A player has turned off planetary boundaries in Starfield, opening the door to some exciting possibilities.
Even before launch, Bethesda’s new sci-fi role-playing game Starfield was causing quite a stir. Although chief developer Pete Hines had hinted that the entire planet would be explorable, leaks quickly made it clear: In Starfield, you will encounter invisible walls in the landing zones.
But what actually lies behind these invisible barriers? That’s what two players have now found out for you.
Orbiting planets doesn’t seem completely out of the question
The first big discovery: A Reddit user named WhiteLight506 made the first found out that it is possible to land very close to the city of New Atlantis and spot it from a distance. However, he was unable to enter it, as the city is outside the invisible level limits mentioned and he came up against an invisible wall.
What this looks like in the game, you can see in the following screenshots:
You can see New Atlantis from the adjacent tiles
byu/WhiteLight506 inStarfield
Many fans have been convinced by this post that the unmarked landing zones are not completely random-generated and linked together after all.
So another player named Draspian went one step further: (He turned off the planetary boundaries in Starfield’s .ini file) and tried to enter the city from the outside. He got damn close, but then the game crashed. Draspian suspects that the game was trying to render the entire city in one go – and that caused the crash.
Even if you can’t explore the planets completely seamlessly, this discovery may now open the door for future mods. (Another user suggests, for instance) that there should be an option to load the next area when reaching a border.
A mod that loads the next area and kicks the current area out of RAM at least doesn’t sound unrealistic – and would ultimately make circumnavigating the planets possible. Even if it then doesn’t work quite as seamlessly as many had originally hoped.
