Square Enix is still trying to figure out exactly what the issue is.
Square Enix and People Can Fly got crossplay working in Outriders over the weekend, but a planned fix for the nasty bug that's wiping out some inventories remained elusive. In fact, Square Enix reported an increase in reports of the bug after the patch went live, and said that fixing it “is our top priority.”
In a new Reddit thread dedicated to the inventory wipe bug, Square Enix said that it has made additional server-side changes that should "drastically reduce"—but not eliminate—the bug's occurrence, and asked players to only report inventory wipes that happen after 1 pm PT/4 pm ET on April 11. They’ve obliged, and while developers are clearly having trouble nailing down the issue, it sounds like progress is being made.
"We're seeing many of these reports appear to be specifically related to starting a multiplayer session from the Expeditions Outrider camp. If you're concerned that this issue may happen to you we recommend avoiding this setup for the time being as this greatly reduces the likelihood of the issue occurring," it wrote. "However, we're continuing to dig deeper into this issue, so any further details that you can provide if you've been affected will help us better understand this problem."
In followup posts, however, Square Enix said that the problem can still occur in other areas as well, and that while singleplayer seems to be at a lower risk of inventory wipes than multiplayer, "it does not appear to be immune."
If you run into wiped inventory grief, Square Enix offered a "potential prevention method" that might save your stuff: As soon as you notice that your gear is gone, force-close the game and reboot it. Maybe you'll get lucky—and if not, the planned inventory restoration event is still in the works too, although a date for that won’t likely be nailed down until the bug is properly fixed.
I've reached out to Square Enix to ask if there's been any further updates since yesterday, and will update if I receive a reply. In the meantime, you might want to take a quick check of your available hard drive space if Outriders has been crashing a lot: It turns out that the game has been dumping (and keeping) some seriously huge crash logs in a deeply-buried folder on C: drive.
