It happened on a startup of an initial new game (no save) V04. Ignoring the call stacks 3x, nothing seems amiss, other than not being able to ever buy shields or weapons, which I assume will come with V05 combat.
That is peculiar. There are three main causes of issues
(a) use of an old incompatible save
(b) overwrite install into a previous version folder
(c) mod use (like URM)
If you have a text postable dump I'll have a look.
Combat is not implemented in V0.4. You could also wait for V0.5, which will be publicly released around 15.05.
Not sure whether you refer to the actual Ylyee quest to trigger (visit bar at 15:00 after 10 days or so in V0.5).
If you refer to the multivaerse pod save not working and are on a Mac, move the.app to the desktop and play from there.
If your issues are with V0.4, I recommend to restart with V0.5, released yesterday. That might help.