Fallout 76: Invaders from Beyond PTS Features and Update Log

February 09, 2022

Fallout 76

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The Invaders from Beyond Update for Fallout 76 is now available in the Public Test Server!

We hope you will join us for some playtesting, and then share your feedback and bug reports with us in the Bethesda Studios Discord Server.

Read on to catch descriptions of the features and improvements we’d like you to try out.

PTS Now Available on Steam

While the Public Test Server has traditionally only been available to players who own Fallout 76 through Bethesda.net, we’re excited to announce that our community on Steam can now join us for playtesting in the PTS!

If you own Fallout 76 on Steam, you will now see the “Fallout 76 Public Test Server” appear in your Steam Library right underneath the normal Fallout 76 client. Install the PTS on your favorite drive, launch the client just as you would the base game, and dive right into the new “Invaders from Beyond” content.

As always, we greatly appreciate any and all feedback and bug reports that our PTS players share with us. Make sure to join us in the official Bethesda Studios Discord Server to post your thoughts once you’ve had the chance to do some playtesting.

New Seasonal Event: Invaders from Beyond

Mysterious beings from the outer reaches of space are invading our skies and stealing the brainwaves from lifeforms throughout Appalachia! Work together with other humans to fight back against the alien scum and send them fleeing back into their ships before they can complete their “research.”

Every hour on the hour an Alien Mothership will appear above one of several high-profile Appalachian locations to deploy three Brainwave Siphons in the area.
Travel to the Mothership’s location and examine Siphon Kappa to start the event.
When the event begins, players must destroy all three Brainwave Siphons, one after the other, before the aliens can complete their Brainwave Extraction process.
There’s just one problem: Each Siphon is protected by a force field, which is controlled by a different Alien Commander.
Defeat alien forces to draw out the Commander for each Siphon. Take out the Commander and the force field will drop, allowing you and your event mates to destroy the Siphon.
If you manage to demolish all three Brainwave Siphons in time, you will receive some loot, XP, and have a chance to earn plans to craft new alien weaponry and C.A.M.P. objects.
Keep your guard up, because as long as the Invaders from Beyond Seasonal Event is live, you may encounter extraterrestrial interlopers at select Public Events, including Campfire Tales, Free Range, and Line in the Sand. You may also spot our curious visitors in new Random Encounters that we’re adding with this update.

Fallout Worlds Improvements

Earn S.C.O.R.E. in Fallout Worlds

In response to community feedback, we’ve implemented the ability for you to continue your Season journey in Fallout Worlds. Going forward, you will now be able to earn S.C.O.R.E. from non-repeatable Daily and Weekly Challenges you complete while playing in Public and Custom Worlds.

New Custom World Settings to Explore

We’re introducing a variety of new settings for Custom Worlds that Fallout 1st members can tinker with in the Public Test Server. Catch a brief description of each one below, and then head into the Test Server to make them your own.

Carry Weight: Adjust the Carry Weight setting to choose a specific maximum amount that a player can carry. Alternatively, use the Carry Weight Multiplier setting to adjust max weight by a percentage. Drop it down to zero, or crank it all the way up to eleven times the default amount.
Frequent Confetti: New Dismemberment setting that will cause enemies you take down to explode into a cloud of confetti.
Perk Effects: Choose whether players can benefit from Normal Perk effects, Legendary Perk effects, both, or neither with this setting.
VATS: We’ve added the ability to turn off VATS targeting versus other players, or even disable VATS entirely.
Relaxed Building Restrictions: The “Toggle Snapping” option in build mode can now be adjusted to allow you to place C.A.M.P. objects even if they intersect.
Weather: If you enjoyed the darkened skies above the Mothman Equinox Seasonal Event, you can now bring it to your Custom Worlds using the Weather Setting.

Additionally, the Happy Builder Public World is currently available in the Public Test Server, so that everyone can try building some intersecting C.A.M.P. objects with the updated Toggle Snapping option.

New Public Event: Test Your Metal

Please note: “Test Your Metal” is slated for a future patch that will arrive after the Invaders from Beyond Update. However, we’ve included it in this PTS to begin gathering early community input. Give it a try and let us know what you think.*

The Brotherhood of Steel have uncovered that a group of Blood Eagles, calling themselves the Rust Eagles, have been stockpiling spare robot parts to construct an army of combat bots. Concerned about the threat this may pose to Appalachia, Scribe Valdez recently sent a Field Team to investigate

The Test Your Metal Public Event will appear on your map at the Metal Dome, just north of Fort Atlas in the Savage Divide. Travel there and speak with Initiate Pappas to start the event.
Once Test Your Metal begins, you will join three members of the Brotherhood Field Team to compete as gladiators against the Rust Eagles’ deadly machines.
You and the Gladiators of Steel will square off against the bots in three rounds of frenzied combat. Defeat the opposition in one round, and you’ll advance to the next.
Once you’ve conquered all three rounds, you will earn some loot, XP, and have a chance to pick up rare rewards, including plans to craft the new Raider Robot Armor set.
Make sure to defend your teammates, and have Stimpaks at the ready if they fall. The more Gladiators of Steel who survive their time in the ring, the higher your chances to earn rare rewards.

Additional Improvements

Buildable Pirate Radio: Tap your toes to Appalachia’s newest radio station when you’re relaxing at home with a buildable Pirate Radio that you can place in your C.A.M.P. Open the build menu and navigate to the Appliances section to find it.
Invisible Backpacks: The community has long requested the ability to hide their currently equipped backpacks from view. Now, you can do just that with the new “Show Backpack” game setting. Don’t worry, you’ll still receive all the benefits of your pack when it’s hidden.
Stimpak Adjustments: We’ve reduced the weight of Stimpaks and Diluted Stimpaks by 25%, and reduced their prices by 25% as well. Additionally, we’ve increased the number of Stimpaks and Diluted Stimpaks that will appear in Medical Vending Machines.

PTS Update notes - January 21, 2022

Events: We’ve temporarily reduced the Public Event rotation in order to increase the frequency that the Test Your Metal event appears in the PTS.
All Public Events in the Test Server have been disabled except for Test Your Metal, Invaders from Beyond, Free Range, Line in the Sand, and Campfire Tales. This change will not carry over to the live game.
Events: Made adjustments to increase the Invaders from Beyond difficulty. We’ve increased the health to Alpha, Omega, Kappa, General Zeta, Alien Invaders, Alien Drone, and Alien Base. We’ve also increased General Zeta’s resistances.
Events: Fixed an issue that could cause the Public Event, "A Colossal Problem", to begin after nuking Cranberry Bog to begin Scorched Earth. This change was implemented when this iteration of the PTS released, but we wanted to note it here as it was missed in the original notes.
Dev Comment: We know that some of our more seasoned players enjoyed being able to trigger both A Colossal Problem and Scorched Earth simultaneously, and that you may be disappointed that this is no longer possible. However, the ability to trigger both events this way was not intended, and we felt that fixing this issue is important for the overall health of the game.
Sound: Fixed an issue that caused the UFO’s sound effects to continue after event completion.
Sound: We’ve added some new radio plays to Pirate Radio! Happy listening!

PTS Update Notes – January 31, 2022

PTS Now on Steam!

As mentioned at the top of this article, we’ve expanded the Public Test Server to include all players who own Fallout 76 on Steam. Download the PTS client in your Steam Library, and then log in to join us in playtesting “Invaders from Beyond” Seasonal Event and new Fallout Worlds Settings, as well as the future “Test Your Metal” Public Event.

Test Your Metal Public Event

We’ve received tons of great feedback from the PTS community for our upcoming “Test Your Metal” Public Event, which is slated to arrive in-game with a patch after the “Invaders from Beyond” Update. We are going to resume developing Test Your Metal with all of your feedback, bug reports, and thoughts in mind, and plan to keep this event available for playtesting in the PTS for one more week, until February 7. We will make adjustments, implement fixes, and bring it back for playtesting in a future iteration of the Test Server.

Additional Changes in Today’s PTS Update

Challenges: Challenges that players have chosen to track now correctly appear in the Challenge Tracker on the Map screen.
Challenges: “Well Fed” Challenges now only progress while the player is affected by the Well Fed effect.
Client Stability: Fixed an issue that could cause duplicate items to appear in the player’s Pip-Boy and result in a client crash.
Contextual Ammo: Alien Blaster Rounds should now drop from all contextual ammo sources.
Combat: Explosion damage falloff is now calculated correctly when targeting different parts of an enemy.
Daily Ops: Addressed an issue that could cause Daily Ops Bosses to flee from the player.
Daily Ops: Bosses now calculate weapon damage correctly versus players with high resistances.
Fallout Worlds: Players can now correctly place Wires that intersect other objects when Object Intersection is set to Allowed or Allowed (No Collision).
Fallout Worlds: The “Invaders from Beyond” weather effect no longer disappears during the event in Custom Worlds.
Invaders from Beyond: Players can now correctly leave conversations with The Emissary.
Invaders from Beyond: Fixed an issue that could prevent players from properly joining the event at the Wavy Willard’s location near Extractor Omega.
Invaders from Beyond: At the Monongah event location, Aliens now correctly navigate to Brainwave Siphons instead of congregating on a nearby roof.
Items: Fixed an issue affecting Thorn Armor that could result the wearer being forced into PVP when hit by another player’s melee attacks.

PTS Update Notes – February 9, 2022

Test Your Metal Public Event

Thank you to everyone who took part in “Test Your Metal” Public Event playtesting! We’re still hard at work developing Test Your Metal, which is slated to arrive in a patch after the Invaders from Beyond Update. We’ve received tons of feedback and bug reports for this event, and with today’s patch we’ve removed Test Your Metal from this iteration of the PTS. We’re planning to discuss everything you’ve shared so far, and will continue to improve on Test Your Metal before it returns to the Test Server ahead of our next Fallout 76 update.

Improvements and Fixes in Today’s PTS Update

C.A.M.P.: Objects no longer sink into some dressers and tables after being placed on top of them.
Challenges: “Pass the Buck” has been removed from the list of subchallenges for the “Complete Different Daily Quests” World Challenge.
Challenges: Daily and Weekly Challenges requiring the “Well Fed” Hunger effect now correctly progress whether the player is “Well Fed” or “Fully Fed.”
Displays: When scrapping or storing Display Cases and Mannequins, a warning dialog now appears to inform the player that any items assigned to that Display or Mannequin will be unassigned.
Fallout Worlds: Fixed an issue that could cause C.A.M.P. objects to snap to the ground beneath a Foundation, rather than snap to the Foundation itself, while the “Relaxed Building Restrictions” setting is enabled.
Invaders from Beyond: Reduced the number of enemies that can spawn at once during Invaders from Beyond in order to improve event performance. Enemy spawn rates were slightly increased to help offset this adjustment.
Items: The magazine capacity for Alien Disintegrators with the Automatic Receiver mod has been increased from 25 to 40 rounds.
Items: The Alien Blaster now correctly deals condition damage to enemy limbs that it hits, instead of damaging limbs at random.
Items: Popcorn from the Popcorn Machine now correctly reduces Hunger and Thirst gains by 25%.
Items: Jetpacks that take up the Backpack slot will no longer turn invisible when the Backpack Visibility setting is turned off.
User Interface: Addressed an issue that could cause quest objectives to display incorrect text, fail to appear, or fail to update correctly.
User Interface: Player positions on the Map now update correctly after Fast Traveling.
User Interface: Fixed an issue that prevented the list of potential rewards from appearing correctly after selecting a Public Event on the Map.
User Interface: Quest objective text now correctly appears when placing the crosshairs on a floating quest target.

Thank you very much for your participation in the PTS, we’re looking forward to hearing what you think!

Bethesda Game Studios