PSA: New Borderlands 4 Bug May Steal All Your Skill Points

Borderlands 4 launched with a bang earlier this year and quickly became one of the most talked‑about looter shooters on the market. Set on the all‑new planet Kairos, the game invites you to play as a Vault Hunter – a mercenary on the hunt for alien Vaults – with billions of wild guns and devastating abilities. Each Vault Hunter has three branching skill trees filled with socketable abilities and potent passive effects, letting you design a huge variety of powerful builds. The online experience is also more flexible than ever; up to four players can cooperatively explore its four distinct regions, and the improved lobby system supports drop‑in/drop‑out play with instanced loot, dynamic level scaling and cross‑play. With all that content, it’s no wonder that millions of players have been leveling up, experimenting with skill trees and enjoying the mayhem.

Unfortunately, a nasty bug has surfaced that threatens to derail your progress. Reports have been circulating on Reddit and social media that a progress‑erasing glitch can wipe out all of your hard‑earned skill points. In a September 16 2025 news post, GamesRadar’s Scott McCrae alerted players to the problem after a Reddit user explained that they had played up to level 10, logged back in the next day and discovered that their character’s Action Skill and skill points were completely missing. Other players chimed in with similar experiences, saying the issue “happened out of the blue” and that the respec machine did nothing to restore their builds. While Borderlands games are known for their chaotic combat, losing all of your progression is chaos of a very different kind.

The circumstances that trigger the glitch are still being investigated, but players have noticed a pattern. The bug seems to occur when the game crashes or when you disconnect and reconnect to a multiplayer session. One frustrated player on social media recounted how they lost their entire skill tree after joining someone else’s game, quitting to the main menu and then reloading. They warned others that if you join a multiplayer session or load your own game and see that your skill points are missing, you should not quit normally. Instead, they suggest force‑closing the program immediately (Alt+F4 on PC) to try to preserve your save state. Several replies corroborated that this abrupt shutdown prevented the save file from being overwritten, suggesting that the normal quit process somehow flags the corrupted state as the new normal.