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Fallout 76's latest update relaxes its building rules so you can try erecting a nuclear bunker in mid-air
Game Updates

Fallout 76’s latest update relaxes its building rules so you can try erecting a nuclear bunker in mid-air

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Fallout 76’s latest patch is following up the addition of fishing in the only way that’s natural. Bethesda have opted to revamp its base building mechanics in an effort to make thing easier for newbies and offer veterans some extra freedom to stick huge shacks full of stuff together in different ways.

For Patch 62, dubbed ‘C.A.M.P revamp’, menus have been rejigged and placement restrictions relaxed in an effort to have you spend 60 more hours slapping bits of wood into accomodation, rather than going off and ruining some super mutant’s day. Then again, I can’t imagine the green folks are too happy about the wasteland being turned into a showroom of properties that’d probably cost several million quid despite the fact they can barely keep the radiation out, such are modern house prices.

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The aspect of the patch – which drops today, September 2nd – that’s most caught my eye is the restriction loosening that the devs say will allow players to stick a number of items anywhere, “even in the air”. While this doesn’t apply to everything, with some stuff still demanding you set it down on the ground, the patch’s trailer shows off a number of houses built atop rocky outcrops that’d usually turn everything red outside of modded Fallout 4.

To paraphrase a British TV show, when it comes to houses it’s the whereabouts, whereabouts, whereabouts that can be key, and this looks to be making killer views much more accessible. Is it wise to build your house up high and out in the open if there are nukes flying around? Probably not, but hey, video game.

In line with that general restriction loosening, the need to snap home components directly together has also been relaxed. “Walls can also be built beneath the floor, and upper floors can be attached to walls without the need for a staircase,” Bethesda say. Yep, just get rid of your stairs and use a power armour jetpack to get upstairs. I’m sure that’ll end well if your fusion core runs dry and you’re bursting for the loo. Actually, I’m forgetting, this is a video game house. The very swanky and totally unnecessary downstairs commode was the second thing you built.

Finally, there’s the building menu revamp, which aims to make it easier to find the thing you’re looking for without as much rummaging through interface drawers. “We’ve arranged our thousands of items into main categories and subcategories. For example, our lighting main category now has multiple subcategories such as freestanding lights and wall-mounted lights.” There’s a quote you’d just as likely find in an email from your flat-pack furniture retailer of choice.

As you’d expect, Bethesda’s got a bunch of community building competitions planned for the rest of the year, with the first set to run from the revamp’s release to September 29th. Good luck beating out the loose collection of floor-walls with random clutter slapped onto it that I might submit.



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Hoskinson Goes Nuclear On Cardano Foundation: Here’s Why

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Charles Hoskinson used his latest AMA to unleash his most forceful critique yet of the Cardano Foundation (CF), defending the decision to exclude the CF from claiming Midnight’s NIGHT tokens while outlining aggressive multi-chain partnerships, airdrop mechanics he says could be among the largest ever, and a near-term push around Token2049 and an Asia tour.

At the center was the Midnight redemption controversy. Asked “to address the decision to limit the CF from claiming NIGHT tokens,” Hoskinson framed the move as a necessary risk control rooted in the airdrop’s terms. “We built it. It’s my money. We can do whatever the hell we want to do,” he said, adding that the distribution included a disclaimer about “undue burden and harm to the network.”

Hoskinson Torches Cardano Foundation

He asserted ownership of the CF’s ADA is “not clear,” claiming “the Swiss government stole the ADA,” and warned that letting the CF redeem would introduce an adversarial governance bloc: “They’d come in and instantly be adversarial […] and assert that they have some sort of governance control. Let somebody else have that NIGHT who’s going to do something more with it.”

He escalated further later in the stream: “At what point does the community tell the CF to f*** off […] the free [stuff] they already squandered?” and, when pressed on why to blacklist the Foundation’s addresses, replied, “Why invite a bad actor […] into an ecosystem?”

He added to his rant: “I’m out there alone and it’s expensive, guys. Some of these deals with the big guys, they’ve become eight figure deals. […] It’s frustrating because all of our competitors have foundations that in some cases have endowments that are in the billions to tens of billions of dollars and they’re hungry and aggressive, and they’re doing stuff and they’re investing in stuff and they’re really pushing things forward.”

Hoskinson also insisted that the Midnight rollout materially benefits Cardano rather than siphoning attention from it, pointing to custody and exchange integrations set up to list both Midnight and Cardano-native assets. “We just announced today the Copper partnership[…] any exchange that uses Copper as a custodian […] can now support that asset. And […] they didn’t just agree to support Midnight. They agreed to support Cardano and Cardano native tokens,” he said, grouping Copper with relationships involving Bitcoin.com, Blockchain.com and Brave.

Hoskinson also said IOHK is working with Chainlink on a first-ever UTXO deployment: “We sat down with Sergey [Nazarov] […] They’re skeptical about the engineering cost […] [but] ‘I think we can figure it out.’”

The CF critique broadened into a sweeping governance and resourcing indictment. Hoskinson alleged the Foundation “is just not deploying capital in meaningful ways,” noting its absence from recent conferences: “When I was at Salt […] who wasn’t there? The CF. When we were at Rare Evo […] there was no CF booth.”

The Midnight Foundation Is Different

By contrast, he cast the Midnight Foundation as aggressively commercial—110 deals in the pipeline and “hungry” account management across ecosystems—and pointed to Intersect, Cardano’s members-based body, as the organ that now embodies his original foundation vision: “You already got a members-based organization […] It took two years to build it […] Now just add like $600 million […] and give them four extra years.”

He drew a direct line from CF governance to reputational damage: “Members of the organization are low-key soft accusing us of stealing money […] Were there any apologies? Was there any attempt for reconciliation?”

The animus with the CF bled into an evidentiary promise. Hoskinson said the audit report is in the final stages—“we’re so close to the release”—intended to “close out a 10-year history lesson from 2015 to 2025,” including “the original contracts with IO […] how much funds were raised […] the sale […] ADA vouching,” and audits tied to the Cardano Foundation.

Hoskinson framed it as “complete exoneration on our part,” and “very damning” for the CF’s “recusal […] of their responsibilities,” arguing that the Foundation’s decision to distance itself from Cardano’s origin story “created a lot of problems.” The purpose, he said, is “sunlight”: “You push it all out there […] and I think those conclusions will be very positive and favorable to Input Output.”

At press time, ADA traded at $0.8795.

ADA remains above the red zone, 1-week chart | Source: ADAUSDT on TradingView.com

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

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Product Reviews

Google announces first nuclear site to power its data centers

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Big Tech’s foray into nuclear power continues as Google announced the site of its first nuclear reactor today, as part of its 2024 deal with startup Kairos Power. Oak Ridge, Tennessee, will be home to the Hermes 2 plant, which will supply Google with 50 megawatts of power under a long-term purchase agreement with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

The Oak Ridge plant is the first in a 500-megawatt deal that comprises multiple small modular reactors (SMRs) to provide power for Google’s data centers in Montgomery County, Tennessee, and Jackson County, Alabama. The Hermes 2 is scheduled to begin operations in 2030.

In a statement, TVA CEO Don Moul said, “Nuclear is the bedrock of the future of energy security. Google stepping in and helping shoulder the burden of the cost and risk for first-of-a-kind nuclear projects not only helps Google get to those solutions, but it keeps us from having to burden our customers with development of that technology.”

Google’s deal with Kairos Power is expected to reach its full 500 MW potential by 2035 and was the first-ever corporate deal to buy nuclear power from SMRs. The financial specifics of the deal have not been released.



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Scientists Pitch Bold Plan to Turn Nuclear Waste Into Nuclear Fuel
Gaming Gear

Scientists Pitch Bold Plan to Turn Nuclear Waste Into Nuclear Fuel

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Nuclear fusion has seen some exciting advances, and the promise of clean, efficient energy does seem to be creeping closer to reality. But skeptics point to practical issues we may not be trying hard enough to solve—issues that will inevitably weigh down our reactors when they finally arrive.

A new proposal by Terence Tarnowsky, a nuclear physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, focuses on one key part of the problem: finding a supply of tritium, a fundamental ingredient for fusion. Tarnowsky, who will present his roadmap next week at the ACS Fall 2025 conference, suggests tapping into the thousands of tons of nuclear waste, including spent reactor fuel, using the sleeping atoms within to support tritium production. With the right adjustments to an accelerator-like apparatus, this strategy could reliably create a self-sufficient source of the precious isotope.

In a successful fusion reactor, tritium and deuterium—two lightweight hydrogen isotopes—fuse and release a gigantic load of energy in the process. By contrast, current nuclear plants run on fission, or the splitting of heavy atoms such as uranium, which also generates a hefty amount of power but produces long-lived radioactive byproducts. This waste material just “[sits] around the country,” presumably for a million years, and costs hundreds of millions of dollars each year to manage, Tarnowsky explained to Gizmodo during a video call. 

Meanwhile, the promise of fusion is shadowed by an inevitable shortage of tritium, an extremely rare and unstable hydrogen isotope. “There are only tens of kilograms [of tritium]—both natural and artificial—on the entire planet,” Tarnowsky said. And it doesn’t help that nuclear experiments worldwide are burning through those tiny supplies at an alarming rate. “So, where is this tritium supposed to come from?”

Breeding tritium in labs is a viable option, but again, there’s a very good reason we haven’t found the perfect recipe; it’s a “tricky fuel to deal with,” Tarnowsky said. 

“If you breed tritium now, it’s not like you can stash it in a container for 30 years from now, because it decays to helium-3 very quickly,” he explained. “And it also has the chemistry of hydrogen. Hydrogen likes to get out of things; it likes to get stuck in walls. So it’s a hard thing to deal with.” For context, the half-life of tritium is 12.3 years, meaning it decays to half of its original amount in that time.

Tarnowsky’s proposal combines previous theories with recent technological advancements. Simply, the idea is to employ a particle accelerator to trigger the decay of uranium and plutonium atoms inside nuclear waste, resulting in a series of neutron bursts and other nuclear transitions that would eventually produce tritium atoms. The waste would be covered with molten lithium salt to shield the process from overexposure to harmful radiation, according to Tarnowsky. 

With the right design, Tarnowsky surmises this method could “produce more than 10 times as much tritium as a fusion reactor at the same thermal power,” as noted in the press release. That said, he admits that this roadmap would require bold commitments from both the public and private sectors. 

Fusion economy is irreversible in some ways, Tarnowsky said. It’s certainly not something where one “can flip a switch and have a backup system running if something goes terribly wrong with tritium breeding,” Tarnowsky said. “You need to plan ahead by a very long time frame.”

But the longer we wait, the more we’re essentially digging ourselves into a hole, he said. “Every year we continue to operate our nuclear power plants—in a very safe manner!—we also make more spent fuel every year, [which] increases about 2,000 metric tons per year. So the liabilities are getting worse every year.”

All that said, Tarnowsky remains hopeful for the future of nuclear fusion—and, really, completing our transition toward clean energy. 

“I’d say, you know, 10 years ago, this kind of technology being proposed in this space would not have received this much interest; people were wary about nuclear power plants,” he said. “And then they went to burn dirty coal. Well, what are you going to do? But we’re having this conversation now, and people aren’t just reacting with fear.”



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