A secret, supposedly inaccessible “developer room” in
Fallout 76 has reportedly led to an illicit item market within the community, including content as-yet-unreleased. Exactly how
Fallout 76 users gained access to this developer room – a development remnant created for testing purposes – isn’t clear. Nevertheless, items from the room are said to have been traded to any number of accounts, including as part of real money transactions, and Bethesda has begun to ban accounts known to visit this secret room.
As reported by Eurogamer, this developer room has been hidden within
Fallout 76 the entire time. Bethesda is known to implement these types of rooms in its games for testing purposes, providing developers with a location where every item can be accessed with ease. In single-player games, the location can be traveled to via a console admin command. In
Fallout 76, the room should have been completely out of reach. Until it wasn’t.
How players figured out how to get to the room isn’t clear yet, though it’s said to have been discovered some time ago but was kept secret. These players would travel to the room, take any item they pleased, and bring them back to the normal game world. Given the room likely required some sort of
exploit or hack to access, it’s unsurprising that the items found therein eventually were being sold for money in grey markets online.
Items within the room included all manner of things, but the most interesting ones are unreleased
power armor paints. These paints are named Winterized, Military, and Atom Cats and are likely to be introduced to the game naturally as part of an upcoming update.
Bethesda is reportedly now aware of the situation and is
banning accounts that journey to the developer room. Though without comment, it’s unclear whether Bethesda has any plans for further measures, such as removing the room altogether or deleting the items acquired from it. Given such ambiguous consequences, some users continue to abuse the developer room and quickly transfer items to other accounts before a ban can take effect.
The result is a continued grey market for illegitimately taken items.
