Inside the Vault: Fasnacht Seasonal Event and Patch 7 Preview

March 07, 2019

Fallout 76

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Welcome back to Inside the Vault!

As Wild Appalachia draws nearer, we’re traveling to the town of Helvetia to preview the first seasonal event in Fallout 76, which will be sure to shoo away those winter blues: Fasnacht Parade! Next, we’re going to share a few highlights with you from Patch 7, which we’re planning to release next week.

New Seasonal Event – Fasnacht Parade

Each year, since the founding of Helvetia in 1869, the townsfolk celebrated Fasnacht by donning fantastic masks and parading through the decorated town. The festivities culminated by burning an effigy of Old Man Winter on the bonfire to signal the end of winter. The townsfolk may be long gone, but dutiful bots have kept the party rolling every year—and they welcome your participation!

Fasnacht Parade is a repeatable, limited-time event quest that will be available for one week, starting on March 19. You and any other dwellers who wish to take part must speak with the Master of Ceremonies in Helvetia and then divide and conquer to find and aid the town’s robotic shopkeepers in setting up for the annual parade. You and your compatriots will be asked to assist with a variety of party prep duties that may have you stepping on stage to play a cheery tune, choosing the perfect decorations, or exterminating some buzzing pests, among many other activities.

If you find and aid the Protectrons quickly enough, they will be able to march in the parade. Be sure to remain vigilant! Times have changed since the pre-war days, and all that commotion is sure to attract some party crashers. Defend your marchers as they traipse around town, and then set Old Man Winter ablaze to banish the biting cold, earn some sweet loot, and even claim a festive Fasnacht mask of your very own. The more marchers who survive the parade, the higher the chance you’ll earn a mask, some of which are exceedingly rare. Here’s a look at just a few that you can get by completing this event. There are many more, and masks can be traded, so put your Charisma to the test by haggling with any Dwellers who have a mask that catches your eye.

Remember—No party lasts forever, and neither does this seasonal event quest. Complete Fasnacht Parade as many times as you like, grab as many masks as you can, and score new Fasnacht-themed C.A.M.P. plans before the celebration ends on March 26.

Patch 7 Highlights

We’re gearing up to release Patch 7 next week, and it contains the first wave of Wild Appalachia game content—including the new Brewing and Distilling crafting system and quests we previewed last week—as well as balance and design changes, and a ton of bug fixes. Full patch notes will be available on patch day, but here are a few highlights we’re excited to share with you:

Energy and Heavy Weapon Balance: In Patch 7, we’re making some adjustments to greatly increase the durability of many energy and heavy weapons and increasing their damage so you can take down enemies more easily, spend less time repairing, and more time looting. Here are the details:

Energy Weapons
For heavy and semi-auto energy weapons, we’ve greatly reduced the amount of condition damage they take per shot. Your heavy energy weapons should now last four to five times longer, and semi-auto energy weapons should last twice as long before needing repairs.
We’ve also given semi-auto energy weapons an additional damage boost of +10% so they have a little more bite.
Heavy Weapons
We’ve reduced the fire-rate for high rate-of-fire automatic heavy weapons across the board and increased their damage by +10%. Adjusting these weapons’ fire-rates gave us more room for a damage increase, which will help them punch through armor more effectively without increasing their baseline damage per second too high.
Weapon damage for all other automatic heavy weapons has been increased by 10% to 20%.
Like energy weapons above, we’ve significantly reduced the condition damage that automatic ballistic heavy weapons take per shot, and they should now last about four times longer before they need to visit a weapons workbench.
We know that many of you have also been asking for weight changes for heavy weapons. While we haven’t addressed this in Patch 7, we do plan to make improvements with a future update and we will let you know as soon as we have more details to share.

C.A.M.P. and Workshop Budget Adjustments: In Patch 7, we’re planning to make adjustments to the C.A.M.P. and Workshop budget system that should allow you to build even bigger and fancier Wasteland abodes.

The amount of budget space that some buildable objects consume, such as Turrets and Lights, has been reduced, but they now also have a maximum amount that can be placed in your C.A.M.P. or Workshop. The build menu recipes for these objects will show you how many are already present in your C.A.M.P., including the ones you have stored, and the total amount of each you can place.
There are several important aspects of C.A.M.P. and Workshop budgets we must keep in mind when making adjustments, including how objects are used by players, overall structure balance, and even game performance. While the above changes aren’t a direct increase to budget size, they should give you more overall budget space to build lots of cool stuff, while also allowing us the flexibility to further refine and improve balance and performance.

C.A.M.P. Placement Adjustments: Occasionally, when we bring new content to the game, it may need to be placed somewhere that was previously usable as a C.A.M.P. location. We can't have C.A.M.P.s and quests occupying the same space and while we do our best to limit these cases, sometimes it’s unavoidable.

Starting with Patch 7, and in future updates, we plan to add a few new “no-build zones” to the game world that will prevent players from constructing C.A.M.P.s in those areas.
However, it’s possible some players may have already built in these locations before they became no-build zones. When this happens, affected players will be notified upon joining a world that their C.A.M.P.s can no longer be placed, and they will be given a free C.A.M.P. placement as a result. We don’t expect this will impact most players, but we hope this free move will help you find a new home for your home.

Challenge Tracking: With Patch 7, we want to make challenges easier to keep an eye on as you make progress toward completing them, so you always know when that next reward will be on its way into your pocket.

We’re adding a new challenge tracking interface to the Map, which you can use to quickly access the challenges menu whenever you’d like.
As you scroll through your available challenges, you can now select and add them to the tracker, which will update as you make progress toward completing each one.
Additionally, you will also receive a notification in-game whenever you make progress toward one of the challenges you’ve added to the tracker.

We’ll see you again next week as we cover even more of the new game content we have in store for you in Wild Appalachia. Until then, we’ll see you in the Wasteland!

Bethesda Game Studios