Fallout 76 Custom Worlds: How Do They Work?

New features were added to Fallout 76 with the release of Season 6. One of the more prominent features added is custom worlds. Custom worlds are the replacement for Fallout 76’s battle royale game mode, Nuclear Winter.

Custom worlds allow players to host private sessions of Fallout 76 and apply game-changing effects to those sessions. Much like the previous private worlds, custom worlds can only be set up by Fallout 1^st members. Hosts can invite their friends to these sessions, but the friends will need the host to be online to rejoin those sessions later unless they have an active subscription to the game. Custom worlds can support up to eight players at a time, just like private worlds can.

When creating a custom world, players have three submenus of settings to customize their world. The Workshop menu allows for the customization of settings surrounding the building and some aspects of crafting. These settings allow options such as allowing objects to be built and crafted at no cost, allowing more objects to be placed in C.A.M.P.s, or allowing the width and height of a C.A.M.P.’s building radius to be extended or shrunk.

The combat menu contains settings for PvP and PvE combat as well as legendary effects. The menu allows the host to raise or lower equipment durability, disable legendary effects on weapons and armor, change the amount of damage players take and deal, and more settings relating to combat.

The final menu is a random assortment of settings that didn’t fall under the other two. These are settings like making players drop more than just their junk when they die, different settings of weather, adding a visual filter to the game, and determining if all locations on the map are discovered without having to visit them.

There are a few more settings that I didn’t list above, but for the most part I covered the major game-changing settings that are available. Overall the settings are not too impactful to gameplay, the most they allow for is a player to re-roll legendary weapons and armor to try out a specific build without having to waste resources on it.

An important thing to note is that you cannot carry a save from a custom world over to adventure mode. When you join a custom world, a copy of your current adventure mode character is copied onto the custom world and is used for that custom world alone. You can have up to five characters for custom worlds, which means you can actively play in five custom or public worlds at a time.

You can unlink a character from a world to be used in a different one once you reached the five character limit. You can also reimport your current adventure character at any time. This is why custom worlds seem like more of a testing area over anything else. You can’t make any meaningful progress in a custom world. Any levels you gain or items you find are stuck in that custom world, and you can’t complete any challenges or earn any points for the Scoreboard while playing in a custom world.