This is a certified Code Spaghetti™ moment, right? I don't like being that person who shits on Bethesda for being bad at making games but seeing modders who understand the inner workings of the thing bring this up as an issue on the official discord bug reporting channels makes me confident this is a fuck-up on a scale that's just.. hilarious to think about. Their given "solution" was to just NG+ to fix it, which yeah it's kind of like saying "just reset your game and lose your progress so it starts working again". And like they said, it's just gonna happen again over time.
I can't believe this is a thing that's happening to essentially everyone on every platform without them ever knowing it. This could explain my constant crashing back when I was in NG+1. I played for too long and the game wasn't designed for that despite it being... designed so you can explore to your heart's content. I just did NG+2 so my ~321 hours save has just been reset but wow. The game doesn't recycle IDs for stuff so it just sort of runs out eventually and chokes on itself. I feel a bug like this could even be reported on by games journalists for being so funny but then Starfield "flopped" by AAA games standards so I have no idea if this is a widely known thing or not and the general public probably doesn't care. I care about this messy game, would be nice if they could fix this one sooner rather than later so people who are actually putting in the time and trying to enjoy the game don't get screwed over and have their hundreds of hours go to waste because a save gets corrupted. incredible stuff.
screenshot source.