One badly thrown Molotov cocktail turned the console version of Fallout 4 into an acid trip

Bugs in Bethesda games have long since become a genre of their own. Sometimes a random rendering glitch produces an image no studio artist would ever have come up with. The nuclear wasteland suddenly glows neon, as if lit by a black light in a teenager's bedroom.

That is exactly what happened to one player in Fallout 4 on Xbox. The character took a Molotov cocktail in an elevator, and the whole world turned a toxic green. In the first screenshot, the Grognak axe glows, a unique weapon from the Hubris Comics shop in Boston. Thanks to the green tint, the axe is easy to mistake for a glass weapon from The Elder Scrolls or a Skyrim mod. The second shot turned out even funnier: a frozen, deathly stare with burning red eyes, aimed straight at Arturo Rodriguez, the gunsmith from Diamond City.

Technically, an old engine ailment is most likely to blame. Fallout 4 occasionally loads cubemaps incorrectly, the environment textures the game uses to calculate reflections. When one of those maps gets stuck on the wrong color, every shiny and light-colored surface changes along with it. Metal, puddles, white text, and even eyes take the hit, and the red tint of the pupils probably came from a green reflection mixing with a semi-transparent brown texture. Other players have seen the same glitch in pink, blue, and yellow shades, especially in heavy locations like Sanctuary on saves with hundreds of hours played.

The game lore, meanwhile, offers far more colorful explanations. Some decided the character had finally seen the world through the eyes of the Children of Atom, others diagnosed uranium fever, and the comments promptly broke into a chorus of "Uranium Fever" from Diamond City Radio. The simplest diagnosis turned out to be the most accurate:

You aren't supposed to drink the molotov

The fix is mundane: just restart the game. But the owner of the save admitted to liking the green filter and is in no hurry to part with it, especially since the neon palette suits a nuclear apocalypse and recalls Dogtown from Cyberpunk 2077 and Borderlands. Players also pointed out that recent Fallout 4 updates, starting with the 2024 next-gen patch, brought new bugs and crashes and broke mods on many saves.

Fallout 4 will turn 11 soon, and the Bethesda engine is still throwing surprises.