In Fallout 76, your character has a chance of receiving mutation if they become radiated. Many of these perks come with positive and negative effects. Some of these effects are worse than others, depending on how your building your character and what you want them to do. There are specific ways to receive mutations, how to keep them if you want to make use of their benefit, and how to get rid of them if you don’t want to deal with them on your character.
A great way to ensure your character does not receive any mutations is by wearing protective gear like hazmat suits or gas masks. You want to wear these to lower the chance of your character receiving radiated damage.
How to get Mutations in Fallout 76
Your character has a five percent chance per every five radiated health points to have a mutation sprout up. You can increase your chances of receiving a mutation by doing these things:
- Consuming radioactive food and liquids
- Standing close to scorched corpses
- Standing next to radioactive waste, zones devastated by nukes, irradiated creatures, or anything else giving off radiation points
Mutations List
| Mutations | Positive Effect | Negative Effect |
| Adrenal Reaction | More Weapon damage and quick health regeneration at low health | Max health points goes down by 50 |
| Bird Bones | Agility goes up by four and you gradually fall from heights | Strength goes down by four |
| Carnivore | No disease from Meat and twice the bonus to your food when eating meat products. | Cannot eat fruits, and vegetables. |
| Chameleon | You receive invisibility while unarmored and standing still | |
| Eagle Eyes | Your critical damage goes up by 25 percent and perception by four | Strength goes down by four |
| Egg Head | Intelligence goes up by six | Strength and endurance go down by three |
| Electrically Charged | You have a chance to shock melee attackers | |
| Empath | Damage taken by teammates goes down by 25 percent | Your damage goes up by 33 percent |
| Grounded | Energy resistance goes up by 100 | |
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| Healing Factor | Health regeneration goes up by 300 percent | Effects by chems go down by 55 percent |
| Herbivore | Eating vegetables provides twice the benefits with no chance of disease | Cannot eat meat |
| Herd Mentality | All special stats go up by two while grouped | All special stats go down by two while playing solo |
| Marsupial | Carry weight increases by 20 and you have a larger jump height | Intelligence goes down by four |
| Plague walker | Poison aura scaling with your diseases | Diseases |
| Scaly skin | Damage and energy resistance goes up by 50 | Your AP goes down by 50 |
| Speed Demon | Movement speed goes up by 20 and you have a faster reload | Increased drain on your hunger and thirst |
| Talons | Punching attackers does 25 percent more damage and causes bleeding | Agility goes down by four |
| Twisted Muscles | Melee damage goes up by 25 percent, and you have a better chance to cripple limbs | Your gun accuracy goes down by 50 percent |
| Unstable Isotope | You have a chance to irradiate melee attackers | |
How to keep and cure mutations
Each mutation comes with a positive and negative effect. However, if you find one you want to have on your character, you can receive the starched genes perk when you reach rank two. You cannot keep a mutation otherwise. The perk prevents you from losing the mutation when you use RadAway to remove the radiation from your character.
If you want to cure the mutation, you can use RadAway without the starched genes perk to eliminate one. However, you only have a chance of this happening. A definite method of removing one from your character is to visit the Whitesprin Bunker to use the contamination chamber.
