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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Over the weekend, Starfield players began to share reports of a strange paranormal infestation. There are asteroids in the game that, for reasons known only to gods and/or programmers, follow you from orbit to orbit, flying eerily in formation with your ship, and sometimes even accompanying you to a planet’s surface. “In one of my weirdest Bethesda glitch experiences, I’ve got a tiny asteroid that’s been following me for the past 30 hours,” user ReverendRoo posted on Reddit, triggering an avalanche of comments reminiscent of UFO chasers spotting each other at a NASA open day. “I would catch a glimpse of it from time to time,” wrote fattfett. “I tried to approach it but you can’t. It stays away. I assumed it had a deeper meaning [toward] the endgame.” Some players, like Blackdius, have multiple asteroids in tow. It seems impossible to blow them up. I’ve dug up a Youtube video below of one such clingy space boulder from a couple of weeks back. As you can see, it’s not just a fixed background point like a screen artefact, but seems to move in response to the player’s ship. Most peculiar.
My best guess is that it’s a debris effect from your ship taking damage, and it’s supposed to fly away and expire, but somehow got stuck instead of disappearing, so now it’s an “effect” on your character that doesn’t know its supposed to have timed out already.
Other Bethesda games, especially Skyrim, had bugs like this of status effects that would get stuck on your character longer than they were supposed to and you’d only realize hours later when your character has some weird blue fog following them
That has precedent and is a very interesting conjecture. I vote this explanation.