Apex Legends Disables Crafting Due to Exploit (Update)

Update: Respawn has resolved the issue, and crafting has now been turned back on in the game.

Update on that @playapex exploit:

We’ve resolved the bug, so crafting has now been turned back on for all playlists.

— Respawn (@Respawn) March 19, 2021

Original story follows below.

Apex Legends players who hop into the game on Thursday may find themselves with fewer Shield Batteries and Med Kits now that the game's crafting system has been temporarily disabled due to an exploit. The exploit in question was crashing servers pretty consistently, according to anecdotes from players who were affected by the exploit, and after acknowledging the exploit on Wednesday, Respawn Entertainment followed up on its first tweet by saying crafting had been disabled.

The disabling of the crafting system extends to every part of crafting in Apex Legends including the Replicators, materials players find around the map, and the Replicators that drop like Care Packages throughout the match. There's no indication right now for when the crafting system will be reenabled, but Respawn Entertainment said it'd turn it back on as soon as the planned fix is tested and implemented.

To address a server-crashing @playapex exploit, we're temporarily turning off crafting (including replicators, materials, replicator drops, etc.) across all playlists, starting now.

We will turn crafting back on after we're able to finish testing our planned fix. Stay tuned! https://t.co/tMIA9BFX3N

— Respawn (@Respawn) March 18, 2021

Pro players such as TSM Snip3down spoke out about the exploit on social media after it'd apparently been going on for a few days now. Exploits are usually kept quiet once they're discovered so as not to allow players to replicate them easily, so you likely won't find people openly explaining how to reproduce the results, but the takeaway with this exploit was that it involved crafting and could crash entire servers. Doing so could easily save players from a bad game by nullifying their would-be losses, so it's easy to imagine how this sort of exploit could be problematic for normal games let alone the ranked system in Apex Legends.

The game got an update just three days ago to fix some problems with the game's Heat Shield item after it was released as part of the Chaos Theory event, so we'll likely get another of those hotfixes soon to patch out whatever was going on with the crafting system. There's still one trick in the game that allows players to equip Gold Barrel Mods on weapons of their choosing which hasn't been patched out yet, so it looks like that trick is here to stay for the time being.

Expect to see more news on the crafting exploit soon from the Apex Legends Twitter account as soon as the problem is resolved.