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Borderlands 4
Essential Hardware

Battlefield 6

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Borderlands 4

Gearbox breaks out some free loot because Borderlands players have already looted over 750 million items, half a million of which were from trash cans

Rich Stanton

17 September 2025

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(Image credit: Gearbox)

The big theme in the first week of Borderlands 4? Whether you’re talking about technical issues or character builds: it’s busted. There are so many broken builds it’s untrue, and players are running around with “infinite damage” builds that nuke bosses in under 10 seconds… which is either great or terrible, depending on your mood.

But it’s probably why, in the first week of release, players have fought bosses 63 million times and defeated 55 million of them. Pretty good hit rate, and the numbers come from developer Gearbox itself, which has released a loot package for all players to celebrate… erm, all the looting.
The rewards come in the form of a Shift code, Gearbox’s little data-hoovering service that it uses because it can, and is called the Break Free Pack. It includes a vault hunter skin, a legendary ripper shield that scales to your level, and two ECHO-4 drone skins: the code is JS63J-JSCWJ-CFTBW-3TJ3J-WJS5R.

Related Articles

Borderlands 4 is hiding more than 200 collectible Marcus bobbleheads in hard-to-reach places, and Randy Pitchford reckons ‘most players will never see any of them’

Borderlands 4 has, like, so many guns, 30 billion guns, so many they had to put ’em on a ‘wall of guns’ like the Matrix, say devs

Randy Pitchford challenged players to break the Borderlands 4 servers over the weekend, offering free DLC for anyone who takes part

More interesting were the stats Gearbox released alongside the code, which include the enlightening fact that four-and-a-half million players have managed to kill themselves with grenades so far, while around two million of you shot exploding barrels while just being a tiny bit too close.

More to the point, in the archetypal looter-shooter players have now, excluding items of common quality, looted precisely 764,733,586 items. Presumably that statistic was rendered irrelevant the second it was issued, but until Gearbox starts a live tracker we’ll go with it. It also offers a rather granular breakdown of where some loot has been obtained:

(Image credit: Gearbox)

Items looted from Outhouses–1,530,794
Items looted from a grill, beer cooler, or boombox–1,811,970
Items looted from Trash Cans–487,585
Items looted from Red Chests–14,814,296
Okay, who’s been rooting through the bins. There are some less interesting stats about miles driven etcetera I’ll spare you, beyond the fact over 16 million vehicles have been blown up.
The rewards in question are available now, and initially I thought you had until the end of the year to claim them. It turns out that the cutoff for redemption is actually December 31, 2030, so there’s really no excuse. I’ve just told Google to remind me to do a reminder post in five years: hey, surely someone will still be rustling around in the trash.

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Rich Stanton

Senior Editor

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years’ experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as “[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike.”

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Borderlands 4 is hiding more than 200 collectible Marcus bobbleheads in hard-to-reach places, and Randy Pitchford reckons ‘most players will never see any of them’

Borderlands 4 has, like, so many guns, 30 billion guns, so many they had to put ’em on a ‘wall of guns’ like the Matrix, say devs

Randy Pitchford challenged players to break the Borderlands 4 servers over the weekend, offering free DLC for anyone who takes part

Borderlands 4 live launch coverage: are you ready to loot 30 billion guns?

All Borderlands 4 Shift codes and how to redeem them

Borderlands 4 has ‘more passive perks than all the previous Borderlands combined’—uh, is that a good thing?

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