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Gearbox has finally made those long awaited fixes to Borderlands 4’s vending machines and Lost Loot machines.
They explained this in their patch notes dated October 30, 2025:
Interacting with Dr. Zed’s Meds and Gunsvending machines and lost loot will now reset any Action Skills, Ordnance, or Repkits currently in cooldown.
We’ll break these down for people who may not understand this at first glance.
The Vending Machine Cooldown Fix
To clear this up at the onset, this has nothing to do with the cooldown for Maurice’s Vending Machine to generate loot.
Whether you are using your Action Skills, you Ordnance, or your Repkits, there is a cooldown that limits how much you can use them. The cooldown forces you to recharge each of these abilities before you can use it again.
That may seem like Gearbox wants you to use these sparingly. But that’s not a hard rule. Even in the first Borderlands, you can update to certain skills that allow you to lower that cooldown.
It’s up to Gearbox to balance this out so everyone tries every character and gear. Players get to experiment with these any way they can.
Borderlands 4 introduced a small trick that players users were using to make high level builds. You can reset your cooldown if you approach any of the vending machines in Kairos and open them.
This was not a trick that existed in older Borderlands games. But players made use of it to make their endgame builds.
Last week’s patch removed that trick. But as we now know, that’s not what Gearbox intended. This trick is now back, and that also means those builds are viable again.
The Lost Loot Machine Fix
Lost Loot Machines were introduced so that if you ran out of space to pick up some really good gear, you did not have to return to the location to get it again. You just had to go to one of these machines and have them bring them back up for you.
There were several issues with Lost Loot Machines’ behavior. But the main thing is that they were not retrieving high level gear properly. And that ruined the point of these machines.
This issue has been around for some time now, possibly since the game launched. Creative director Graeme Timmins promised to improve the machines last week, and he has met this promise. Thanks Graeme!
While Borderlands 4 did not launch in an ideal state, Gearbox deserves credit for the rapid pace that they have been addressing these issues. If anything, we hope that they have all the egregious issues pinned down by the time they introduce cross-save and cross-progression, and more importantly, when they finally launch this game on the Switch 2.
