We have nearly reached the halfway point of 2026 and also the end of Fallout 76’s Season 24. And now, Fallout 76 Season 25, titled “Appalachia Under Siege,” is set to kick off with Update 68 called “Infestations”. These Infestations will introduce new faction-controlled encounters and challenges for players, along with, of course, new rewards and achievements. During an off-hands media preview, we checked out some of the new infestations coming in Update 68.
This new update seems to expand on one one of the title’s last patches, Update 66: “The Backwoods,“ with its focus on player exploration and group play. One of the main goals for Infestations, according to Creative Director Jon Rush and the Fallout 76 team, is to “Bring the map alive.”
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While the last Fallout 76 updates added public events, this one is focusing on different sections of the map. These new areas are Infestations. This new element are random faction-controlled encounters that will be located around the map for players to stumble upon. Players will see a large circle on the map in the same way a nuke location shows up, but it will be in a different color for denotation.
Fallout 76 Season 25’s Update 68 is adding Infestations to Appalachia.
Once players are within the circle, they must investigate the area to locate the actual infestation, which consists of enemies of a specific faction or force, such as Super Mutants, and then try to retake the area from the infestation. To clear the infestation, players will need to locate and kill the area’s main boss.
These infestations do sort of resemble the already current Public Event system; however, they are located in vastly different areas of the map. There will be 40 infestation locations, and none of them will overlap with any existing public event areas.
Most, if not all, of them will be located on the more outer parts of the map, and this was purposeful. The Fallout 76 team wanted to give players a reason to return to locations that are not usually explored or revisited once discovered.
This design of having these infestations out of the way will force players to explore more parts of the map and hopefully, as mentioned before, “bring the map alive” with events and activities now happening all over the map and not just the main common locations that players are used to traveling to.
Infestations will be in the more challenging content side of things, scaling from level 50 all the way to level 200. Now, this means the rewards will be more rewarding as 4-star legendaries can drop from these infestations and will include their own set of 4-star items for players. The map can even get a little hectic as there can be multiple infestations occurring at the same time.
Fallout 76 Update 68: Infestations are really about these infestations, as that is the main focus and really all that is in this update. However, these infestations should give players some new challenging content and explore regions of the map that they may not have visited in quite a while.
Infestations bring life to the outer parts of the map, incetivizing play there.
The other key component is that it is another way for players to obtain 4-star items for their characters. It really feels like these are supposed to be an almost intermediate way for mid-game players to get better gear and work their way up to The Gleaming Depths raid.
While there is a main boss that needs to be killed for these infestations, the Party Crasher System that was introduced in Update 66 will not be a part of these, and none of the Party Crashers will be in any of the infestations.
Ultimately, “Infestations,” isn’t adding anything too substantial for players looking for more depth. However, for those looking for more combat, the addition of Infestations will ge the job done, extending players’ interaction with the map beyond the areas that Public Events added more content to.
Fallout 76 Update 68: Infestations and Season 25 are available now.
