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There are mods for Seamless Grav Jumps and for Seamless Planet Takeoffs. But when you arrive at a planet in Starfield you still have to choose a landing spot, and then watch a loading screen and an animation. It's another thing that contributes to the feeling your spaceship is more like a house that can teleport.

When you're in space, Starfield's planets are basically just textures you can fly right through if you put in the hours to try it, as Alanah Pearce discovered back when the RPG's boundaries were still being explored. It seemed like one gap modders would never be able to paper over, but Frederik Wessberg has apparently managed it.

The video of his work-in-progress mod shows a planetary approach, complete with heating effects on the ship during atmospheric entry, a moment of white as he hits a layer of clouds, and then the ship just lands. It seems like the clouds are there to mask a moment of loading, but Wessberg says "the cloud cover is in fact not a fancy loading screen."

He goes on to explain, "The clouds are not covering loading – they're helping make the seam as minimal as possible right at the point when we do the final cell switch, in terms of lighting and exposure, and terrain color. For airless moons and planets, I just do the switch with no veil, which is fine in that context as the lighting and exposure won't change as much between the two cells (although there I do some extra exposure matching). The underlying loading mechanism is entirely done in the background, while the game is still interactive. We just wait until the assets are finished loading in, and then we do the swap."



To make that work, the floating textures had to be replaced with actual models of the planets and moons. "I had to completely reimplement Starfield's planet rendering in space in 3D," Wessberg says, "in a way that looks detailed and sharp at every altitude.

"Thankfully, Starfield is actually amazingly physically accurate, and in many ways a true space simulator – it just doesn't ever reveal this to the player, but I could leverage it in my design here. So, the planet rendering is based upon Starfield's biome data and exact surface maps, including climate data, atmospheric composition data, and takes into account things like orbital phase, distance to the sun, distance to the moon(s) orbiting the planet and how they contribute moonlight, and so on. The philosophy is: Starfield's data is the 'truth', but we then modulate it by real physics."

The finished version of the mod, which will be freely available on Nexus Mods, will let players fly manually in low orbit, or turn on the autopilot and walk around the ship as you descend from orbit, and land anywhere you like—even on water. There's a post on Wessberg's Patreon with the details.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Starfield guide: Our hub of adviceStarfield traits: The full list, with our top picksStarfield companions: All your recruitable crewStarfield romance options: Space datingStarfield console commands: Every cheat you needStarfield mods: Space is your sandbox

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.



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