Two-seater rover in Starfield turned rescue missions into a comedy

The bigger the game, the more small details slip through the cracks. And when the question of where to seat a rescued survivor goes unanswered across a galaxy of a thousand planets, a minor oversight becomes its own brand of absurdity.

The reminder came from a screenshot posted by a newcomer who just picked up Starfield and is enjoying their first 10 hours. The frame shows the protagonist and a companion cruising off in the REV-8 rover while a rescued NPC jogs along behind on foot. The game had no ground vehicles at launch in September 2023. REV-8 arrived in a free update in spring 2024 and can jump using jet thrust. It seats exactly two.

The two-seat cabin is far from the only quirk of the rover:

• A passenger has nowhere to stand or hang on, even though handrails on the back or side seem like an obvious fit

• There is no cargo storage, even though the rover was built for exploring huge planets

• The cabin offers no protection from hostile environments, yet a hefty turret sits on the roof

• There is no dedicated ship vehicle bay module, so the rover simply materializes next to the player when stepping out onto the surface

The limitation hits hardest in the standard "rescue the missing person" missions, where the freed NPC has to walk to the camp. By that point, though, the road is usually perfectly safe. One player put it this way:

By the time I find the person I'm supposed to rescue, there's nothing left alive between them and the camp. They're fine.

There is also an easier loophole: the quest counts as complete once the player returns to the quest giver, even if the rescued NPC never shows up. Some players leave their companion behind, drive the survivor back, and circle around to pick up their partner, while owners of robots like Vasco simply load the metal sidekick into the back. The cherry on top is a story about an outpost where the only worker asked the player to find a missing colleague, vanished right after the dialogue, and turned up at the rescue site as the very colleague in question.

The latest DLC, Terran Armada, only expands the tradition. The new robot companion refuses to get into the new vehicle and keeps teleporting right in front of the hood, while other companions drop out of the sky mid-drive, knocking the rover off course and dealing real damage.

The galaxy in Starfield is endless, but the rover has two seats.