Starfield has been a great game for me. I especially enjoy the game’s ship building feature. I had been merrily learning and modifying ships for many months until June of this year. Below is an earlier Vindicator III I had designed and used for several months without incident.
This is a version of the Vindicator III I began using in March 2024. It worked fine while I was in NG+3 but I did change the cockpit to the Viking design later.
Sometimes there’s a glitch that is easily fixed my simply going to a Starship Technician or using a Landing Pad with Ship Builder. I had also encountered some glitches at Staryards before and they were weird but not crippling.
BTW, I’m Level 125, NG+4, 1000 of 1000 Gamerscore, 50 of 50 Achievements.
In June, something especially bizarre happened. It wasn’t just “disappearing ship” but there were other weird happenings, like from a distance I could see into the internals of my ship. It was so weird, I shutdown and restarted my Xbox Series X. That “internal” thing was gone but the disappearing defect became persistent. I had done a lot of research but by the time I wrote this explanation, I was more baffled than alarmed. I figured there had to be a fix. Shortly after, this is when I stopped playing Starfield. It was too frustrating.
This was a posting on a bulletin board. Soon after I began to realize the extent of this problem.
I week or so ago I tried to build a newly purchased Vindicator III and build a new version. I was very careful to save my progress at each step. HOWEVER, it was necessary for me to go to two Staryards (again DEMOS & Stroud-Eklund) to get the parts I couldn’t get elsewhere. However, I didn’t do a thorough test after each change. In part, I didn’t know the kind of test that would demonstrate the defect.
You see, while at a Starbase or Landing Pad, there were no signs that the problem had been reinitialized. I now know that simply flying the Disappearing Ship to anywhere on the surface of a planet or moon would reveal the defect. I probably invested 400,000+ credits and 10-12 hours into this starship build. And it is useless. I’m not upset. I’m very disappointed.
This is a variation on the type of Vindicator III that I’ve made in the past. This and the previous one are unusable.
Solving This Problem
Here’s a Starfield Ship Missing or Disappeared guide I found that talks about simple solutions to basic disappearing ship problems. I’ve tried all of them but they don’t solve my problem.
Speaking as a software engineering, my instincts tell me:
- There’s high probability that this problem is caused by using a Starship Staryard to modify any part of your ship.
- And/or there’s a higher than average possibility that it is triggered when a Port/Starboard Side Landing Bay is swapped out for a Forward Landing Bay; this is also the reason I travel to a staryard.
- I doubt that the cockpit selection or number of habs, makes any difference.
I understand how challenging a problem like this can be to unravel. I’m willing to delete my current Vindicator build and buy & rebuild this again “in the existing state of my system & files” if Bethesda is looking for volunteers. They’d have to monitor each step of the build. They should be able to find me in their support files or use my contact page.
Being Yordie Sands 