Here are the Fallout 76 changes Bethesda didn’t tell us about

Stealth isn’t always good

Bethesda’s first major steps toward fixing Fallout 76 came yesterday. The December 4 patch upped stash capacity, rebalanced some weapons, and nuked all sorts of bugs. Here are the full details of all the announced changes.

The problem is that there were evidently a bunch of other alterations that Bethesda never told us about. The community quickly caught on that this update had all sorts of balance-affecting tweaks that were stealthily implemented — almost all of them geared toward making Fallout 76 even more of a grind-heavy game. Here are the major ones that the Fallout 76 subreddit figured out, as aggregated by user _Robbie:

Confirmed changes:

• Workshops that produce fusion cores have had their rates reduced to one core per hour from 10 cores per hour.

• Workshops that produce ammo have had their production cap reduced from 400 to 200.

• Extractors now produce ore instead of scrap (it takes multiple ore to equal one scrap, so this is a big one), with the exception of lead.

• Fusion cores drain quicker, though the actual percentage difference is not determined yet since it’s not on the patch notes.

• Several exploits removed. The grenade exploit, the search exploit, and the cap stash exploit.

• Some server hopping “exploits” have been removed, meaning that you can no longer jump servers to obtain items that you’ve already gotten/another player has gotten in the one you’re on. Possibly an undocumented change from a previous patch.

• Enemy spawns have been altered, drastically. They used to spawn when anybody entered the area, even if other players were already there. It appears that enemies now spawn if and only if no other player is immediately near their spawn point. For me, this is good for some circumstances, but very problematic for farming high-level areas for XP. This has significantly reduced the effectiveness of nuke zones as a means of level-up.

• A carry weight bug that improperly calculates increases from gear, resulting in a lower encumbrance limit until you unequip gear that boosts your capacity, log out, and re-equip. This goes for power armor and for things like pocketed armor.

Suspected changes:

• Flux (a valuable late-game item) looted from nuked areas decays much quicker. The example given in the thread is the difference between a 1-hour decay and, under the new patch, 5-10 minutes.

• Legendary enemy spawn rates reduced, and the chance of them actually dropping legendaries also reduced.

• Plan drop rate at events reduced.

• Plan and mod loot drop rates reduced.

• Characters who are above level 50 doing less damage in both PVP and PVE — possibly to prevent griefing?

• Super mutants and ghouls may or may not have gotten a health increase.

• Enemies now aggro within a certain radius, and are automatically healed if they (or possibly the player) leaves that radius.

• Stealth seems to have been nerfed, but it appears to be unintentional due to another bug affecting stealth in a strange way.

• Melee damage has been reduced at the higher level. OP of one of the threads tested at 50+ and noticed reduced damage.

Nearly every change here makes playing Fallout 76 a less efficient experience. Maybe some of them are necessary, especially the ones that do away with egregious exploits. But Bethesda has promised to do a better job communicating with the community about what the hell’s happening with Fallout 76. Right out of the gate, we get woefully incomplete patch notes with hidden tweaks that seriously affect all corners of gameplay. War isn’t the only thing that never changes.