How to fix Groundpounder mission bug in Starfield? Answered

Starfield is shaping up to be Bethesda’s least buggiest game to date. Aside from the rare ambitious NPC stuck going through a solid wall, and some money exploits, the experience has been relatively devoid of any game-breaking glitches or errors. I was unsure as to why, that is, until I found out that Bethesda decided to go ahead and put all the missing bugs in a single mission. 

The Groundpounder mission is a fairly long side-quest in Starfield where you join forces with a group of UC Marines and Freestar militia to defeat a bunch of pesky Spacers in the Altair system. There are many bugs you can encounter during such a noble act though, such as the NPC’s not talking to you, receiving a bounty for no apparent reason, and the most common issue of nothing happening when you reach “Defeat the Spacer Invasion.”

Groundpounder bounty bug fix

Let’s get the easy ones out of the way. Try to avoid shooting any of the UC friendlies. They will become hostile and prevent you from completing the mission, and subsequently stick you with a hefty bounty. NPCS such as Lieutenant Torres not talking when you press “E” is not a bug per se, but more of a progression lock. You need to kill all spacers in the previous area to talk to him. Make a trip back through the previous rooms and pick off any remaining spacers. Use the console command “tcl” to phase through doors and reach those who are stuck behind locked doors. Once the area is cleared, you can return to Torres and proceed with the mission.

Defeat the Spacer Invasion bug fix

The major bug many players report is being stuck on the “Defeat the Spacer invasion” objective. Once you defeat the remaining spacers you have to do a space battle but weirdly, no spacer ships spawn in orbit and the quest marker disappears or points to an empty space.

First, if you have an autosave from a time before you reached the “Defeat Spacers In Altair I’s Orbit” objective, load it. The upcoming battle is very hard so before you fight the spacer ships, go to a ship vendor and upgrade your ship as much as you can. Also, set the difficulty to easy for this part. If you leave to fix or upgrade your ship in the middle of the battle, the game will glitch out. Now you can proceed as planned and hopefully complete the mission

Groundpounder bug fix without autosave

If you, unfortunately, don’t have an autosave and are stuck with the buggy quest marker, don’t worry, there’s still a fix you can try. Simply grav jump to New Atlantis and go outside the ship for a while. You’ll see that the blue quest markers have come back and there are a pair of spacer ships that have landed with you. When they try to leave, run quickly back inside your ship, make sure you press “board” not “cockpit” and go to the cockpit manually to fly your ship. You need to have great timing for this. It isn’t clear why this weird method can fix the bug for so many, but it’s likely to work for you as well. When you reach orbit, you’ll find the remaining spacer ships you needed to destroy in Jemison’s orbit. If there’s only one ship, destroy it first and repeat the process until the other one spawns as well. Like magic, the Groundpounder mission bug will disappear and you can go back to the Altair system to complete the rest of the mission.

If you’re still pulling your hair out because of this bug, your last resort is to put it on the back burner for now. There’s a chance that the enemy ships will randomly spawn when you fast-travel to a bunch of different systems, so you can deal with them later.

So there you have it! This was our guide on fixing the many Groundpounder mission bugs in Starfield, check out our other Starfield articles for more tips and tricks.