As we speak an intense debate is raging among the scientific community. Previously the second law of thermodynamics presented the notion of the entropic nature of systems that leads them to their inevitable decline and death. Since its inception, this has been considered gospel by the scientific community, but then Fallout 76 came along; refusing to cease burning despite having reached the point it should have suffered its scientifically ordained entropic death. As it has not scientists have are now divided into three warring camps.

The largest argues we merely do not understand Fallout 76 or what is transpiring around it. Thus it is not the second law of thermodynamics that is lacking it is our understanding of the event in question. Their opposition instead argues that we fully well understand Fallout 76 and the company that has made it. That its existence refutes the second law of thermodynamics and we need to revise it to match reality. I’m partial to the third camp who argues we’re dead, this is hell, and the laws of physics no longer apply.

In fairness that is a harsh joke, but one perfectly describing the situation with Fallout 76. A game whose continued existence — if it were a physical phenomenon — would bring the laws of physics and our understanding of the universe into question. Yet with a dwindling player base, the game continues to exist through each subsequent controversy.

Those wondering when the next controversy would emerge almost had their answer as rumors of how Bethesda was flagging negative reviews on Steam to have them pulled began to circulate. Unfortunately, no evidence ever emerged proving or disproving this occurrence, so the anecdotal evidence had to be placed on hold until a major discovery or gotcha was made.

Where that story disappeared into limbo it wouldn’t take long for the latest batch of bugs plaguing the game following the Wastelanders expansion to emerge. In brief summation, players are discovering their inventory is being cleared out and valuable weapons are being removed off their corpse. Some users are claiming the issue is not new, but the latest iteration is confirmed to be more frequent than any previous occurrence.

How this is happening is the epitome of bungling. Rather than create new code from scratch the developers took code from Fallout and Skyrim and pasted it into the expansion. As a result of pasting code designed to work in a different paradigm, NPCs are treating dead users as corpses, and vendors are experiencing similar issues.

Vending machine bug – players are able to buy items from your stash, that you haven’t placed on sale and other bugs:

Weapons disappear bug – if you die and some NPC is nearby, he will loot your weapon:

Amor piece disappear bug:

Power armor disappear bug – PA pieces are being removed when you enter PA frame and you’re wearing chinese stealth suit:

Vendor bot can steal your ammo – people are losing thousands of their ammo:

Bonus info: Why is this happening?

PSA no.2: if you’re afraid of losing your weapon when you die during an event and you think about putting it to your stash until fix will be released, I advice you do NOT do this. As mentioned above with vending machine bug, some player may buy that weapon from your stash. Better option is to keep it on some mule alt that you don’t use.

Remember when in Skyrim/FO4 NPCs were looting dead bodies? Or when you gave your follower in Skyrim some good armor and he would equip it if that armor was better than what he currently had equipped? Bethesda reused old NPC scripts from previous single player games and applied them to an online game. That’s why NPCs are stealing yor weapon when you’re dead.

Bethesda in the same thread issued a statement recognizing the occurrence of the issue but was unable to provide any details on when they would have it resolved.

Thank you for your concerns about these issues, everyone. We share them too, and we are actively investigating everything outlined in this thread, as well as other reports we’ve received here, on our own forums, or through support tickets. We have commented in a few previous threads about some of these issues. However, even though we can’t respond to everything, each report, video, and screenshot of an issue that you share with us helps us narrow in on fixes.

In our next hotfix, we are planning to include a fix for the issue where NPCs can occasionally take a player’s weapon when they die. The remaining issues mentioned in this thread are all still active investigations, and we want to resolve them as soon as possible. If they can be addressed in time for our next hotfix, we will definitely include them.

We don’t have an exact timing to share on that hotfix just yet, but we will let you know as soon as we do.

It is difficult to even find words at this point. This is not just a one-off mistake brought upon by a harmless accident in coding. That could be excused or at the very least understood. No, this is Bethesda opting to take the cheapest course producing a shoddy product as a result. Good luck to them attempting to build any hype for Starfield.