I’m going to copy and paste an email I had sent to obsidian, I want to see if anyone else is possibly having this problem. 
 

Platform: Xbox console
Multiplayer, 2 players. Second player uses PC.

tldr; your respawn armor and weapon disappear after respawn or losing into game, and you have no way of getting them back. It’s gone forever. 

I found a major bug/glitch that is super super frustrating. I’ve been playing this game for the last two years when it was just a game preview and this has never happened until the full game release. 
You know how when you respawn you have your last armor and your last weapon/item used. Well when I die sometimes (this has happened twice) I will respawn with no armor and no weapon. When I go to retrieve my backpack I still don’t get my stuff that I last had. It’s getting really frustrating because I already made two sets of armor and weapons that took a while to get and upgrade. It’s getting to the point where I don’t really want to play the game because I’m afraid I’m going to lose my stuff. Like I’m afraid I’m going to have a really really good weapon for it to just disappear. 
Also I’ve tried the “retrieve backpack” setting, but that doesn’t seem to help. I needed to go back a couple of saves when it was a save and not an auto-save just to get my stuff back. Meanwhile I have to redo everything I just did for two hours...  lol. 


Explanation: 
Sorry I don’t have a video. But here’s the best I can explain it. 
So, basically for example I was doing the pond lab. Me and another player had just finished that and I was running to exit out the pond and my game crashed… (which never happened until the full release) so, I load back into the game and SOMEHOW spawn in a small lab where you like scan your stuff, and I noticed once again… I spawned with NOTHING! nothing, no armor, no weapon. Once again… I lost my weapon that I worked hard for. And honestly it’s super super frustrating. Because like I said earlier I have go back a couple of saves which makes me lose all my progress and time wasted. 
Another example. This was the first time I noticed the bug/glitch.
I was at the upper yard. I got killed by a beetle. Respawned. And I noticed that I didn’t have my armor or my weapon But, I assumed that if I got my backpack that it’ll be there. It wasn’t… so I just made a new armor set. And my other player gave me a NEW upgraded weapon. To which once again, is gone because it happened again. 

Anyways, I hope I explained it well enough. I’m not sure how else to explain it. It’s super odd. And I hope it can get fixed as I love this game a lot and look to playing it after work. 

You are not alone!

I encountered this problem tonight. I was also at upper yard fighting a moth, after I respawned, I found everthing I equipped was gone. Weapon, head, body, leg and trinket. Im ok to spend some time to build another set of weapon or armor. The problem is trinket. I equipped right elf charm at that moment. I really really really want to get my trinket back.

One more thing to add, my bag was full when I died. Not sure whether this was the root cause.