How to avoid the nasty Outriders glitch that wipes your inventory

Outriders is a looter shooter, but what happens when you lose all of your loot?

Some people playing People Can Fly and Square Enix’s popular new game have encountered this very issue. A glitch seems to wipe all equipped and stored gear from a player's inventory. If this happens to you in the later stages of Outriders or on a high world tier, it can be extremely disruptive.

If you’re one of the unfortunate souls that have run into this Outriders glitch, this is what we know about its cause and how to fix the problem or avoid it in the future.

What causes the Outriders loot glitch?

Players have noticed that inventory wipes can happen when the game crashes or you disconnect when using crossplay. The glitch appears to be more common when using crossplay. On r/Stadia, user Z3MOG explains in more detail how the issue arises when you have an unstable connection, and you disconnect at a key time.

After this happens, you’ll see that your inventory is wiped, so you no longer have any equipment that you are holding, nor the weapons and armor equipped to your character. This glitch existed in Outriders’ demo, so the developers are aware of it.

On April 8, Square Enix provided an update on this issue and their plans to fix it. “We believe that the rate of this bug appearing should be greatly reduced once the upcoming patch has been published,” a Steam post says after detailing a major patch intended for the week of April 11. “With crash fixes in place, we intend to run a one-off mass restoration.”

Still, they were hesitant to give an exact timeline: “While we will try our hardest to make things right, we unfortunately cannot make guarantees for the specifics of the above or the timeline of this, as we may run into technical difficulties that delay our work,” they said.

How to fix or avoid the Outriders loot glitch

There isn’t a way for you to directly get all of your lost loot back in-game yet. As such, your best option is to avoid the issue and make sure that you and your friends have a stable internet connection while playing Outriders.

If the issue persists, avoid crossplay altogether for the time being. Outriders does require an internet connection to play, but you don’t have to play with others. For the safest experience, you might want to play the game by yourself if you’re anxious about coming across this issue.

People Can Fly and Square Enix did detail how item restoration will work once it rolls around though:

“Here are our intentions for this restoration:

• Restoration should take place on a specific day and should be a one-time event
• The exact date is TBC but we’re hoping for this to occur in the coming week(s)
• We will update you when we have confirmation of date and timings
• We will only be able to restore the most valuable tiers of items lost, e.g. Epics and Legendaries.
• We will be unlikely to restore an inventory full of blue gear.
• The restoration should be additive to your inventory. It should not replace your current inventory.
• Restored items may not have the exact same stats as the lost items”

After this, the devs will handle loots wipes on an ad-hoc basis. Additionally, People Can Fly is planning an “Outriders Appreciation Community Package” for those who ran into this problem or just played the game between March 31 and April 11. After a patch, players’ highest level character will receive a Legendary Weapon, some of the Titanium resource, and the Frustration emote.

We will update this post if People Can Fly finds a solution or fixes this issue in a future update.

Outriders is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and Stadia.