Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-31136266-20170225152501/@comment-31541346-20170310024043

I saw another post somewhere about  how this guy gathered a bunch of metal salvage and put it in a big pile then one day half of it mysteriously disappeared. Tsk tsk, you must go through the portal to the other guys game and give him his metal salvage back!

Actually, I have the slightest idea on what happened. You ran into the chunk and it loaded a metal salvage spot midair, and it thought it wasn't there so it kept doing it until you arrived at just the right time. You encountered the Stalkers because they appeared near the metal. (The chunk could have also updated differently, and where metal salvage used to lay it fell instead. This has happened a few times when I swim into chunks, its a bit more unlikely considering the amount off Metal Salvage you have there)

I've heard of the same occurance of another guy who kept picking up player PDA's until his game crashed, it kept spawning them because the game thought they weren't there. You probably experienced a similar, more patched version of this glitch (when you swam into the chunk the reloading stopped).