Despite the release of tons of mods to date, Starfield modding is considered to be quite difficult as the game’s code is hard to work with, in addition to the current absence of support and official modding tools.
At least, that’s what one of the founders of the Starfield Community Patch group, Timothy “Halgari” Baldridge, said in a recent interview with Eurogamer. Last month, the group released its first unofficial community patch for Bethesda’s game, addressing issues that haven’t been fixed by Bethesda. According to the modder, the only reason that the team can successfully mod and fix many of the unaddressed bugs that have been left in the game is the large amount of experience with modding other Bethesda games using the same engine. As pointed out by “Halgari” in the interview, it took prominent modder “ElminsterAU” more than 400 hours to get his xEdit Starfield mod working. Here’s the comment ElminsterAU shared with the community when he released xEdit Starfield:
It is evident from analysing both the data structures in the provided module files and from decompiling game code that modding capabilities were not a consideration in the development of the game engine up to now. This can also be inferred from the fact that there has been no quality assurance testing of modding functionality from Bethesda, as various current engine bugs that appear in the context of using mods would have been obvious showstoppers. Any existing modding capabilities appear to be incidental, stemming from the engine’s legacy code base and the required work needed in that context to maintain functionality within the confines of editing Starfield.esm using the internal version of CK2.
Halgari said in the Eurogamer interview, “The only reason we can mod it already is because we’ve modded the other games using the same engine and we know what to do. But a lot of stuff is really broken compared to the other games.”
Despite the fact that hundreds of mods for Starfield have been made available to date, the true modding scene for the game likely won’t take off until Bethesda releases its official modding tools next year. Then again, that was to be expected, as it’s always been the same with their previous games.
Bethesda hasn’t revealed an official release date for these modding tools just yet, but looking at the release of these tools for other Bethesda games, we might be looking at an early 2024 release – hopefully.
