Inside the Vault – Protect Appalachia PTS Update - April 24, 2026

Player Ghoul Radiation Adjustments

Today we’re making some targeted adjustments to the Player Ghoul radiation experience to generally improve your ability to utilize environmental radiation as well as making some improvements to how Glowing One and Rad Reaver interact with Glow.

• Increased Player Ghoul health gain from environmental radiation: 20% -> 35%.

• Increased Player Ghoul Glow gain from environmental radiation: 25% -> 35%.

• Rad Specialist Perk: +5/10/15% more environmental Glow -> +10/20/30% more environmental Glow.

• Player Ghouls now have -50 Radiation resist by default (similar behavior to the Breathe It In Perk).

  • Dev Note: This change gives Player Ghouls a higher threshold before they need to be concerned about radiation resistance on armor preventing them from healing/gaining glow from radiation.

• Fixed cases where the Glowing One and Rad Reaver Perks weren't providing as much Glow as intended.

• Fixed a case where the Glowing legendary weapon mod provided less Glow than intended.

• Doubled the radius of the Glowing One Perk.

• Reduced the Glow granted by the Glowing One Perk from 6/12 -> 4/8.

  • Dev Note: The increased radius listed above should make the effect much more available and result in much more overall Healing/Glow income, so we've reduced the magnitude a bit to reduce the risk of this effect being too powerful.

• Addressed an issue where Glowing Blood Packs added Radiation Resist to Player Ghouls.

• Adjusted Irradiated Blood Packs to no-longer apply Radiation Resist to Player Ghouls.

• Irradiated Blood Packs are now affected by the Bloodsucker perk (regular Blood Packs and Glowing Blood Packs were already affected).

Non-PA Radiation Resistances

• Reduced the radiation resist on most non-PA armor (by 45-65%).

  • Dev Note: With the changes to radiation in this update, each individual point of Rad Resist is much stronger than before. This left the radiation damage mitigation power of non-PA armor in a very strong state, even more so when used in combination with the increased usefulness of armor mods and items. This change still leaves non-PA armor radiation damage resistance at a higher level than it was before The Backwoods update while bringing it inline with our intended goals.

Weapons

• Fixed missing crafting costs for the Light Machine Gun Standard Barrel, Standard Stock, and Standard Magazine mods.

• Renamed the Light Machine Gun "Standard Muzzle" mod to "No Muzzle".

• Added energy damage to the Gamma Gun (in addition to the existing Radiation damage).

Infestations

We’re continuing to work on changes to Infestations based on your feedback by exploring solutions that provide you with more information about their locations without becoming as explicit as a Public Event.

Our goal is to preserve the small team fight and organic discovery experience as much as possible while still ironing out the frustrations that you have expressed when it comes to finding them.

While that’s being worked on, we’re increasing the frequency of Infestations to assist in any testing you would like to do. We continue to welcome your thoughts on the feature!