Starfield mod aims to make simply playing the game a lot more rewarding

Most of the hardcore Bethesda fans who’ve invested thousands of hours into Skyrim and Fallout 4 couldn’t wait for the chance to start digging into Starfield.

Whether you paid for early access, or jumped into the game on September 6, odds are you’ve already blazed through a lot of missions and gotten up to plenty of wacky hijinks.

No matter whether you’re after Thomas the Tank Engine or customisable UI elements, the game’s modding scene is already home to a bunch of great works that can augment your adventures in space. One of the latest is worth checking out if you don’t think your character is being suitably rewarded for all of their hard work.

Do you think Starfield is a bit too stingy in dishing out XP?

The mod in question is called ‘Rewarding Activities’ and is the work of modder Darthrispal. Its aim is pretty simple: to increase the amount of XP you’ll earn by doing everything from discovering new locations to picking locks, and upgrading equipment.

“I think the experience is poorly balanced in Starfield,” Darthrispal writes in the mod's description. “The best way to level up is to kill creatures on a distant planet and other activities give too few experience points in my opinion. This mod rewards other common activities we all do while playing.”

Currently, you’ve got three versions of the mod, entitled basic reward, medium reward, and high reward to choose from. All of these boost the XP gains given out, with a list of activities it affects by different amounts.

For example, discovering a new location or marker on your map while using the basic version of the mod will net you 80 XP, which is more than the 20 XP dished out for the same thing in the vanilla game, but a lot less than the whopping 200 XP you’d get if you were using the high reward version.

It also looks like each version allows you to tweak the XP amounts you’ll be rewarded with upon completing a mission or killing an enemy, with the four choices on offer including sticking to the vanilla values or going as far as doubling them.

If you like you can also customise things even further - assuming you’re comfortable dipping into an INI file and changing the text values for different XP gains directly - but this probably isn’t too wise to attempt unless you’re a hardened modding veteran.

So, you might still land on plenty of barren and boring planets as you explore the cosmos, but at least now you’ll have the chance to be compensated progression-wise for your efforts.

Make sure to follow us for lots of guides to Starfield’s characters, mechanics, and quests. You can also check out our latest mods of the month.