For some odd reason, I decided to pop on again yesterday and today after some patches downloaded. It's now become barely adequate, which is a huge improvement. It's only crashed once in two gaming sessions, which is very good by the amazingly low standards set by FO76. Only 2 of the "challenges" are still bugged - kill tough monsters because killing a scorchbeast queen doesn't register (I've killed dozens) and find locations in cranberry bog because finding/visting abandoned bogtown doesn't work. So that's a big improvement over what it was.
I threw some of the useless legendary scrip at the surveyor and for the first time it wasn't entirely useless! I got an anti-armour faster firing minigun which is just the job because faster firing is just what the fastest firing gun in the game needed
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So I chrome plated it because that went nicely with my coal black power armour and went to waste some of the ~20,000 5mm bullets I have by running in and out of the golf club to get a pack of a couple of dozen L62 feral ghouls chasing after me. It was quite amusingly silly overkill. No use as a general weapon because of the spin-up time and the ridiculous rate at which it uses bullets, but amusing and maybe useful against the tiny handful of tougher mobs. It weighs very little with a heavy weapons build and it uses the 5mm bullets my main weapons (3 miniguns with different legendary effects), so why not?
I also got what initially looked promising - a harpoon gun with legendary effects I don't recall. 322 damage per shot. Mod a harpoon gun with flechettes and you have infinite ammo because you can shoot corpses with it to magically create more harpoons in the corpse than you fired into the corpse. So I did, for testing. Single shot, bolt action reload between shots, has a scope...it's a sniper rifle! Aaaannd...it's useless as a sniper rifle because it's only accurate at short to medium range. Maybe that's a shortcoming of my build. So I put it in my shop for 500 caps, my usual price for 3* legendaries that someone might want.
Hardly anyone was on throughout both sessions. Despite being in what used to be a popular location, I had no trouble placing my camp when popping in and out of the game in between doing RL things. On several occasions I encountered a pristine Whitesprings. Doors closed, nothing touched. I've never seen that before. Maybe Bethesda has increased the number of servers, but I doubt it. Some people are paying for private servers (why?), but there can't be many people doing that.
Wastelanders is due out on the 7th of April, along with release on Steam. With seperate atom points for each version, so you can't really swap from one to the other. With dozens of patches so far and with Wastelanders, it looks like it might become something like the game it should have been to begin with. If Wastelanders is as good and as big as they're making it out to be.