Fallout 76 players are running out of room in their inventories, and the game’s not even out yet. Fortunately, Bethesda is promising a fix. Finding and crafting the best equipment is a major part of Fallout 76. The game’s world is full of junk you can pick up, useful for creating everything from guns and ammunition to the bed players sleep on in their campsite. But each piece of that junk weighs something.
Fallout games have traditionally limited players’ inventories by making them unable to run if they’re hauling too much weight, while providing storage containers with no capacity limits in various places around the map for housing all the excess. While Fallout 76 maintains the limit on how much individual characters can carry before they become encumbered, it also imposes a limit on how much players can store in containers to 400 units of virtual rubbish.
Players are quickly filling up their pockets and running out of space in their stashes as a result.
In one popular post on the game’s subreddit, one player said that the Stash limit is ruining the game for them. “I have a modest amount of a bit of everything and I am full,” they wrote. “This leaves no room at all to collect different guns and blunt weapons and sets of armour and power armour.” They said that while the limited space fits in with the idea of Fallout 76 as a survival game, it cuts against the endless loop of collecting, crafting, and upgrading that MMO-style games are predicated on.
“I shouldn’t be able to max out my stash in [five] hours of play,” another person responded. “Bethesda should know they’ve created a legion of hoarders with their past games.”
Another player even made a very handy guide for how to get the most out of your Stash, with tips like what order to break junk down in and a hierarchy of items worth holding on to. “Ammo is also fairly common, and can be specifically crafted for your weapon if you find that sweet sweet favourite weapon,” they wrote. “So don’t save 800 shotgun ammo. Just drop it, it cannot be sold.” However, even that player thought the storage limit should be, at least, quintupled.
The stingy Stash limit took players by surprise because Bethesda had initially said that there would be none. “Store away,” wrote Senior Vice President Pete Hines wrote in response to someone on Twitter asking about the game’s inventory management system. “Not aware of any limit.” Since then, Hines has been hounded by players asking about whether the game’s stash limit would be increased.
On November 6, just before Fallout 76 received a 30GB update, Hines said that he had not previously been aware that there would be a stash limit, but that the team was working on changing it. “There are reasons why it’s there and those reasons are important,” he wrote, but did not elaborate on those reasons. (Kotaku reached out to Bethesda for comment, but the company did not respond, nor has it responded to any email or phone call from Kotaku since 2013.)
Yesterday, Bethesda announced that increasing the Stash limit would indeed be one of its first priorities following the game’s full release on November 14. “We’ve seen [Stash size] come up a lot and understand the frustration,” a representative of the company wrote on Reddit. “While the Stash size at 400 weight limit can get easier to deal with over time, we do plan on increasing it in the future.”
It remains to be seen how soon that particular change to the game will get implemented. Destiny‘s inventory system had a similar problem when the game first came out back in 2014, and it wasn’t until the following April that Bungie finally expanded players’ vault space so they could hoard more of their rare loot.
Hopefully Fallout 76‘s Stash size gets fixed sooner than that.
Comments
16 responses to “Bethesda Says It Plans To Fix Fallout 76’s Item Storage Problem”
This is one reason I would hate to be a games developer in the present time. Gamers are never happy and never will be happy. I personally feel as though Bethesdas take on limiting the amount you can store is spot on. It is a post apocalyptic world after all. Lets take a look at another successful MMORPG WOW. You are restricted to storage space, there are only so many slots for you bank and a cap on the size of bags to chuck them in. I just feel nowadays people find the most mundane crap to complain about. Fucking container space what a joke.
The difference there though is that games like WoW are slot based. If you have 10 slots you can store any 10 items. They also tend to use stacking so 1 piece of iron for example takes up the same amount of space as 20. That’s not the case with a weight-based limit so you’ll easily go through it a lot faster, particularly if you want to hang onto interesting items you don’t exactly “need”.
That said, I didn’t play the beta (dead PC) so I can’t really speak for how good/bad it actually is. Inventory management usually doesn’t bother me too much as I’ll just work with what I’ve got, but I can certainly see why other people would complain if it results in them spending more time in menus than actually playing.
What nonsense.
This is just developers using online games to find another way to nickel-and-dime their customers with microtransactions.
Each ‘slot’ is an extra line in the database. This adds a minimal cost to their server hosting (one of the drawbacks of making games online only). But what this does is create pressure on the player to pay for an MTX which provides them more space.
You damn apologists drive me mental. I hope you’ve never complained about anything in your life. Never that your meal wasn’t correct. Or that the rent is too high. Or that your boss is working you too hard. You just lap everything up with a big s**t eating grin.
God forbid some gamers react when developers implement shitty systems.
A lot of games have storage limits. I get the frustration, but assuming the stash limit was to sell MTX (which there’s no evidence is the case or was ever planned) is the same thing as apologists, just on the opposite side. It doesn’t hurt to wait until a company actually does something wrong before getting out the pitchfork.
I run a 7 days to die server from an old 2600k in my garage.
These two-bit indie devs have given us virtually unlimited storage space on a $20 game.
Bethesda, after selling how many copies of Skyrim, want to charge $100 for a game where I’ve exhausted my storage in 8 hours.
I think you missed what I was saying. It’s not a technical limitation, it’s a gameplay limitation. Tons of games have storage limits because it’s the design of the game that you shouldn’t be able to keep literally everything. Choosing what to keep and what to ditch is a dimension of play.
You’ll probably find that the stash limit is to promote player interaction rather than to conserve resources. 4 players = 4x the stash, and can specialise a lot better to maximise efficiency. The mistake people are making is treating this like a solo Fallout game. You are not alone out there, and the devs want to encourage interaction between the players on any given server. and the game is specifically designed to that end.
You’re likely spot on. This is obviously a gameplay limitation, not a technical one.
“Hey, want to trade?”
“Nah I already have 500,000 deathclaw dicks at camp, no point.”
Usually I wouldn’t be surprised if it did turn out to be micro transactions but because its Bethesda I also wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they cant have more slots because its based on some system someone designed in 1993 that cant go above the number 400.
Even in the post-apocalypse, mankind has BOX technology.
I can build self-targeting, unlimited ammunition machine gun turrets, but you think a box is not fitting for a survival experience?
The C.A.M.P lets you pack up your entire base into something you can carry around without even slowing you down, and you’re upset that it has a storage limit? The portability of the thing is already through the roof but you’re having a whinge that you want infinite storage in it too.
Strap in everyone… Because we’re probably in for a long haul if we get a new article every time Bethesda says it is going to fix something in Fallout 76.
I think there are more pressing issues to fix in the game than item storage.
Such as the Physics being tied to FPS.
In most companies, core engine programmers and game systems programmers are not the same people. It’s probably safe to say tweaking this isn’t going to take anyone away from engine problems.
Interesting that Pete Hines doesn’t know basics about the game. It’s no wonder that so much of what he says is incorrect or contradicts what Todd Howard says. Still, that level of dysfunction pretty much sums up Bethesda.
I was having trouble with the stash limit myself until I double checked what I had in there. Steel and wood is very common and ended up taking a large chunk of it.
That said around 800-1000 would be good for long term play
The storage limit is becoming an issue for me and almost everyone I’ve spoken to ingame. I am sick of having to micromanage my inventory. I have become dehydrated and hungry just from spending so much time agonising over what resources to keep and what to throw. I’m almost resigned to the fact I’ll always be fighting whilst overburdened. It’s not allowing me to have the fun in this game that I should be. I feel that once again, a good game is being ruined by the introduction of pvp elements. That’s just my take on it.