The new year isn’t exactly starting well for Fallout 76. Gamers discovered a new glitch yesterday which appeared to affect the majority, if not all, of the game’s players; a near-total lockdown of the complex Fallout 76 nuke system, effectively rendering it impossible for players to launch nukes. After being made aware of the bug, Bethesda reacted swiftly and launched a hotfix earlier today. This seems to have resolved the problem.

The New Year Fallout 76 Nuke Glitch

Launching a nuke in Fallout 76 comprises the events of four of the game’s final story missions; I Am Become Death, Mission: Countdown, Scorched Earth, and Death From Above. These missions are repeatable, allowing high-level players to farm top-tier resources by launching nukes and harvesting the resulting fallout zones. Indeed, they can also be used to trigger an encounter with the game’s final boss, the Scorchbeast Queen. However, this whole system seemingly broke down yesterday.

Players found that the game’s three nuke silos were inaccessible. It’s normal for a silo to seal for a short while after players launch a nuke at the site, but in this case something was clearly wrong; all three silos had an unlock countdown of 9,999 hours! In fact, players weren’t even able to gather new launch codes, as the enemies who carry the pieces ceased spawning. Even the Enclave terminal which guides players through the process was inoperable; the machine was displaying confusing error messages instead of its normal readout.

Fortunately, it seems that whatever this bug was, Bethesda was able to prioritise a fix straightaway. The Bethesda Support Twitter account was able to launch a hotfix earlier today. It’s unclear what caused this problem, and Bethesda hasn’t issued an explanation. The timing suggests that the changeover from 2018 to 2019 in the game’s code may have caused some sort of malfunction, though it could be something else entirely. Whatever the case, it seems that it wasn’t too troublesome to repair, and players should once again be able to find code pieces and launch nukes.