Fallout 76 Infestations' new public boss battles are your ticket to top-tier legendary gear

A new Fallout 76 update has just launched, and it’s about to make the world a lot more chaotic – but also open up another way to get your hands on its top-tier gear in doing so. Fallout 76 Infestations, which is accompanied by Season 25 of the survival game, ‘Under Siege,’ covers the map in a barrage of bounteous bosses, each promising to act as a possible gateway to the four-star legendaries that have thus far been pretty elusive to get your hands on. The only caveat is that you’ll need to make sure you get there in time.

The Fallout 76 Infestations update launches today, Tuesday June 2. The gist is simple: at regular intervals, powerful faction bosses spawn somewhere on the map. You just need to head to their rough location, track them down, destroy them and their minions, and grab all the loot they were carrying. If other players find them first, you’re free to join in. Ahead of its release, I joined a roundtable to learn more from Creative Director Jon Rush, Lead Producer Bill LaCoste, Lead Designer Carl McKevitt, and Systems Designer Fahad Khan.

McKevitt says the new mechanic “floats somewhere between endgame and casual friendly,” and crucially mentions that it’s “one of the easiest ways to get a four-star.” Currently Fallout 76’s highest-ranking weapons and armor modifiers, these were introduced with the Gleaming Depths update in December 2024, and then recently made more widely available through public event ‘party crashers’ like Bigfoot in the Backwoods update. The open-ended nature of Infestations makes it a much more easily approachable source, provided you don’t go in alone.

McKevitt notes that making the step up to activities that offer four-star legendary gear “has been a hurdle that’s been hard for players that are in the ‘late but not quite endgame’ stage to cross.” He hopes the introduction of Infestations will boost the power of many players’ arsenals as a result, although some “special” four-stars will remain exclusive to the raid. If you’re already loaded up, don’t worry: Rush promises that there will be new four-stars that can be found through these activities as well.

If Bethesda pulls that goal off successfully, it could open the door to more people finding the Gleaming Depths raid approachable. It’s one of the best pieces of content Fallout 76 has ever had, yet a notable percentage of the player base has largely steered clear, because it’s at its hardest when you’ve yet to step your gear up to four-star level. Factor in all those wink-and-nudge hints that a second raid is coming soon, and you can understand why helping players get a bit stronger might be an important target for the team right now.

Enough pondering on the future, however; let’s talk more about how Infestations actually work. When one appears, a large green circle is plonked on the map, indicating the rough region that the enemy boss has dropped into. You’ll have to head there and start manually scouting around to find them – Rush mentions that, originally, the plan was for there to be no initial indication as to where to begin looking, but admitted that this only lasted “for about five minutes” on the PTS before this was determined a mistake.

McKevitt says the design of Infestations began as something “much more subtle” in nature, closer to rare spawns for high-level mobs. However, after deciding that there was “a lot of dynamic and interesting combat coming out of it,” the team doubled down on the mechanic and evolved it into the Infestations we have today. “I don’t anticipate that evolution stopping, even after launch,” he remarks, adding, “We want to diverge it from other features that are similar, like Head Hunts, to make it something special.”

There’s one elephant in the room, or perhaps a lack thereof. During our demo, which took place on the live PTS build, Rush was struggling to reach the Infestations before the other players had already killed the boss. It’s all well and good promising the new system as a way for everyone to get in on good drops, but it’s no use if they can’t even get there in time to take part. Still, that’s what testing is for. “I wouldn’t be super surprised if we took one more crack at the health values before launch,” McKevitt remarks with a smile as another ‘Infestation complete’ banner pops up in seconds.

He also notes that the sort of highly dedicated players who take part in the PTS are “not representative” of the average person on live servers, so the team is always “a little bit conservative” about reacting too strongly to the early numbers. Khan says the current difficulty tuning is “quite generous,” scaling from level 50 up to around the 200 mark, meaning that while there should still be some level of challenge for kitted-out min-maxers, “even our lower-level players up to level 50 should be able to take part.”

On top of this, the sheer quantity of Infestations might make that balance issue more negligible. In its current form, Khan says that Infestations can spawn roughly every ten minutes, and up to five can be running concurrently on a server at the same time, although this is something the live team has the ability to change later. There will also be in-game achievements tied to both finding and completing Infestations, so you’ll be rewarded if you’re an expert spotter.

Does broadening the availability of four-star legendary gear cheapen its value? McKevitt explains that, moving forward, Bethesda’s plan is to roughly separate these out into ‘common’ and ‘exclusive’ groups. The common pool will be “about half of what went out with the raids,” and any activity with the potential to drop four-stars will pull from a combination of that common pool and its own exclusive set. “We want to make sure that any new sources we introduce don’t necessarily invalidate the previous sources.”

Infestations feels like a delivery on the road to Rush’s promise of making Fallout 76 “thicker” throughout 2026. “I look at our map as kind of the main character of the game,” he says during our preview, “it’s really the number-one asset for Fallout 76.” With the introduction of Infestations, he says “it feels like the map is sizzling.” For now, these all take place in the overworld, although Rush says conversations about putting them into interior locations have happened. Then, he teases, “We might have some really cool features coming up in the not-so-distant future that do just that already, so stay tuned.”

Rush and LaCoste can’t resist one more teaser. “You keep shooting this down,” LaCoste says to his partner in crime, “but I would really love to take my dog, my hog, even the deathclaw that I just got, or my cat out there.” Rush looks at him, mock-incredulously. “Your camp pet? Out in the world? Fighting alongside you?” He thinks for a moment. “Maybe for down the road… I don’t know if players would want that.” I can certainly already think of a few who would. Watch this space, I suppose.

The Fallout 76 Infestations update is live as of Tuesday, June 2, 2026. Arriving alongside it is Season 25: Under Siege. It might not be the kind of significant map expansion or story update we’ve seen elsewhere over this past year, but these sorts of upgrades to the fundamentals of the world are needed if F76 is going to continue to stay interesting for the long term.