I just visited a friend using a portal. Then we went to a Drop Pod only 2 minutes 39 seconds away. When I went back, the portal had been deactivated and there was no way to interact with and turn it back on. I was trapped with no starship! Luckily I was able to reload a save to get back to my starship, but if I had saved too many times, I would have been trapped for good.
I submitted a bug report about this, but I wanted to let you all know so you don’t get marooned on a planet with no starship.
I assumed there was only one portal per planet, so this would send me back to the portal I came from which refuses to let me interact with it. If there is more than one portal per planet, it might work…
I’d like to believe Hello Games didn’t mean to intentionally maroon players on planets with no way to get their starship back.
The current state of portals renders them useless as you can’t even visit a friend for a few minutes and walk around with them for a bit without getting hopelessly trapped on a planet. If Hello Games did this intentionally they just flushed months of working on portals to make them active down the drain by making it a useless feature.
Okay, I did a series of videos experimenting with this bug and trying to escape the planet after the portal closed and I was trapped. It has a happy, albeit embarrassing for me, end.
And finally, what I should have done in the first place, a video proving there actually is a bug that makes the portal close behind you, at least temporarily.
@MacForADay Useful series on the getting trapped with portal closing.
Seems even more obvious now how we are truly not supposed to have access to our ship. Makes me wonder if HG is planning to make changes to prevent the current known way to re-locate > claim Base > back through Portal > Space Station > Teleport to this new Base, have Ship … Also wonder now if doing so keeps the system void of any space ships as you showed or if this does not affect it due to having gone back through the portal again to then use a teleport instead.
I agree and no, making the portal close is not a solution, but appears to be a bug, even more so with the portal eventually opening up again, however that happens. I would however actually prefer to see the portal close again with some interesting mechanic to re-open it. The easy way of course being forced to activate it again, like we already do.
Most likely a bug yet I cant help wonder if HG added a little quirk to portals (given proc.gen is their forte) so that occasionally an active portal may close up for a bit or need triggering by spending a bit of time exploring.
I have no evidence to substantiate this train of thought but with some of the lore suggesting a portal trip could be fatal, would it not stand to reason that the occasional ‘stranded traveller’ experience might be included?
I’ve noticed that if one spends a considerable amount of time on a planet (especially exploring in one general direction) then ‘finds’ seem to sometimes increase in quality/number. Almost a reward for actually exploring rather than just show up, claim the planet, then leave.
With that as a concept that time and distance in a biome might have an effect on what happens, might that also include a misbehaving portal.
