Did the the living ship quest over the last week on one of my games.
I had completed everything, searched for and found the living ship i wanted. Went through the process of waking the ship. Realised I didnt want to swap the ship I was in so I called in my freighter, dropped a beacon in case i lost the location and swapped my fighter for a hauler. On return the living ship was now a shuttle even though it still showed the egg icon. Tried a few things to work around it but the egg and other items are gone and the ships lost after a lenghty quest process.
Moral of the story? Dont leave the living ship location or you’ll lose the ship NMS is still an absolute shitshow in places.
Yeah. You would think that whatever the game generated would remain the same. Why did it regenerate and why the wrong ship type? Always summon your ship to you. Never take your eyes off something you like.
I assume you reported it.
I know, you would think I’d know better after all this time. I used to to manual saves regularly.
Now that I think about it I did one at some point during that last base update I posted yesterday. If it was done after I resized the windows and small walls I will go back to it, otherwise I’ll let it go.
Haven’t reported it as of yet, probably will later on.
Had the same problem. Found it but didn’t want to swap so I marked the location. Came back to a different ship. Never found that particular living ship again. Still disappointed.
Yeah I was a bit salty about it too. Its the timers on that quest make that it feel more of a grind.
I’ve went back to my manual save. It took me a couple of hours to redo the base I was at, but I have only to collect the souls and go back to the same system.
If I remember right from other times I’ve done the quest I should get the same location when I get round to going again. So fingers crossed I will get the same ship.
I find it interesting (and frustrating) how this game (or procedural generation in general) loses and restores information that we take for granted, there are whole new dimensions of errors possible…
Was the quest still active when you returned? They have living ships spawn at the same locations as normal wrecks. Like, did they double-book the ship seeds to be either standard ships or living ships, and when you left and returned, they completely forgot about that quest and reverted to “let’s generate a normal wreck here”?
Remember when they introduced freighters, and our saves only stored that there was a freighter, but not what it looked like? And the game just generated a new colour and crew every time we entered a system…?
This game has partial amnesia about the oddest details.
And all the base building bugs….
NMS: “Oh, here comes a player, let’s read the save file. Right: They wanted these rooms in their base, I remember exactly where they put them. … +/- 2 metres-ish above or below the ground, probably not so important… Doors? What are doors? … Refinery inventory? Uh. 999999 nanites sounds plausible. … And I recall clearly they had parked their starship here. … Exactly half intersecting with this building and the ground. Perfect.”
The first part is pretty obvious. The location fell out of range and was unloaded, so it naturally needs to be regenerated when approaching the location again.
The second part is most certainly an oversight in the game state. It’s pretty clear that the ship that is generated naturally from the seed is replaced with the living ship as a reaction to a certain game state. Only that state seems to be too narrowly defined. All in all, a very understandable and actually rather hard to catch bug. You don’t realise it until somebody actually does it.
Also, it might actually be pretty difficult to avoid. The replacement is almost certainly done by the running quest-script. At the moment you’re heading for the ship, it has all the necesesary information (i.e. it has retrieved a crashed ship location from the seed, and it knows that the living ship is supposed to be there, not anywhere else). Once you reach a location marker, that information is removed from the script, with this stage of the quest being complete (you can see this in the quest marker just vanishing once you reached it).
This happens with all missions, so is most likely part of a generic script that is reused for all of them. Once that happens, the quest doesn’t know the location anymore. There should be a very simple way to test that: Take on a mission with a specific location target (destroy a depot, raid a factory, that kind of thing). Reach the target so the marker vanishes, plant a beacon, go away and come back. My guess is that it is now not recognised as the mission location anymore, and the mission will be uncompletable.
If this holds true, changing the behavior is not actually going to be as easy as one might think. It requires the mission to hold on to the marker for longer and will require some flagging in the background, which all will affect save games. All in a script that is widely reused and generally works, which means you don’t want to change it without some serious testing afterwards. Which may well be considered to not be worth it if the occurrence of the issue is rare.
Doors? What are doors? 
