Imagine hearing “See that mountain? You can climb it!”, only to find fuck all atop said mountain. Todd “The Lord” Howard said no more, and perma-banned us from finding our way onto a planet in Starfield.
A Starfield seamless landing mod is in the works, and a new teaser shows ships flying from orbit all the way down to a planet’s surface with no loading screens at all, fixing one of the biggest complaints players have had about Bethesda’s space RPG since launch.
The twist is that it’s being built by one person, Danish singer-songwriter and audio engineer Frederik Wessberg, who isn’t a programmer by trade, so how has a solo modder done what so many people wanted from the base game? Let me explain.
What Does the Starfield Seamless Landing Mod Actually Do?
In the vanilla game, landing on a planet is a menu, a cutscene and a loading screen, which killed the sense of exploration for a lot of players, especially anyone coming from No Man’s Sky. Wessberg’s mod, called Seamless Landings, lets you fly from space to the surface without a single load, according to GamesRadar+, and the feature list in the teaser goes well beyond that:
- Flying: land manually or use autopilot, and you can even touch down on water
- Weather: 3D volumetric clouds driven by the game’s climate data, plus thunderstorms and lightning
- Sky effects: polar auroras, night-side airglow and atmospheric scattering
- Little touches: city lights at points of interest, cloud shadows, and a re-entry heat shield effect that leaves an ash layer
Re-entry heat effects in a Bethesda game, made by a musician in his spare time? That’s not a sentence I expected to type today, or in the forseeable future!
How Did One Modder Pull This Off?
According to Wccftech, the mod rebuilds Starfield’s planet rendering in 3D, because the base game shows planets from space as a flat texture, so Wessberg had to make them look properly detailed at every altitude. It uses the data Bethesda already put in the game, like biomes, surface maps, climate and atmospheric makeup, then adjusts things with real-world physics such as orbital phase, sunlight and moonlight.
Wessberg told GamesRadar+ the game is “actually amazingly physically accurate” under the hood but never shows it off, which is a fascinating little detail, because it suggests all the ingredients for this were sitting in Starfield the whole time, just… not being used!
Quick NoteThis is PC only, and Wccftech says it needs SFSE, the Starfield Script Extender, so console players won’t be getting this one through Creations, at least not in its current form.
When Can You Actually Download It?
Not yet, and there’s no release date or ETA, with Wessberg saying it’ll go up free on NexusMods “when it’s eventually ready”.
He’s been working on it for roughly six months, so this is very much a teaser of an unfinished project, and things can change a lot between a slick clip and a stable download.
Is This Mod a Reason to Reinstall Starfield?
Not today, because there’s nothing to download, but if Seamless Landings ships in anything like the state shown in the teaser, it could be the mod that finally gets lapsed players back into Starfield, since the loading screens were such a big part of why exploration felt so disconnected. It’s free too, so the only cost is the time it takes to set up SFSE and pray your load order doesn’t explode!
It’s also a bit of an awkward look for Bethesda, because a solo modder fixing a headline complaint is great for players but doesn’t say much for what shipped. If you’ve never modded a Bethesda game before, our Fallout New Vegas modding guide is a good crash course, and crashing is, of course, the Bethesda tradition!
FAQ
Is the Starfield seamless landing mod out?
No, the Starfield seamless landing mod is still in development, with no release date announced yet.
Will the Starfield seamless landing mod be free?
Yes, modder Frederik Wessberg says the Starfield seamless landing mod will be released free on NexusMods when it’s ready.
Does the Starfield seamless landing mod work on Xbox?
No, it’s a PC mod that requires the Starfield Script Extender (SFSE), so it isn’t available on consoles.
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