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Fallout 76 gets its Worlds update today, adding custom servers and more

Season 5 is getting a two-week extension to make sure everyone gets the rank-ups they've purchased

Members of the Brotherhood of Steel play foosball and arcade games in a brightly lit room looking out across the wilderness in Fallout 76

September 8, 2021 Bethesda has announced that Season 6 will now begin today as planned, after determining that players should all receive any rank-ups they've purchased.

The big Fallout Worlds update arrives in Fallout 76 today, adding the ability to create and play in custom versions of Appalachia in the MMORPG. The update also launches Bethesda's own 'Public Worlds', which are custom-style servers for anyone to check out, and feature themed variations to Fallout 76's rules, difficulty, monster selection, and much more.

Starting today, one Public World will be available at a time, with new ones rotating in on a monthly basis. The first is called 'Happy Builder,' and it changes things up by removing many restrictions on building and C.A.M.P. placement and automatically reveals all map locations. PvP is disabled on the Happy Builder Public World, which is probably where the 'happy' part of the title comes from.

'High Risk,' the next Public World in the queue, is quite a bit different. In this world, fast travel is disabled and PvP is always on. Players will drop extra loot when they die, making PvP all the more tempting. Free workbench crafting, as well as legendary item attributes, are disabled.

Fallout 1st members, however, will be able to start up custom worlds with whatever mix of settings they see fit. Make enemies harder or change the rules for PvP, enable special weather conditions, or even mess with the jump height variable and remove fall damage.

As we’ve noted in the past, Bethesda has been keen to preserve ‘official’ character progression while making the choice to play in a custom or public world as seamless as possible. The solution the studio has settled on makes it so that you’ll be able to create a ‘clone’ of your normal Adventure Mode character at any point, then take that clone into another world, where any progression made will be specific to that server. You can have up to five Fallout Worlds characters at a given time.

Today’s update also marks the official end of Fallout 76’s Nuclear Winter game mode. Players who have completed any Nuclear Winter matches will get a Nuclear Winter pennant, as well as a sum of perk coins that scales with the amount of progress they’ve made in the battle royale game mode. It works out to six perk coins per Nuclear Winter perk card, and one coin per Overseer Ticket earned.

Many of the cosmetic rewards you could earn from Nuclear Winter are now available as rewards for completing public events in Adventure Mode.

There’s the usual raft of bugfixes and tweaks in the patch notes, but of particular interest is the entry under the World heading: Vault 51 has opened for exploration in all game modes. You may want to gear up and head that way to learn about the fate of its inhabitants.

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Season 6 begins today, but rank-up purchases have been disabled while Bethesda works to address a problem that cropped up last season for players who bought rank-ups using Atoms. Everyone can still earn rank-ups as usual with S.C.O.R.E. by completing in-game challenges. Since there’s been a bit of confusion over the start date for the season, Bethesda says it’s running a double XP and double S.C.O.R.E. weekend that will begin as soon as the patch arrives and run through 9 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. ET  5 p.m. BST September 13.

The patch will vary in size depending on which storefront you used to buy Fallout 76. On Bethesda’s launcher, the download will be 15.3GB; on the Microsoft Store/Xbox Game Pass for PC it’s 23.3; and on Steam it’s 16.1 GB.