Today I’m going to tell you an agonizing story that I had to go through in Fallout 76. The main actors are my perfectionist streak, my character “Lynhardt” with 800 hours of playtime and 3 simple items that I couldn’t get my hands on.
Maybe you know it from your favorite MMORPGs or loot shooters: you want an item or talent, you work hard for it, spend many hours in the grind to finally get what you deserve.
For my part, I find the general grind for items really annoying, which got on my nerves especially in Destiny 2. However, the only game where the grind was actually bearable and fun for me is Fallout 76.
In this game, created by Bethesda, you and up to 24 other players can wreak havoc in Appalachia, West Virginia. You can do quests and side quests, explore the map, participate in events, farm, build or simply grind levels.
For my part, Fallout 76 really grabbed me and that’s how my 2nd character “Lynhardt” came about. The first was used as a mule to save space for my more important items.
Fallout 76: The trailer for the update “Nuka-World on Tour”
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So that’s how the journey began, I leveled up Lynhardt, completed the main story and spent many hours collecting XP, event items and trading with other players. It was a good time before I started thinking about blueprints for weapons, armor, and mods.
In this game, crafting is an important part, because it gives you independence in Appalachia and you can test and design free builds on your own.
The journey to a perfect character begins
So I wanted to make Lynhardt an all-rounder and so I started collecting plans. I went to a lot of servers, went to different shops and bought all the plans that could be bought with caps.
Then it was on to the events. The “Invaders of Beyond” event in particular was really fun. You had to kill aliens and you got cool loot for it, and the plans for the alien weapons were the best in the game in my opinion. I was able to grab these too.
This was followed by the daily surgeries that kept me busy for over 3 months. There were plans for armor, but they just never wanted to drop. But I could handle this grind too.
I still had other plans open from other events, but I was temporarily researching special mods tied to quests and that’s when I came across the Vault jumpsuit.
From here an odyssey began that I will not soon forget. I did some research and found out that the vault jumpsuit has mods that you can unlock, but they are tied to a side quest that requires you to collect Overseer holotapes. In total there were four mods tied to four holotapes. These build on each other and always unlock the next best mod.
So far, so good, I thought at the time. Until I found out that I already unlocked the best of the four mods and was missing the three worst.
Surprised, I didn’t think about it and went on a journey to pick up the remaining three tapes. However, when I collected them all, nothing happened. You should know that the blueprints are learned automatically when you pick up the tapes.
I thought maybe I missed something or didn’t complete the quest properly and went through it all again. I repeated all locations and tried several times to find the problem, but I found nothing.
Annoyed by this fact, I searched the forums, Reddit, YouTube and pretty much everywhere where players like to talk about problems to find out if this was just a crappy bug. I didn’t find anything here either.
I felt really cheated because I couldn’t be the only one this happened to. So I felt compelled to contact support and chatted with them for over 2 weeks. I even sent photos of the chests and that I didn’t get the plans despite keeping the tapes and the support couldn’t help me here either.
So I sat there heartbroken with Lynhardt and couldn’t take the sight of him anymore, so I decided to delete it, save my items to a separate account beforehand and start from scratch. And while many could overlook that and would have preferred to keep the character they put hundreds of hours into, I couldn’t.
The sight of him always reminded me of this misery I was in for several weeks. I had to erase it and although the step was quite bitter, I felt a relief and even a revelation.
Because as I was moving all my items from Lynhardt, the thought crossed my mind that I might have taped my first character over to Lynhardt when I was starting him back then. Maybe I was the culprit that caused the bug in the first place and not Bethesda.
Either way, my character at 800 hours has now disappeared into the depths of the Matrix, but that didn’t stop me from making a new Lynhardt. He’s level 19 so far, but that’ll change quickly over the next few days. Maybe I’ll even reach level 530 and trump old Lynhardt.
Have you ever encountered a strange bug or an incident in a game where you saw no other option than deleting your character? Let me know in the comments!