Frustrating Apex Legends bug prevents players from looting death boxes

Julian Young
Apex Legends Death Box Loot Bug With Logo

A bizarre new bug has appeared in Apex Legends that apparently prevents players from grabbing anything out of death boxes, and the community isn’t happy about the game-breaking glitch.

Apex Legends Season 8 released on February 2, and introduced the 30-30 Repeater rifle, an Obliterated Kings Canyon map update, and the game’s newest Legend: Walter Fitzroy, more commonly known as Fuse.

Despite bringing a slew of new content to the battle royale, Respawn’s latest content drop also added several new bugs, ranging from more common Legend ability issues to a serious glitch that wiped out entire accounts-worth of player unlocks.

Reports of the game’s latest bug started to appear on the Apex Legends subreddit on February 19, and quickly spread like wildfire. Players from all platforms shared that they are unable to loot death boxes: a bug that has some truly game-breaking potential.

Apex Legends PVPX Death Box Bug Twitch Clip
Apex Legends streamer PVPX shared his own encounter with the death box bug.

The game’s subreddit has been flooded with reports of the bug across PC and consoles, in both the ranked and casual playlists. “Nobody can loot from death boxes and everyone on my teams that I’ve talked to have that same problem,” one user reported.

In addition to written reports of the issue, many players shared video evidence as well. In one user’s post, they attempted to loot several attachments for their R-99 SMG, but the items either briefly disappeared and then went straight back to the death box, or simply never moved at all.

Apex Legends content creator Jamison ‘PVPX’ Moore shared a clip of his own encounter with the bug during a Predator Ranked match — potentially the worst possible time for this issue to pop up. In the clip, he tried looting an enemy death box then realized that none of the items were actually picked up. “Is the server crashing?” he asked, then exclaimed, “I can’t loot the body!”

“It’s just disappearing, the loot is disappearing when you loot it,” PVPX continued. When his teammate and fellow pro Haris ‘Hodsic’ Hodzic tried to loot the death box, he ran into the same issue and confirmed “I can’t even loot it [either].”

Any game — especially complex battle royales like Apex — are bound to have their fair share of bugs, but picking up items from defeated enemies is a core part of any BR experience, and being unable to do so can quite literally break the gameplay loop entirely.

While players have reported issues with looting from death boxes, ground loot appears to be unaffected by this particular glitch, so players can still equip themselves with items found outside of death boxes (although this limitation still severely impacts the flow of the game).

The death box looting bug is not listed on the official Apex Legends Trello board at the time of writing, but with such a serious bug affecting so many players it’s only a matter of time before Respawn identifies the issue and pushes out a fix to stop the problem from occurring.