Starfield’s biggest modders feel abandoned, and Bethesda agrees

Bethesda’s latest RPG behemoth Starfield is an absolutely massive title on Xbox and PC, but it has its fair share of bugs. While a number of Starfield modders are attempting to fix the sci-fi game, they feel that Bethesda has screwed them on launch.

The team behind the Starfield Community Patch, the most popular mod for the game’s PC version, reveal that modding in Bethesda’s newest game “feels like an afterthought”.

In an interview with Eurogamer, the team explained that fixing Starfield is much harder than the other modders’ efforts on Skyrim, Fallout 4 and other Bethesda games.

The Starfield Community Patch is currently an open-source project that combines the talents of multiple developers, but working on Starfield’s bugs without access to official mod tools is proving to be a major pain. According to SCP founder Timothy "Halgari" Baldridge, it took over 400 hours to get an initial patch working for the game due to its new engine, Creation Engine 2.

“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,” Halgari explained. “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.”

Bethesda Game Studios has always been pro-modding, going as far as to add modding functionality into the console versions of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Legendary Edition and Fallout 4. The studio’s games have been responsible for the best mods of all time, with fans even going as far as creating detailed Skyrim sex mods. However, at launch, Starfield is seemingly missing a lot of functionality that modders need.

Halgari revealed that the Starfield Community Patch in its current form is more of a hack than a mod. The only reason the team is even able to create the current form of the fan-patch is because its members have worked extensively on the prior version of the Creation Engine.

Halgari isn’t the only one to reveal this. In fact, the Eurogamer report also includes a comment from Bethesda Community Manager Cartogriffi who explained: “Mods was dead last for priority, and when the pandemic hit it was easy to put it on the backburner".

Nevertheless, Bethesda is working on bringing Starfield mod tools out to the public. While it may take longer than some fans expected, the game will include the hefty modding scene Bethesda games are known for.