Borderlands 3 Has Its Own Loot Cave (For Now)

How would you like to earn a ton of legendary loot in Borderlands 3 without having to work all that hard? It's possible, thanks to a new loot farming location found in the game.

The sweet new loot spot in question was discovered by PC Gamer's James Davenport, who reports that it's located in the Jakob's Estate area on Eden-6. After changing the game's difficulty to Mayhem 3 (so you can earn better loot), you'll find a purple loot tink who spawns under a deck in the southwest portion of the map. Apparently, you can kill this tink, grab his loot, fast travel back to the start of Jakob's Estate, and then quit and load back in to do it all again. Over and over and over.

It certainly seems to be the Borderlands 3 equivalent of the "loot cave," in which you can do a tiny bit of work and gain a lot of rewards in return, but only because the game is letting you do something it probably shouldn't. And that term is, of course, an homage to the famous Destiny loot cave that player spent hours shooting into. But there's no telling how long the spot will stick around before Gearbox comes along with a patch. This could be fixed days from now or weeks from now. It depends how many other fires the team at Gearbox is trying to put out right now.

If you're looking to get as much legendary loot as you can in the shortest amount of time, we suggest you take advantage of this loot tink loop as soon as possible. Get as many runs in as you can. Collect as much legendary gear as you can. It doesn't seem likely that Gearbox would punish anyone who farmed loot, or that the studio would take weapons away from those who found them. But this really doesn't feel like something that's going to last forever.

What it does feel like, though, is something that is happening more and more in looter shooters. It seems there is a healthy amount of players out there who enjoy these kinds of games, and revel in the excitement of receiving new weapons and armor. What these players don't like doing, however, is actually grinding through the game in order to obtain these gear drops in the intended manner. These loot farming locations ultimately throw off the balance of the game, as they enable players to procure powerful guns far more efficiently than the game would otherwise allow, thus making those players more powerful.

And it's possible these bountiful loot spots could actually cause players to engage with the game less, as they'll have less of a reason to boot up their favorite shooter if they feel there's nothing to chase. Looter shooters like Borderlands 3 and Destiny 2 are all about hunting down that elusive white whale of a weapon. They're designed to keep you coming back to try again, almost like you're pulling a lever on a slot machine. And, as gross as it sounds, you get the same brain chemical buzz from getting a nice weapon drop as you do when you win at slots. Players who get all of the good loot in one go, though? They're not going to keep playing. And that's bad for companies like Gearbox and Bungie, which is why you can probably expect this issue to be patched up in short order.

Aside from the aforementioned loot farming fiasco, there has been one other issue with Borderlands 3 that should be a cause for concern, and it has to do with cloud-based game saves on PC. Some players are reportedly seeing their save files wiped out entirely thanks to the Epic Launcher's cloud saves feature, so if you happen to be playing Borderlands 3 on PC, you might want to hold off on using cloud saves; at least until the issue is fixed.

Otherwise, it looks like Borderlands 3 is doing about as well as everyone expected. The game is sitting at a Metacritic score of 85 currently, and most who've played it and offered a critical analysis state that it's more Borderlands for people who like Borderlands. If that sounds like you, great!

Borderlands 3 is available right now on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Should we learn about any other exploits in the game, we'll be sure to share them with you here.