Read some of the responses. But there appears to be an easier solution.
If you die in water, your corpse container will be invisible every time. Every time. Your dead body is there, but it does not render.
It seems to be a little more intermittent for deaths on regular ground. Again, sometimes the body is there, and you can recover. Sometimes it is not.
Recovery options:
Note the EXACT spot where your corpse container is laying on the ground. When you make your naked run back to your corpse container, and you do not see your body, carefully start trying to E key against the spot on the ground where you died. From my experience - your corpse container IS there, it’s just not visible to you. I have had almost 100% success with corpse recovery using this method for when I have died, and my body falls into the water.
For a death on regular ground spots, make the run back to the point where you died. If you do not see your body, try moving away “a piece”. I cannot really give you the exact distance. But it seems that you must move away far enough for that particular server chunk to unload from your client, and then reload. If you approach mobs / NPCs, I would suggest that the distance is just outside of the range where mobs render and become active (start pacing the area, etc.). If you walk away, and come back, and no corpse, walk away again, further this time, and keep doing that at increasing distance until you find your corpse on return. I have had some decent success with this method as well.
Hopefully this helps. Good luck, and be careful out there. Funcom - attention to this bug would be appreciated.
FWIW - I believe that this bug is also something that will occasionally affect human mob character corpses, also. I have fought off human exile mobs many times. Like three of them. I’ll get the first two, turn my back to their corpses, and then fight off a third. When I turn back around to the first two to loot them, they’ve instantly and magically disappeared.
It could be players harvesting and looting your corpse. I’ve done this even on an official server. I run across some body and I harvest it for human flesh and heart, but before I get the Set dagger out, I loot… And see lots of items that mark the person as a player with the amount of stuff on there. So… I grab them also.
Yikes! I thought that on normal PVE that shouldent be possible? Thats a pretty nasty bug. I don’t want to try it out tho, since that might mess it up for a fellow pve player
Official Servers have the same settings as one another. My character in question was on one of the Official PVE America ones. Note the server settings at the top of the right panel.
super annoying, you can not see the corpse yourself,
but you can “E” it if you have the right location, so remember the location and “E” the area (note that the death marker on the map is not reliable either since it tends to jump around).
if you are lucky a friend or neutral player can show you where the body is since they cna see usually see it.
Watch your death animation, watch for body bounce. Look for landmarks… patches of grass, rocks, location related to other landmarks, etc.
The spamming with the skinning knife is a good idea, too. Though - I don’t like that idea because it will destroy your body, and ultimately your stuff’s container. If something should go wrong, and you don’t grab up the loot bag (baddie in the area, another death, etc., get chased away), you might lose your hard earned gear. I suppose if you are at a last resort, and E keying the spot hasn’t worked for you, you can try going the butcher route.
I’ve discovered that if you have a bed, then use a bedroll then roll up that bedroll and die you will probably lose all your gear and your corpse will not be there.
There seems to be a lot of glitches around having multiple beds / bedrolls.
So if I just have one bed I go back to the spot that I died, log out to main menu and when I log back in my body is usually there. If not I walk away a distance and repeat.
The only times this technique has not worked for me is when the game got confused as to where I should respawn. For example one time I placed the bed too close to a wall and when I died I was sent back to the desert - no gear. Another time I rolled up my temporary bedroll and died on the way home before activating my bed - no gear.
Basically USUALLY the hack people talked about above works, but there are times when it will not work.