Starfield player experiences game-breaking bug after 600 hour playthrough

Starfield may have been snubbed by The Game Awards - there’s no denying how tough the competition is this year - but plenty of players are still sinking hours upon hours into Bethesda’s latest space epic.

Bethesda developers are hard at supporting Starfield, helping the game reach its full potential. We know that city maps is just one highly-requested addition that’s on the way. There’s also the Shattered Space expansion which we know very little about at this point in time. This week, one player embarked on their 33rd New Game Plus playthrough, wielding the wildest result we’ve seen yet. If you’re yet to roll credits on the game, you may not know that each subsequent New Game Plus will add a fresh twist on the story. Another player has stuck to one playthrough, sinking a massive 600 hours into it. Bad news though: they’ve seemingly encountered a game-breaking bug.

Take a look at some of our favourite Starfield wins and fails.

Reddit user Mattgyvercom took to Reddit to share the tale. The user wrote, “Sad to say bye, but 250m is the closest I can ever get to my main outpost without crashing. Abandoning it and rushing another NG I guess.” Allow me to break this down. As reported by GameRant, Mattgyvercom was playing the game on his Xbox Series X when he encountered the issue. The user put countless hours into crafting an extensive outpost but no matter how he approaches the station, the game now crashes.

Mattgyvercom has tried approaching on foot from a variety of directions, unassigning cargo links, unassigning companions, reverting save files, but nothing seems to allow the user to get close. They later confirmed that they’d spent around 600 hours on that particular playthrough.

GameRant suggests that the bug could be to do with the way Starfield handles FormIDs. To put it plainly, FormIDs take up more space in the Creation Engine than they previously did in its predecessor. As such, during long playthroughs, FormIDs will begin to overflow which could be causing these instability issues. This certainly isn’t ideal when you consider that Bethesda anticipates this is a game players will spend years with. Hopefully, a solution is found soon.