The Borderlands 4 Glitch That Breaks Every Build
Borderlands 4 players have already seen their fair share of strange bugs, from overpowered crit knives to bizarre boss interactions that caused what fans jokingly called total existence failure. But the newest discovery might be the most game breaking one yet. It lets you unlock your strongest abilities and then refund almost all of your skill points.
The glitch was first found by an anonymous player and then shared with the community by Borderlands creator JoltzDude139. He called it the most insane glitch in Borderlands and claimed it could change the build meta for every character. In a game that lives and dies on wild builds and theory crafting, that is a big statement.
If you enjoy messing with skill trees, this bug basically hands you the keys to the vault. You can grab top tier skills across different trees without paying the normal tax of fully investing in the ones below. It is powerful, it is broken, and it almost certainly will not last long.
How The Skill Point Glitch Works
The actual method is not super complicated, but it does require some setup and patience. You cannot use it right away at level one. You need a decent number of skill points first so that your tree is already filling out.
Here is how the process works in simple terms:
- Spend skill points in a tree until you can reach the big ability you want.
- Make sure every skill you invest in stays at least two points below its maximum rank.
- Reach the powerful skill you are aiming for but keep one single skill point unspent.
- Go back to an earlier skill in the same tree.
- Use the option to dump all of your remaining points into that skill.
- Immediately hit the undo button to reverse that spend.
Normally, undoing should give you back the one leftover point you just dumped. Instead, the game gets confused. It refunds more points than it should, effectively duplicating your skill points. According to JoltzDude139, the exploit works by tricking the game into thinking you invested more than one point in that last move.
The really broken part is that you can repeat this process. Every time you dump your remaining points and then undo, you squeeze more points back out of the skill. Over time, your total available points climb way beyond what your level should allow.
There is one important catch. The glitch stops working if you fully max out any skill during the dump step. To keep it going, you need to be careful and spread your refunded points around the tree instead of capping any single node while you are in the middle of the loop.
It is not a quick trick. JoltzDude139 calls it tedious, and you do need a healthy pool of points before it becomes worth the time. But for players who love min maxing and build crafting, the payoff is kind of absurd.
Why This Changes The Meta And Why You Should Hurry
Borderlands games are built around the idea that you make trade offs. You choose one path in a skill tree which means you cannot fully invest in another. This glitch throws that whole design out the window. By farming extra points from the skill tree, you can grab the best capstone abilities across multiple trees on the same character.
That means things like:
- Stacking multiple top tier offensive abilities that were never meant to be active together.
- Skipping weaker prerequisite skills while still reaching the big payoffs.
- Experimenting with weird cross tree combos that would be impossible in normal play.
It is exactly the kind of chaos that Borderlands players love to toy with. For people who already beat the main story or are grinding endgame content, this glitch is basically a free sandbox to try every dumb power fantasy build you can imagine.
Of course, Gearbox has noticed. Borderlands 4 creative director Graeme Timmins replied to the glitch thread with a simple message. We are on it. That pretty much confirms a patch is coming, and soon. When it lands, you should expect this trick to vanish and the skill trees to go back to behaving like a normal RPG.
So if you are curious what your character can really do when the usual limits are gone, now is the time. Fire up Borderlands 4, back up your save if you can, and test out whatever cursed build ideas you have been sitting on. Just do not get too attached. Once the update rolls out, those supercharged setups may become impossible to recreate.
Interestingly, this meta breaking bug is not even the biggest problem Borderlands 4 has dealt with. The game’s Steam rating is currently sitting at Mixed, thanks in large part to performance issues and crashes on PC. Gearbox has rolled out several patches that target those problems and has said that improving PC performance is a top priority.
Publisher Take Two has also admitted that early sales have been softer than expected, and they put a lot of that blame on the technical state of the game at launch. Still, they are confident Borderlands 4 will have a long tail as patches land and more players jump in over time.
In the meantime, this glitch has given the community something very Borderlands to rally around. It is wild, it is broken, and it turns the whole build system into a toy box. If you are the kind of player who loves breaking games just to see what happens, Borderlands 4 is handing you a rare opportunity before the developers slam the door shut.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/borderlands-4-has-a-very-stupid-glitch-that-lets-you-unlock-a-characters-most-powerful-abilities-before-refunding-all-your-skill-points-but-dont-expect-it-to-be-around-long-as-gearbox-says-were-on-it/
