Bethesda working on hotfixes for broken Fallout 76 subscription features

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Fallout 76's new subscription service, Fallout 1st, hasn't been received well for the most part. The pricey $12 per month ($100 per year) subscription offers, among other things, an unlimited scrap storage box and private servers. But in addition to widespread complaints about the service in general, some subscribers have been reporting technical problems as well. Namely, that the private servers aren't exactly private and that their scrap supplies have been disappearing from their shiny new premium boxes.

In a statement sent to Polygon, Bethesda says it's addressing both issues. Currently, private servers are joinable by anyone on the friends list of the server owner, even if they haven't been invited. As you can imagine, this is a big issue: anyone who has played Fallout 76 has no doubt added players (perhaps many of them) to their friends list who aren't really friends but just strangers they may have played with briefly. Starting your private game and being joined by a bunch of randoms you don't really even know isn't exactly the definition of private.

That will hopefully be fixed soon. "We are looking to provide an option in an upcoming patch that will allow Fallout 1st members to restrict access to their servers more completely," Bethesda told Polygon.

As for the disappearing scrap, Bethesda initially stated it was simply due to a display error, where scrap boxes were appearing empty but actually weren't. “However, we have since found that a small number of players have in fact experienced a loss of scrap items after placing them into the Scrap Box and then loading into a world," the studio said.

According to Bethesda, resolving the scrap box issue is a "top priority," as is restoring the scrap to those who lost it. When a hotfix for these issues arrive, we'll let you know.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.