In a game as big and complex as No Man’s Sky, some things are bound to go wrong. Some players in this vast virtual universe have been running into an unusual problem: their ships appear to be shooting themselves.
Players on the No Man’s Sky subreddit have been noting the bug since the release of Next, the latest update to the game. Some say that when they fire any weapons, their own ships take damage. “I shoot my photon cannon and it takes a chunk out of my health,” one player wrote in the thread linked above, “and when I shoot my rocket launcher I instantly die.” There have been dozens of complaints like this since the game updated. You can see the bug in action at about five and a half minutes into this clip:
“Our ships are procedurally generated, as are our weapon stats. The issue you mention affects a subset of ships that players can buy in-game, with certain weapons,” Sean Murray, founder of Hello Games, said over email when Kotaku asked about the bug. “It is generally only seen when multiplayer is active, and is related to network lag in these cases. The issue has been fixed by the team, is in testing, and will be released in a hotfix soon.”
While this seems pretty annoying if you’re on the run from pirates or being chased down by sentinels, Hello Games has been fixing bugs and releasing hotfix patches at a steady clip since the Next update. Hopefully this one get patched out soon so every player can have the Star Wars-y space battles they’ve been dreaming of.