Borderlands 4 is a looter shooter that revolves around… loot. But what happens when you can’t get your hard-earned Legendary drop because it got trapped out of bounds or behind an invisible wall? Desperate Borderlands 4 players are running into that exact problem and are now pleading with developer Gearbox for a fix.
If you’ve played Borderlands 4 you’ll probably know the feeling. It’s the europhoria that comes from a Legendary drop among the confetti-like explosion of loot that erupts from a downed boss. This is something the Borderlands series has always done well, perhaps better, even, than any other looter shooter. When Gearbox chief Randy Pitchford recently said if more developers better understood why gamers love loot, then Borderlands would have “good competitors,” most agreed with him.
But if that Legendary flies off and lands out of bounds, the frustration is just as intense as the euphoria that proceeded it. Double the intensity if the Legendary spirals away after a particularly difficult boss fight.
This has been a problem with Borderlands 4 since launch, but it was exacerbated this week with the weekly endgame content reset, which rotated The Oppressor into this week’s Big Encore boss fight. The problem here is The Oppressor is a flying enemy (flying enemies in shooters are almost always more annoying to fight than any other), which means it darts about the sky, sometimes over areas the player can’t reach. And what happens when you land the killing shot as it’s in the air? The loot flies sometimes lands on a roof, behind an invisible wall just out of reach, or off the map entirely.
Players are, understandably, infuriated. “Do not waste your Eridium on this week's Big Encore Boss Opressor unless you want to lose loot,” declared redditor PuzzleheadedDust8094. “If you value your Eridium and dislike getting screwed out of your items because Gearbox can't seem to prevent your loot from flying outside of the arena or through walls, you absolutely should avoid fighting this boss UNTIL THEY FIX THIS.
“I have lost so much loot to bosses dropping stuff in places you can't get to because it's a giant death pit or because of bogus invisible walls. This week’s Big Encore boss might just be the biggest offender yet. I've lost (and I wish I was joking) 7 OUT OF 10 Big Encores worth of loot. That's 700 hard earned Eridium down the drain.”
“I swear to god if they don't fix The Oppressor loot issues (out of bounds or spread around the entire arena rather than where the boss is) and flying around for a full f***ing minute before you can even hit him, I may lose a bit of faith,” said StretchDizzy7792.
“Please QC your Big Encore picks. Two weeks in a row of bosses with issues (loot under floor on last weeks). It takes 15 minutes of farming the boss to realize if there's an issue most people will experience.
“I hope to god they pushed back the patch to add a fix in for this.”
“Big Encore… 6 kills. 3 Legendary’s out of bounds. 0 Legendary’s in the lost loot box,” said S0LWAY. “Horse apples! Absolute horse apples!!”
That’s a reference to Borderlands 4’s Lost Loot Machine, which is supposed to be a backup for this very problem by scooping up lost loot and saving it for collection later. But it doesn’t seem to be working properly — at least, players believe it isn’t working properly — because it tends to favor low quality loot over rare loot and thus fills up, leaving no room for those prize guns.
“The Lost Loot Machine has to be broken,” said one disgruntled player. “There is no way it's working correctly right now. I've only seen one purple and one blue item in it. The rest has always been white and green.”
“It's supposed to replace gear with higher quality loot once full but it's definitely not doing that,” said another. “I constantly leave behind blue gear and that thing should be littered with blues, but nope.”
@GearboxOfficial @Borderlands
— Bunbun Jackalope 🐰 (@BunbunJackalope) October 17, 2025
Flies around sporadically with no inertia looking awful, gets stuck on map geometry, upon dying flies out of arena to drop all loot in inaccessible places. Arena is filled with invisible walls for no reason. Did this fight even go though QA? pic.twitter.com/JFUwmWKqJr
For now, Borderlands 4 players are trying to help each other out by suggesting fixes for the problem, although there’s no consensus on what works and no guarantees, either. Some suggest saving and quitting as soon as the Legendary goes out of bounds, and then, upon loading back in, heading straight to the Lost Loot Machine. Maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe not.
This week’s hotly anticipated patch — the one set to nerf “unintended interactions” such as the crit knife, was delayed to early next week. Some are hoping this ‘Day 30 Update’ will also sort out Borderlands 4’s lost Legendaries problem. In the meantime, there’s a new mod, on the Borderlands 4 NexusMods page, that some players are finding success with (this is only if you’re playing on PC, of course). It’s called Ground Loot Helpers and lets you teleport all the loot to your character. Now that’s a quality-of-life improvement I can get behind.
Unlike an invisible wall.
We’ve got plenty more on Borderlands 4. Last month, a Borderlands 4 dataminer unearthed evidence to suggest that one of the most hated characters from Borderlands 3 was cut and replaced relatively late in development. 2K Games and Gearbox declined to comment when contacted by IGN.
If you are delving into Borderlands 4, don't go without updated hourly SHiFT codes list. We've also got a huge interactive map ready to go and a badass Borderlands 4 planner tool courtesy of our buds at Maxroll. Plus check out our expert players' choices for which character to choose (no one agreed).
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
