Starfield already has more than 700 mods just hours after release. Here’s the story of how modders are racing to mod Bethesda’s highly anticipated role-playing game.
By the time Starfield was officially released on Sept. 6, Bethesda Game Studios’ anticipated role-playing game already had hundreds of mods available — everything from a graphics upscaler to a script that added all apparel items to your inventory. Modders created all of these from scratch, largely during the game’s five-day early access period, and well before Bethesda intends to release its official mod support. To say that modders are excited is an understatement; Bethesda games hold the top five spots for mods on popular repository Nexus Mods. The community was roaring to get to work on Starfield.
One of Starfield’s big community efforts is the Starfield Community Patch, a collective endeavor spearheaded by several prominent modders who intended to fix bugs and tweak settings in the game. This mod isn’t adding content or improving visuals extensively — the Starfield Community Patch is an evolving project designed to make “vanilla Starfield,” or Starfield as the developers intended, a better experience. You won’t find any new planets here.
“Bethesda games are absolutely massive,” popular modder Alex, who goes by Simon Magus and is known for his Simonrim series of mods for The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, told Polygon. “There are always going to be a few bugs that slip through the cracks — and even just insane things you would never expect to find in a normal development process.” Alex described a Skyrim bug that he and a friend fixed this year, a weird scenario where dual-wielded spells didn’t quite add up to the correct damage. “The Starfield Community Patch is a project that’s trying to fill in the gaps, the reality that Bethesda has to, at some point, move on to The Elder Scrolls 6.” It’s the spelling errors, inconsistent percentages, bugs, and missing tags on items that the Community Patch aims to fix.
The project’s mission statement emphasizes the idea of communal ownership; no one person will really own the patch. (There will likely also be other unofficial patches designed to target the same issues — specifically, perhaps, from the team that did popular Skyrim and Fallout 4 patches.) But there are four modders who are leading the effort: Alex, Nexus Mods developer Tim “Halgari” Baldridge, software developer Justin “Noggog” Swanson, and Nexus Mods community manager Mike “Pickysaurus” Watling.
