In my experience, Bethesda has improved Starfield‘s launch-day messiness, but it still isn’t perfect. One potentially game-breaking bug is now doing the rounds, as multiple users on the Starfield Reddit are sharing their experience and attempting to make Bethesda aware of the problem. The core of it? If you don’t start a New Game Plus save after a certain amount of time, your save will crash – and it’ll get worse with longer playtimes.
Multiple Reddit users, including SpareDifficult9987, have highlighted how Starfield uses dynamic form ID generation, how this differs from previous Bethesda RPG games, and what this means for the newest release.
The long and short of dynamic form IDs is that Starfield generates IDs for almost everything that spawns in the game (like objects, dropped items, etc) but doesn’t properly recycle them, according to the Reddit posts. This means that the IDs just stay in your save file and continue to mount up, unless you go through Starfeld New Game Plus.
Normally these dropped items despawn and the form ID gets recycled, but as Starfield isn’t doing that nearly as much, the IDs stack up and eventually cause crashes.
From here, the game apparently runs out of numbers for the IDs it is making instead of recycling as many as possible, as you continue to explore planets and locations filled with objects with IDs. “This will cause your game to crash, and the more you play, the shorter the intervals will be between crashes, practically making your save file unplayable,” SpareDifficult9987 says.
The bug is inconsistent but will mostly impact saves between 200 and 800 hours, and while a Bethesda Community Manager has reached out, SpareDifficult is unsure if or when the issue will ever be fixed.
According to another post, New Game Plus resets all of these form IDs in Starfield, so if you’re a player who continues to restart the game you should be fine. Others that want to continue playing in the exact same save for hundreds of ours might be in trouble, though, unless Bethesda fixes the issue.
You can check out both the original and SpareDifficult9987’s Reddit threads for incredibly comprehensive breakdowns and potential fixes on PC (via PC Gamer).
While the ins and outs of the dynamic form ID generation bug are lost on me, it’s certainly not something you’d want in your incredible long Starfield save, that’s for sure. Especially considering that the only alternative, as of publication, is to erase all your progress with a New Game Plus save. Imagine if your game kept crashing because you became a Starfield sandwich bandit.
We’ve also broken down all the best Starfield mods and Starfield console commands for you, letting you completely rewrite Bethesda’s space RPG to your liking.
Still looking for more? While a good Starfield wiki can be a handy source of information, our new Starfield Database goes further, offering you daily news, searchable databanks, and even interactive tools.
