Paradox Junction Easter Eggs Guide

You get to listen to a song while zombies eat your face. The track is Come Back Down by Kevin Sherwood and Megan Rice: a CoD Zombies tradition so old it predates your ability to dress yourself. You need to find three pairs of Mr. Peaks headphones. Yes, three. Because one would have been too easy and two would have implied the developers respected your time.

First things first: you cannot touch any of these until after Round 7: your first dog round. That's the game's way of saying "not yet, sweetie." Once you've survived your inaugural Rad-Hound parade and teleported to Clean Nuketown for the first time, the map generously allows you to go find audio equipment left lying around like a college dorm after finals week.

Headphone Locations:

• Clean Nuketown / Yellow House (upstairs): On a nightstand. Someone clearly left it there after a perfectly normal afternoon in a suburb that will shortly explode.
• Clean Nuketown / Trinity Avenue: Sitting by a perk machine. Because nothing says "secret" like leaving headphones next to a vending machine.
• Destroyed Nuketown / Trinity Avenue (under a truck): Crawl under the burned-out truck at the very back. The apocalypse didn't bother to clean up the clutter.

Interact with all three in the same game. The song activates and plays across the map. If you expected a concert experience, please lower your standards to somewhere around "radio static."

The TV Jump Scare: Haunted Antenna

This one exists purely to remind you that the developers have a sense of humor and zero sympathy. Your reward for completing it is a jump scare: just a jump scare. No loot. No XP bonus. Just the mild cardiac event you richly deserve for poking around a television in a zombie-infested Nuketown.

• Go upstairs in the Greenhouse and turn on the TV. It will show nothing useful, because it never does.
• Head up to the roof and locate the antenna. It's right there on top of the Greenhouse, impossible to miss, which means you'll still walk past it twice.
• A red orb has spawned somewhere on the map: either behind the Greenhouse or behind the Yellow House. You can't miss it. It's glowing. It's ominous. Shoot the antenna until it roughly aligns with the orb. It doesn't need to be precise. Perfection is for people who don't have zombies on their tail.
• Listen for the loud sound cue confirming you aligned it correctly, then return to the TV upstairs.
• Cycle through the TV channels until the mannequin jump scare triggers. Try not to scream. You probably will anyway.

Note: This gives you absolutely nothing of value. You did it for the experience. Reflect on that.

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Mini golf. In a zombie apocalypse. Available only in the past (Clean Nuketown), only after Round 7, only in the Yellow House backyard, and: the real kicker: only on your first try per game. Miss and you get scraps. Nail it first swing and the game rewards you like you cured a disease. This is not a power fantasy. This is a humility check.

• Reach Round 7 and teleport to the Clean Nuketown past. Head to the Yellow House backyard where you'll find a small putting green, a few golf balls, and the hollow weight of your own expectations.
• On solo, use Decoy Grenades or Ether Shroud to keep zombies away long enough to aim. On co-op, have a teammate hold the horde while you practice your form.
• Throw the ball: or aim and kick it: into the hole marked with a white flag. First try only. One ball. One shot. No mulligans.

Results:

• Bonus Points
• Max Armor
• Insta-Kill (First try only)
• Bonus Points only (if you missed and took multiple tries: congratulations, you played yourself)

Important: This resets per match. If you want to chase the three-power-up reward again, start a new game. The mini golf course does not believe in second chances, and neither should you.

The Giant Nuke Clock: Free Loot Drop

This is arguably the most immediately useful side Easter egg on the map and naturally requires you to shoot a clock until it reads the number 115: a number so sacred to this franchise it might as well be on the currency. You can start this from Round 1 if you're an overachiever, though the actual loot doesn't drop until you teleport after Round 7. Co-op players can speed through this in minutes. Solo players will do it slowly, existentially, while zombies circle them.

• Stay in Destroyed (Future) Nuketown: the charred hellscape you spawn into at the start of every game.
• Climb on top of the bus in the Cul-de-Sac to get a clear line of sight to the large clock mounted on the burned house roof.
• Shoot the clock hands to rotate them. You need to set the time to 1:15. The hour hand points right (toward 1), the minute hand points center-right (toward 15). Once it's set, a sound cue confirms your success.
• Wait until after your first dog round (Round 7), then teleport to the past. The loot drops right as you arrive. The universe has decided you've earned it.

The rewards reportedly scale with the round you teleport on. Doing it at Round 7 gets you decent mid-game gear. Doing it later gets you better gear. Doing it never gets you nothing, which tracks.

• Ether Tools
• Pack-a-Punch Crystals
• Salvage
• Other Equipment (RNG)

For the next several side quests, you will need the Blundergat wonder weapon built. Not upgraded: just built. This is the game's way of gatekeeping its own content while pretending it has depth. Build the Blundergat first. If you don't know how, there's a full guide for that too. This guide judges you, but it doesn't abandon you.

Once you have the Blundergat, a purple cyst appears in the Greenhouse backyard. You need to place four ritual items in front of it: scrounged from both timelines: and then fight the soul box it creates. A mini-boss named Zenvara (an HPT Doppelgänger with delusions of grandeur) will spawn and needs to be put down.

The Four Items to Collect:

• A Head: Inside the secret garage in Trinity Avenue. Use one of three RC-XD controllers (spawns near Pack-a-Punch, in the Yellow House garage, or in the Greenhouse backyard dirt) to drive a car through the locked garage door. The head is on the table inside. Driving an RC car through zombie hell is exactly as undignified as it sounds.
• A Bone: Destroyed Nuketown, next to a fence in the Greenhouse backyard. Just lying there. Very hygienic.
• Guts: Destroyed Nuketown, beneath the truck in Trinity Avenue. More truck-crawling. The apocalypse apparently shops at the same props supplier.
• A Ham: Clean Nuketown, Greenhouse kitchen counter next to a mannequin. Someone's dinner, now your ritual component.
• Place all four items in front of the purple cyst. Hold interact.
• The cyst activates as a soul box. Fill it using any weapons. Monkeys, psych grenades, corner camping: all valid. No judgment. Slightly.
• Zenvara spawns. Eliminate her.
• Free Deadshot Daiquiri
• Purple Salvage (~500 per piece)

Opening the Bunker: A Mannequin Knocking Simulator

The bunker in the back of the Greenhouse has been teased since Black Ops 4. After years of collective fan pleading, Treyarch's answer is: you can open the door, but you can't go in. Truly, the Nuketown experience in full. The process to open it is weirdly elaborate and involves cooking a steak, watching a mannequin eat it, and then sending brain-rotted zombies to politely knock on the door. Normal Tuesday stuff.

• Have the Blundergat built. (Required gate. Yes, again.)
• In Clean Nuketown, go to the Yellow House kitchen and interact with the stove to turn it on.
• Kill one zombie next to the stove. Its soul transfers to the frying pan, creating a steak. Throw a Molotov at the pan to cook it.
• Teleport to Destroyed Nuketown. A mannequin will be sitting at the table, eating that steak. Your steak. The steak you made. It didn't even ask.
• Teleport back and forth between timelines multiple times until bonus points spawn where the mannequin was sitting. This is your confirmation signal.
• Return to Clean Nuketown. A mannequin is now staring directly at the bunker door. This is as unsettling as it sounds. Use Brain Rot or a Psych Grenade to charm zombies and direct them to knock on the door. According to the Fandom wiki, three different zombies each knock three times: nine total knocks. The bunker opens.
• Teleport to Destroyed Nuketown. A gift-wrapped present sits in front of the open bunker. Exciting! Disappointing! Both!
• Mystery Perk Can
• Other Goodies (vague, as nature intended)

Lore note: You cannot go inside the bunker or explore the underground sections from Black Ops 4. The door opens. That's it. The void stares back. Stare into it.

You're fighting an undead horde, managing limited ammo, navigating two timelines, and now: thanks to this Easter egg: a mannequin will teleport next to you constantly for the rest of your match until you track it down and shoot it in the head. It is completely harmless. It just follows you, head rotated backwards, judging your every rotation. This is fine.

• Build the Blundergat. (You should have it by now. If not, reconsider your life choices.)
• In Destroyed Nuketown, go to the Trinity Avenue perk location. Just past the fence on the right side, you'll find a mannequin with its head rotated 180°. Stare at it until it snaps to a different position and a sound cue confirms activation. Congratulations. You've woken it up.
• The mannequin will now follow you between every Point of Interest on the map, teleporting uncomfortably close, never hurting you, just existing near you. It cannot be shot in this state. You cannot make it stop. Accept this.
• Teleport to Clean Nuketown. The mannequin is hiding in one of five locations:
• In the driver's seat of a truck in Trinity Avenue
• Behind the fences on the left side of Pack-a-Punch
• In the wooden shed behind the Mystery Box in the Greenhouse backyard
• At the top of a chimney on the left side of Trinity Avenue
• In the driver's seat of the main bus in the central Cul-de-Sac
• Find it. Shoot it in the head. Watch the high-tier loot explode out of its wooden body with cathartic satisfaction.
• High-Rarity Items Drop
• Excellent Co-op Recovery Tool
• Useful in Curse Mode

The Floating Masked Head: Soul Box Parade

This is the most rewarding side Easter egg on the map and the most likely to kill you in the process. A mannequin head will float around the map leading you through three soul box challenges. You'll end up in a very tight upstairs room in the Yellow House surrounded by zombies during what might be your dog round: a scenario the developer apparently designed while laughing. The loot at the end is so good there are concerns about a future nerf. Start before it gets patched into mediocrity.

• Have the Blundergat built. (Full build. Base version. You know this by now.)
• In Clean Nuketown, go to the normal Greenhouse. On the floor, there's a mannequin head wearing a mask. Interact with it to begin.
• Follow the floating head as it travels to headless mannequins around the map. Stay close: stray too far and the step fails and you have to interact with the head again to restart the soul box.
• The head visits three locations in sequence: the Greenhouse backyard, the front of the Yellow House garage, and the upstairs of the Yellow House in a tight room. Each location is a soul box. Fill it with kills using any weapon.
• In the upstairs room: pop an Instakill, throw a Monkey Bomb, use Decoys, deploy your Field Upgrade: whatever prevents you from dying in a closet-sized space during what might, perversely, also be a dog round. Ask me how I know.
• After all three soul boxes are filled, the head attaches to the final mannequin. Watch it spin and then explode into an absurd quantity of loot.
• Multiple PAP-3 Crystals
• Legendary Ether Tools
• Fully Upgraded Weapons
• Perks
• Everything You Need, All At Once, Too Late

If you're running Curse Mode where points are inflated in cost, this egg is basically mandatory. The setup cost is low; the payoff is enormous. Do it before Round 15 and you'll breeze through the main quest. Do it after and you'll feel like you finally found the stairs after living on the first floor for a year.

Scattered around both versions of Nuketown are power-up statues you can activate once per game. They require minimal effort, are easy to miss because the map is chaotic, and provide a meaningful edge if you grab them efficiently. Here is every single one, listed with the energy of someone who's already done this run seventeen times.

In Destroyed (Future) Nuketown:

• Double Points: Behind a window in a specific house in the Cul-de-Sac. Squint until you see it.
• Max Armor: Inside the yellow bus in the burned Cul-de-Sac. The bus is hard to miss; this power-up inside it apparently is.
• Bonus Points: Far right side of Trinity Avenue, inside a house behind debris. Throw an explosive at the debris. It spawns. Collect it. Feel marginally better about your point total.
• Fire Sale: On top of a house in an out-of-bounds area. Don't panic: you can shoot it from ground level and it'll spawn down below. Yes, this is intentional design.

In Clean (Past) Nuketown: Available After Round 7:

• Nuke: On top of the counter near the center. Contextually appropriate. Probably shouldn't touch that.
• Instakill: On top of a barbecue outside the Greenhouse backyard. Grilling it in, apparently.
• Max Ammo: On the generator next to the Yellow House.
• Full Power: Upstairs in the Greenhouse, behind drawers. Someone filed their power-up away for safekeeping.
• Free Perk: At the very top of the Yellow House, behind the bunk bed. A free perk. Behind a child's bunk bed. In a zombie map. This is fine.

The Perk Vial: Mannequin Roulette

The map's scattered mannequins aren't just set dressing or horror props: some of them are holding vials that, when used correctly, grant a free perk. The vial is already part of the Blundergat build process (you'll use it to extract a mannequin part), but if you choose to keep using it on additional mannequins rather than treating it as a one-use tool, you can farm a free perk without spending your hard-earned points on a Perkaholic gobblegum.

It's the kind of detail that rewards players who were paying attention and punishes those who read the speedrun guide and skipped the flavor text. If you're not interested in free perks, feel free to ignore this entirely. Those 1,500 points you'll spend buying Juggernog manually look great on you.

• Free Perk (without Perkaholic)
• Self-respect at a discount