch, the developer shipped a fix stating that quest items are no longer removed from the world after being picked up, with the aim of preventing some quests from getting stuck. Earlier posts also warned that picking up or completing steps ahead of the intended order may stop progress from registering. The safe habit is to do objectives in the order the quest gives them, and to avoid grabbing quest items before the quest asks for them.

If a quest does stall, the developer's guidance is to check their Known Issues list for workarounds and to send log files through their support file hub ↗. We mirror that list on our Permafrost known issues and workarounds page. There is no published console command or save-editing step for fixing a stuck quest, and this wiki will not invent one.

What is still unconfirmed

The quest data gives locations by named area rather than exact coordinates, so the precise position of recordings #2 and #3 inside the Military Area is still 待确认 — but for Recording #1 the developer's Known Issues list supplies a landmark: the rear of the truck with the hanging corpse, along the route from the collapsed bridge toward the facility. The same list acknowledges a bug in which a player who already holds all three recordings still does not get the step credited, so stalling at three of four is not necessarily your mistake. Whether the recordings can be collected out of order, and whether missing one blocks the radio step permanently, remain 待确认, and because the quest logic has been patched since launch this page cannot promise every build behaves identically.

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