Today I will tell you a painful story that I had to go through in Fallout 76. The main characters are my perfectionistic side, my character “Lynhardt” with 800 hours of playtime, and 3 simple items that I couldn’t get no matter what.
Maybe you know it from your favorite MMORPGs or loot shooters: You want to get an item or talent, you work hard for it, sinking many hours into the grind, only to finally get what you deserve.
For my part, I find the general grind for items really annoying, which has really bothered me in Destiny 2. However, the only game where the grind was actually bearable and fun for me was Fallout 76.
In this game created by Bethesda, you can wreak havoc with up to 24 other players in Appalachia, West Virginia. You can complete quests and side quests, explore the map, participate in events, farm, build, or simply grind levels.
For my part, Fallout 76 really captivated me, and so my second character “Lynhardt” was born. The first was used as a mule to save space for my more important items.
So my journey began, I leveled up Lynhardt, completed the main story, and spent many hours collecting XP and event items as well as trading with other players. It was a good time until I started thinking about blueprints for weapons, armor, and mods.
In this game, crafting is an important part, as it makes you independent in Appalachia and allows you to test and create your own builds more freely.
The journey to a perfect character begins
I wanted to make Lynhardt a jack-of-all-trades, so I started purposefully collecting plans. I visited many servers, checked various shops, and bought all the plans that could be purchased with caps.
Then I went to the events. Especially the event “Invaders of Beyond” was a lot of fun. You had to take out aliens and received cool loot for it; moreover, I think the plans for the alien weapons were the best in the game. I could also grab these.
Then came the daily operations that occupied me for over 3 months. There were plans for armor, but they just never dropped. But I managed with this grind too.
I still had other plans from other events open, but I intermittently informed myself about special mods that were quest-bound, and that’s when I came across the vault jumpsuit.
From here began an odyssey that I will not forget anytime soon. I informed myself and found out that you can unlock mods for the vault jumpsuit; however, these are tied to a side quest where you have to collect the overseer’s 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 back then. Until I found out that I had already unlocked the best of the four mods and was missing the three worst.
Surprised by this, I didn’t think much about it and went on the journey to pick up the remaining three tapes. However, when I had collected them all, nothing happened. You should know that the blueprints are automatically learned when the tapes are picked up.
I thought I might have overlooked something or hadn’t properly completed the quest, so I went through everything again. I repeated all locations and tried multiple times to find the problem, but I found nothing.
Annoyed by this circumstance, I searched in forums, Reddit, YouTube, and basically everywhere players liked to vent about problems to find out if it was just a nasty bug. I didn’t find anything here either.
I really felt mocked, as it couldn’t be that I was the only one this happened to. So I felt forced to contact support and exchanged messages with them for over two weeks. I even sent photos of the chests and that I didn’t get the plans despite picking up the tapes, and even here support couldn’t help me.
I was sitting there broken with Lynhardt and could no longer stand the sight of him, so I decided to delete him, secure my items on a separate account, and start completely over. And even though many could overlook this and would rather keep the character they had invested hundreds of hours in – I couldn’t.
The sight of him always reminded me of this misery that I had been in for several weeks. I had to delete him, and although the step was pretty bitter, I felt a relief and even a revelation.
Because as I moved all my items from Lynhardt, the thought crossed my mind that I might have transferred my first character’s tapes to Lynhardt when I started him over. Maybe I was the culprit from the beginning who caused the bug and not Bethesda.
Either way, my character with 800 hours is now lost in the depths of the matrix, but that didn’t stop me from creating a new Lynhardt. He is currently level 19, but that will change quickly in the coming days. Maybe I will even reach level 530 and surpass the old Lynhardt.
Have you ever experienced a bizarre bug or incident in a game where you saw no other option but to delete your character? Feel free to let me know in the comments!
