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.
It’s a weird visual bug. The only solution to remove it (so far) is by using console commands. Open the console, click on the asteroid, then type disable on the console.
I was already disappointed with the unimmersive the space travel is in the game, and this bug just added itself to the list of disappointments.
Some technical notes: When I looked at the asteroids using the console, I expected them to be STATIC Objects; they were actually something called CONST iirc. Just some fun facts.
For all we know “space” is the same map for each planet and only a few assets get swapped depending on orbit. Maybe this was a cheeky way to make their ancient engine run all these new features without crashing.
I’m having memories of Bethesda getting trains to work in Fallout 3 by making an NPC wear a train as a hat and then run really fast.
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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
I have had one since hour 12, I’ve changed ships multiple times, been all over, still following. It’s basically a space buddy now, I’m on hour 96
I guess I’m gonna have to actually check. I always play entirely in 1st person so I wouldn’t have noticed unless it was always in my windshield or something.
Quantum Asteroid? Outer Wilds style!
