Starfield ship randomly leaves player and initiates a war with the United Colonies

A Starfield player encountered a strange bug where their ship acted autonomously and left them alone to initiate a war with the United Colonies. The peculiar problem persisted even after loading a saved game and remaining on board the ship. This unusual ordeal adds to the list of issues that some Starfield players have been grappling with since the game's release.

On the whole, Bethesda's space RPG is a fairly polished title, at least compared to the company's previous releases. However, despite Starfield delivering on the promise of being the least buggy Bethesda game in recent history, it is evident that a few issues slipped through during development.

One of the individuals who can confirm this is Reddit user Randol0rian, who recently encountered an extremely unusual bug that caused their ship to act autonomously and attack nearby United Colonies vessels. They experienced the issue for the first time after entering the Eye in Jemison's orbit, only to witness their spaceship take off from the station without them and pursue a nearby UC carrier. However, further testing revealed that the bug extended far beyond the Eye. The player reported that their Starfield ship was just as eager to start a war with the United Colonies, even when they were on board and had left the pilot's seat.

Some fans who have commented on this incident speculated that the autonomous spaceship was originally a pirate vessel that the game still treated as such when the player wasn't controlling it. And while this theory aligns with its hostile tendencies, Randol0rian revealed that they actually built their ship from scratch and used a stolen Va'ruun House ship as a base, of which nothing remained. Since the fleet of this faction is not hostile towards the UC, this unexpected behavior in Starfield may have a different origin.

Nevertheless, the bug seems to be definitely associated with a specific spaceship, not least because the player noticed that switching to another home ship halted the random UC attacks, but they resumed when returning to their individually built ship. Adding to the mystery, this issue did not occur immediately. Randol0rian claims to have used the ship for "dozens of hours" without any problems before it took on a life of its own. Ultimately, they managed to solve the problem by entering the Starfield shipyard, adding another module to the spaceship, and then immediately removing it.

This strange bug is not the first peculiar issue that the space gaming community has observed since the release of the RPG. Previously, a Starfield player had experienced a bizarre glitch where New Atlantis became unbalanced and turned the game into "an unplayable mess."

Starfield is now available for PC and Xbox Series X/S.