Fallout 76 is nuking duped items with today’s maintenance

We can all agree just from observation over the past couple of months that Fallout 76 has a variety of issues, but the preponderance of duped items is definitely on that list. While Bethesda has been doing its best to track down the methods used to dupe items, players seem to quickly find ways around those blocks. The maintenance today is taking a different angle, though: It’s not patching the game to remove a duping method, it’s just destroying duped items right out of player inventories.

We’ve just completed some “Spring cleaning” to rid the Wasteland of many items that were created through the abuse of duplication exploits.

These actions were highly-focused toward a list of over 400 weapon and armor items we identified as common duplication targets. Players who had multiple copies of any of these duped items, whether they obtained them using an exploit or by acquiring them from another player, will find that all but one of each of those items have been removed from their characters. Power Armor was exempt from today’s item removals, but we are actively discussing another wave of action to target these items in the future.

Additionally, if a player had multiple copies of duped items removed as part of today’s actions, we also performed a follow-up search of their account for very large amounts of Nuka-Cola and removed those, as well.

Finally, during our investigation leading up to these actions, we determined that less than 1% of all Fallout 76 accounts combined across all three platforms needed to have duped items removed. This means the vast majority of players did not possess multiple copies of these duped items, and have had zero items removed from their characters today.

We are still taking aggressive action to eliminate exploits, duplication methods, and other bugs with every patch we release. If you believe you’ve found an exploit, or encountered a player who is abusing an exploit, we encourage you to report it by submitting a support ticket.

Thank you!

The maintenance is also hoping to fix some network latency issues, but the removal of the duped items is obviously the more important aspect. The announcement stresses that only a small percentage of players will be affected by the item removal as only a small number of players actually have duped items, and items will be removed from both player inventories and stashes. So if you’ve been playing legitimately, you hopefully won’t notice any change… but if you’ve been running around with ill-gotten gains, you may find yourself short several items post-maintenance.