Borderlands 4 drops Version 1.9 and Bounty Pack 4 on the same day

Borderlands 4 closes out July with a one-two punch: Version 1.9 is live, and alongside it comes Bounty Pack 4 as paid DLC. The patch reworks boss encounters, loot and abilities, while the new content adds a repeatable mission, fresh cosmetics and brand-new guns to keep farming Kairos in co-op.

The first half of the pack costs $5.99 USD and delivers the narrative content: Levaine allies with The Flock, a commune of pacifist Rippers camped in the Toxic Scowl —a polluted desert canyon— to settle a score with the aggressive Blasphemers. It's a repeatable mission that unlocks after your first encounter with Levaine in Carcadia Burn, with the starter crate flagged on your ECHO map near any Bounty Board.

The reward for clearing it and farming the new boss and three mini-bosses is generous: a Pearlescent weapon, the PRISM (a Jakobs sniper that imbues ricochets with random elemental damage), plus six Legendary pieces such as the Overconsumption, a Tediore pistol that spawns two turrets on reload, or the Loiter Sploiter, which fires MIRV missiles that spawn their own mini-MIRVs on impact.

The second half, also $5.99 USD, is Vault Card 4: 24 cosmetic items with a desert-chic look and four rerollable Legendary pieces. Unlike a battle pass, it has no time limits or expiring rewards —you level the card at your own pace by killing enemies, exploring and finishing quests. Anyone who owns the Deluxe, Super Deluxe or Bounty Pack Bundle already has both halves of Bounty Pack 4.

Version 1.9 also reshuffles the endgame: the eight Pearlescents introduced in Version 1.7 now have dedicated drop sources on top of being world drops, and two new Pearlescents and one Legendary are tucked into specific spots in Kairos —Gearbox won't say where, you'll have to find them. To balance that out, world drop rates for those weapons have been lowered.

The bulk of the patch is about making sure loot stays within reach and bosses fight the way they should. A drop assist now lands loot in reachable spots, the Subjugator and Thol the Invincible, Takedown at Hadron Abyss and Bounty Pack 3's Brain Zane fights got polished, and gear, abilities and the Vault Hunters C4SH, Harlowe and Rafa were tuned. Rounding it out are stability and performance fixes. Heads up: Gearbox asks you to restart the game to apply the update and avoid matchmaking connection errors.

Gearbox has already teased its next big milestone. On September 10 the Version 1.10 update lands with Story Pack 2: FL4K and the Last Resort, a new Vault Hunter —Loveless the Hacker— and both halves of Bounty Pack 5. The finer details are set to arrive in an upcoming episode of the Gearbox DevCast.