Starfield bugs

What are Starfield bugs?

A ‘bug’ is a conflict in the game which can cause graphical or technical issues, and potentially cause Starfield to crash. In this way, Starfield’s bugs can be categorized into two broad categories.

• Major bugs – bugs which cause crashes to desktop, render areas of the game unplayable, or corrupt your save.
• Minor bugs – technical or graphical issues that disrupt gameplay but do not prevent you from proceeding further, such as a weapon refusing to reload or a character getting stuck in place.

As bugs are discovered and fixed, you can be sure we’ll update this guide and the associated pages.

How do I fix Starfield bugs?

Bethesda is deploys Starfield patches on a very regular basis in an effort to fix player-reported bugs. The current update frequency is about one update every six weeks, with some updates containing literally hundreds of bugfixes.

The bugs that Bethesda don’t resolve can be resolved quickly by a number of Starfield mods, though only PC players can benefit from these fan-made patches at present.

Sadly, even if you mod the game, you won’t be able to eliminate every bug in Starfield, and mod packs that add content to the game could create even more problems.

Fortunately, there are several steps you can take to resolve the majority of bugs:

• Restart the game – reloading your last save should reset the majority of entities in your vicinity. This is useful for when NPCs or items don’t spawn, if a door doesn’t flag as unlocked, or if your ship is missing for unknown reasons.
• Return to an earlier save – if a particular action caused a bug, there is a chance that loading an earlier save and trying again won’t trigger the same bug.
• Deactivate mods – if you have a lot of mods activated, try deactivating them one at a time until the game is stable again. You can then isolate and report the bugs to the Starfield mod authors.
• Use cheats and console commands – Starfield console commands are your greatest tools to resolving issues, as they enable you to skip faulty objective markers, bad cell transitions (moving location), missing Starfield NPCs, and more.

Starfield crashing bug on Xbox

Bethesda bugs are often hilarious, but not when they’re crashing the game. Much of the community, including ourselves, has experienced a Starfield crashing bug on Xbox Series S, with some reports on the deluxe Xbox Series X console also. In our experience, the game crashes on the opening screen the first time after you’ve booted up the console to play it. Still, there is at least a seemingly quick fix, needing just a restart to get the game working at a surprisingly high quality on both consoles. We’re still waiting to see if there’s a day-one patch to fix this issue, or if it’s just something that Xbox users might just have to get accustomed to for a while.

Starfield healing food bug

Despite Bethesda’s love of food and the delicious models they’ve implemented for consumables like the Ta’Ameya Pita or Patty Melt, many players are reporting that consuming food in Starfield replenishes no health. Even players who have taken the Nutrition skill are reporting that eating huge amounts of food restores no HP.

We’re still waiting to see if Bethesda will patch this, or give food a big healing buff so players will hoard fewer Med Packs and more sandwiches.

Starfield grav jump bug

Many players are reporting that their ships are unable to grav jump or land on planets. For some reason, their ships are stuck in a “grav jump pending” state, and there’s no way to cancel it.

Unfortunately, this softlocks the game, and the only fix thus far reported has been to load an earlier save.

If you’re having trouble yourself, or notice any substantial Starfield bugs, get over to our Starfield forum to tell us more or see if any members of the community might have an answer to your problems.