Fallout 76: Steel Reign releases today with legendary crafting and Brotherhood of Steel story finale

Fallout 76: Steel Reign
(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

Bethesda has launched its 28th update for Fallout 76 today with Steel Reign, bringing an end to the Brotherhood of Steel storyline and introducing legendary crafting.

It's a decent-sized update, with plenty to unpack here. The Steel Reign questline closes out the Brotherhood of Steel arc, with the story continuing based on the choices made during Steel Dawn. You can tackle the new quests as long as you're at least level 20 and have completed "The Best Defence" quest.

The game's also introducing a legendary crafting system, which lets you upgrade regular items into legendary ones or re-roll stats on existing legendaries. You can also use it to either upgrade or downgrade the star rating of your legendary items. Using a higher-star Legendary Upgrade will bump that item up and re-roll attributes, while lower-star upgrades will bump it down with re-rolled attributes. Bethesda has also thrown in some new attributes, along with buffing and nerfing a few existing ones.

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K.D. Inkwell is also back following her stint in the Steel Dawn update. This time, she's tasked with escaping some weird, messed-up future where dolphin-human hybrids are turning the few remaining humans into brainless goons, apparently. There are 100 ranks to climb, with rewards to scoop up along the way.

New vendor Minerva is arriving, and she'll be around during events Minerva's Emporium and Minerva's Big Sale. The former will run from Monday to Wednesday, while the Big Sale will be from Thursday to Monday. She'll have regularly rotating items, which you can grab in exchange for gold bullion. 

Bethesda has also upped the cap on wallet currencies, increasing the max caps from 30,000 to 40,000. The daily vendor cap for gold bullion has doubled to 400, with the player cap doubling to 10,000. Scrip's daily vendor limit has gone up to 300, with players now able to carry up to 5,000. New rewards for Meat Week in August have been introduced, and an increase in C.A.M.P slots and S.P.E.C.I.A.L loadouts. As always, a bundle of bugs has been squashed, too.

The update size varies a bit depending on where you downloaded your game. Bethesda.net gets an 8.7GB update, Microsoft Store players get a heftier 15.9GB update while Steam users will have a 7.1GB update. You can check out the full patch notes on the Fallout website. This isn't it for content in 2021 though—there's still more to come later this year from Bethesda's roadmap for the game.

Mollie Taylor
Features Producer

Mollie spent her early childhood deeply invested in games like Killer Instinct, Toontown and Audition Online, which continue to form the pillars of her personality today. She joined PC Gamer in 2020 as a news writer and now lends her expertise to write a wealth of features, guides and reviews with a dash of chaos. She can often be found causing mischief in Final Fantasy 14, using those experiences to write neat things about her favourite MMO. When she's not staring at her bunny girl she can be found sweating out rhythm games, pretending to be good at fighting games or spending far too much money at her local arcade.