It wouldn’t be a Fallout 76 patch if it didn’t introduce a few unusual new bugs, and yesterday’s update was no exception. Some players are discovering that reloading their weapons causes their defense stats to drop.
The bug is pretty straightforward: A player reloads their weapon and then sees the defense stats for their some of their legendary armor pieces take a nosedive. One player showed this happening in real time in a video shared on Reddit.
At the beginning, their armor stat is 519. They then fire some shots and reload. Seconds later the armor stat is 414. Energy resistance drops by around 25 percent as well. Originally, it seemed like the new bug might be related to the patch fixing an issue with weapons that are supposed to boost defense after reloading, but players reported similar issues even when just reloading film into the in-game camera.
Problems aren’t isolated to just reloading, either. Other players have reported issues with durability, with weapons and armor breaking much more quickly then they should. Gear that should be able to take a beating and last for several fights is breaking twice as fast. Players sporting harpoon guns say they’ve seen them lose all their durability after only 15 shots.
It’s especially bad timing, since Fallout 76’s holiday event is set to begin tomorrow. It’ll have the game’s Scorched going around Appalachia and dropping special gift packages when killed. Of course, it’ll be hard to kill them without reloading weapons or with players’ armor breaking constantly.
A Bethesda community manager said on Reddit that the publisher is looking into the problems.
Correction: a previous version of this article stated Fallout 76's holiday event featured Scorch Beasts. It actually focuses on the Scorched.