Fallout 76 has a variety of NPCs, but not a single one of them is a fellow human being. However, players using console commands and mods to gain access to a secret developer room have discovered post-apocalyptic West Virginia’s single human NPC. And he lives a tortured existence.
Dev rooms, also known as debug rooms, are generally kind of secret area in video games that are used to quickly test various game systems in-game. It’s similar to, but not the same as, the kinds of developer rooms which are Easter eggs where players can “meet” the creators.
According to Eurogamer, knowledge of Fallout 76‘s dev room has been circulating on Discord servers for several weeks, but only became common knowledge on Reddit about week ago. The room, like ones accessible through console commands in Skyrim and Fallout 4, contains every single item in the game, including some that haven’t officially been released, like power armor paints. There’s also a level 1 human NPC named Wooby hanging around, whose sole purpose in life is to act as a guinea pig for the myriad of weaponry available in the room.
Unfortunately, Wooby’s existence probably isn’t a hint at actual human NPCs arriving in the actual game. In fact, meeting him will likely get your account suspended. Players who enter the dev room will get slapped with automatic suspensions and can only return if they write back explaining how they got into the room.
Despite the risks, some players are using mule accounts to grab items from the dev room and pass them to other accounts before the banhammer falls. The dev room’s discovery is an escalation of Bethesda’s battle against exploits and misbehavior creating a surplus of top-tier loot that players may sell for real-life money.
Despite a recent patch that squished many duplication bugs (and fixing bobby pins to weigh a reasonable amount) it’s apparent that Fallout 76 still needs better security; but it’s also always interesting to see behind the scenes to see how games get tested.