Items that do something
The play report was blunt: you drag ammo and a weapon out of a body, into your bag, and nothing changes.
That was exactly right, and the interesting part is that nothing was wrong with the items. They existed, they moved, the panels updated, the wire carried them. The bug was a missing join.
The list nobody read
Equipment recorded what a player put in each slot. The simulation never read a word of it.
Every deployed body was born with a hardcoded rifle and no armour, whatever the gear screen said. So a looted pistol, a bought carrier and a class-4 plate all moved between panels and altered nothing whatsoever about the fight. The gear screen was, functionally, a very convincing toy.
The fix is one function that reads the list: the sling decides the weapon, the carrier's plate decides what stops a round, the helmet decides its own. It runs at deploy and after every in-raid equip, so a rifle picked off a corpse reaches the hands that picked it up.
Re-running it has to be free
That function is called every time anything is equipped, which makes one property load-bearing: re-running it must not create anything.
A weapon whose kind has not changed keeps its chambered magazine. If rebuilding the weapon on every equip were the behaviour, then dragging a rifle from one slot to another and back would be a free reload, which is item creation of precisely the kind the loot ordering rules exist to prevent.
A kind that does change gets a fresh magazine, because the rounds in the old one do not fit the new gun.
Small rule, and it is the difference between a join and an exploit.
Wearing is not carrying
The deploy had to learn a distinction it never needed before.
A raid ticket records one flat list of what you are taking in, and every entry was going into the bag. So a carrier you bought rode into the raid as cargo and your equipment stayed empty, which is the same bug as the one above, seen from the other end. One table now decides what fits where, and it is consulted rather than reimplemented per call site.
Then the exit started destroying gear
This is the part worth writing down, because the new feature broke an old line that had been correct for its entire life.
Extraction banked your inventory and nothing else. That was right for exactly as long as nothing was ever worn. The moment deploy started dressing the body from the ticket, that same line began destroying things: a rifle carried in, survived with, and walked to an exit was gone at the door, because it sat in equipment and the bank never looked there.
Item destruction is the mirror of duplication and only slightly less bad. Duplication devalues everything for everyone; destruction takes one specific raid away from one specific player who earned it.
Extraction now banks the bag and the worn pieces. Bag first, deliberately, so that a nearly-full stash fills with what you carried before what you wore.
It was caught by a squad test that has asserted a host's own rifle comes home since before any of this existed. That is a good test, and it should not have been the thing that noticed. It is pinned directly now too.
Ammo already worked
Two of the paths in the play report turned out to be fine.
A magazine taken off a corpse does reload the rifle, and is consumed doing it. Every piece was already there: corpses hold what the victim carried, and the reload takes the fullest magazine from the bag. Nothing anywhere asserted that those two facts met. They now have a test that fails with the reporter's own phrase, an inert token, when the lookup is sabotaged.
Buying from the trader also worked, and had been reported broken for two unrelated reasons: the base screen could not reach the store while a pointer lock made every slot box inert, and a fresh account had no money to try with. Both fixed elsewhere. What was missing underneath was a test.
That is a pattern I keep hitting. "Broken" often means two working things that were never introduced to each other, and the test belongs at the join rather than on either side of it.
A new account has something to lose
Sixty-four empty slots made the base screen indistinguishable from a broken one. Nothing to drag, nothing to equip, no cash to test the trader with.
A new account now gets two weapon kinds, two carrier tiers, a helmet, magazines, a medkit and some cash. Nothing is pre-equipped. The stash is storage, and the body takes only what you deliberately put in the loadout, because that is the invariant the whole ticket design rests on.
Seeded on creation only. Spending it and reconnecting does not refill it.