Fallout 76 players build decryption tools to simplify nuke launches
What if I do want to set the world on fire?
Further trivialising the use of nuclear weapons in Fallout 76, canny players have made tools to bruce force decrypting its nuke launch codes. Players will still need to gather partial codes by defeating high-level enemies, collect keycards, then fight to the silo control room, but the description tools save a lot of time guessing at ciphers. Nukes are mostly useful in the online survival sandbox for irradiating areas so real big nasty monsters spawn for your raiding pleasure, and this helps people get to that faster. Which could be good or bad depending on how you feel about end-game challenges?
Launching a nuke in Fallout 76 requires a fair few steps. Each of the three silos has eight code fragments you can find by killing certain high-level ghouls, plus you'll need to nab a launch keycard from certain cargo bots, and then you need to decipher the code. They're encrypted using a keyword cipher, with each week's keyword revealed letter-by-letter in the Enclave Bunker. That's where tools like NukaCrypt (as pointed out by Kotaku) come in.
Rather than go through faffy decryption processes and permutations yourself, you can just tell that website the codes you know and part of the keyword and vip vam voom it'll do the work for you. It can even decrypt a partial keyword, using science, which would take so much more time and guesswork to do yourself. There's still a lot of legwork, but it's easier this way.
That's one mystery and puzzle gone from the game, I suppose. But it was inevitable given the encryption technique; that's a Riverdale-level puzzler with a solution that's easily automated.
Nukes. Huah! What are they good for? Not really griefing, given the number of hoops you need to jump through and how easy it is to rebuild if you do get nuked. Lobbing nukes is mostly a way to trigger the spawning of high-level nasties like the level 95 dragonbat Scorchbeast Queen, as this video shows (I haven't watched it all so dear god please let them not say terrible things):
