Fallout 76 gets Legendary Hunting Rifles and common-sense Fusion Core reform in a new update

Fallout 76's latest update is packed full of tweaks and fixes, with more than 150 changes heading to the game by Bethesda's accounting. The 500MB update went live on PC today and will start to roll out on consoles as a roughly 4GB download next week. Whether you're rolling through a slightly refreshed Appalachia right now or waiting for the patch to hit your platform of choice, here are six of the biggest changes to look out for.

Teensy bobby pins and more balance changes

Bobby pins - those improbably handy items used for picking locked doors and containers - used to take up 0.1 units worth of weight in your inventory. Now they're only 0.001 each. That means you can carry 100 bobby pins in the space you used to need to carry one! Picking locks is a little tougher in Fallout 76 than it was in Fallout 4, so this is a very welcome change for would-be burglars. That said, if you know somebody who knows somebody who could duplicate up a few hundred bobby pins for you, that may have changed too. Bethesda says it's fixed an item duping glitch.

Legendary Hunting Rifles are a thing and lever-action reloads work properly

Put a new entry on the top of your scavenging list: Legendary Hunting Rifles. With the new legendary tier for the trusty weapon, you'll find extra-powerful hunting rifles out in the world with unique perks of their own. Hunting rifles have been a favorite weapon in just about every Fallout game and it's good to see that tradition continue in Fallout 76. Oh, and another rifle-related change: the reload animation for lever-action rifles now shows the appropriate number of rounds being loaded in, rather than the default five rounds every time. Good news unless you have a lever-action rifle that could hold, say, 20.

Gear gets easier to maintain (for the most part)

Overall repair costs have been reduced for Fallout 76, including both weapons and armor, and mid-to-high-level armor in particular has repair component requirements cut by 20 percent. Note that repair component costs get higher as you level up, so this won't make higher level gear cheaper to maintain than its lower level counterparts. If you like rocking Power Armor, there's some good and bad news: Fusion Core generators will now produce cores at their intended rate (eight cores per hour), but you'll no longer be able to reset a partially spent core by logging out and in again while in your Power Armor.

PvP tweaks make for more fair fights

Somebody walking up and opening your cabinet without your permission isn't cool, right? This Fallout 76 update agrees, and thus it is now a PvP-provoking action to open player-owned containers. It also isn't cool for somebody you're fighting to have their non-PvP-enabled teammate block your access to a workshop either, so that will put them in PvP too. Speaking of workshops, any turrets on the premises will now join the fight against players whom the workshop's owner is fighting.

Performance improvements help you savor the apocalypse

A miscellaneous assortment of performance improvements are coming to Fallout 76, depending on which platform you play. Here are a few that will benefit all players: improved client performance when watching a nuclear detonation, so you can burn out your retinas with a nice smooth framerate; better performance in areas with a lot of those creepy Scorched statues; and a fix for a background freeze that could occur when reading a note.

And more fixes for all kinds of weird issues

It wouldn't be a Bethesda game without some strange glitches. Here are some highlights plucked from the rest of the patch notes:

Weapons: Fixed an issue where bashing an enemy with certain weapons would add the projectile to the enemy's inventory.
Weapons: The Vampire weapon mod effect now works only when hitting living targets as intended.
Quack Surgeon: Quack Surgeon no longer allows for reviving hostile players.
Robots: Fixed an issue that would cause robots to respawn too frequently in Whitesprings.
Scorched: Fixed an issue where Wasteland Whisperer could affect Scorched. Dev Note: Wasteland Whisperer can no longer be used to pacify Scorched.

So much for making friends with the Scorched population. See you in the next life, Mr. Crackly...

Don't forget to claim your free Fallout Classic Collection if you played Fallout 76 last year.