Thankfully this was definitely a bug, not a feature, and Bethesda have released a hotfix to sort it out. A bunch of players were affected by this thievery, losing all kinds of special weapons they’d worked hard to get. One player, “Lizardinosaurus”, reported that an NPC stole one of their guns after they died during a PvE event. When they respawned and returned to the area, they saw the cheeky thief casually using their gatling gun. You should be safe to venture back out now though, as Bethesda say they’ve addressed the problem. “We just released a hotfix for Fallout 76 to address a rare issue where NPCs could take items from a dead player under certain circumstances,” they said on Tuesday. “We did not need to take the game offline to do this, and the hotfix has now been applied to all worlds.” If you were robbed before the fix, unfortunately there’s no mention of whether or not you’ll get your stuff back. You could try and get some new loot by following that weird deer, I guess. Or we do have a Fallout 76 guide on how to make loads of money in-game - maybe buying some even better gear will cheer you up.
