Last week, we reported on a troubling (but somewhat amusing) phenomenon in Fallout 76 where new human NPCs were stealing from players. Specifically, when players respawned during a game event in which they were killed, their best weapons and their ammo were sometimes missing from their inventory. Then I would see an allied human NPC using the same weapon. While they were dead, the NPCs seemed to have rudely looted their corpses.

As an emergent behavior, it was actually kinda cool, but the real problem was that these NPCs never returned the weapons. For a player who has been grinding away for hours for a legendary weapon, it totally sucks to see a Wastelander casually take the weapon away.

On the plus side, that doesn't seem to happen anymore.

"We just released a hotfix for Fallout 76 to address the rare issue of NPCs potentially taking items from deceased players under certain circumstances," a brief post from community manager Valseek on Bethesda's forums The game has been taken offline for this fix.

"There was no need to take the game offline for this fix, and this fix was applied to all worlds.

Naturally, players may still want to be a little cautious about rushing into an event equipped with their best guns. Hot fixes are not always foolproof, and it may be safer to wait for other players to report that the bug has indeed been squashed. Also, Bethesda has yet to announce whether or not stolen weapons will be returned.

This is not the only problem players are waiting for to be resolved: the new Soviet-themed Fallout 76 garbage-collecting robots are a little too heavy-handed with their communist propaganda, and they want you to focus on garbage collection instead of stuffing dozens of information leaflets into cargo boxes. Some players are. Let's see if there will be a hotfix for this too.