One of the big criticisms leveled against Starfield at launch was its lack of seamless planetary landing. Spacefarers can essentially pick a landing zone and go through a glorified loading screen to reach their destination, but they couldn’t fly into a planet’s atmosphere and land directly themselves a la No Man’s Sky.
A Starfield modder is now working to change that, and their results are already super impressive. Frederik Wessberg today posted a clip of the “Seamless Landings” mod that’s still in-progress, showing how a Starfield ship can go from the void of space to the surface of a planet “without any loading screens.”
“I’ve worked on this thing for roughly half a year at this point, and finally it’s starting to look and feel ready enough for me to show it to you,” Wessberg writes in the video’s description. “I’m bringing Seamless Landings on planets and moons without any loading screens to Starfield.”
Wessberg explains that the seamless landing works whether you’re flying the ship manually or putting letting autopilot do the work, so you can leave the captain’s seat and enjoy the view stress-free.
“You can even land on water! If you ever wondered how it would look if you were allowed to select a spot in the ocean in vanilla Starfield, here’s your chance to see that for yourself,” he adds. “And during your trip to the surface, you’ll be flying through real 3D layers of volumetric clouds, driven by climate data and weather systems, thunderstorms and lightning, auroras around the poles, airglow above the night-side horizon, physically-based atmospheric scattering based on the actual atmospheric composition the game data provides.”
Wessberg initially thought the mod would be a “fun, small project,” but quickly ran into some trouble because “planet rendering in space in vanilla Starfield is very limited: A planet is represented by a texture, maybe a moving cloud layer, and maybe an atmosphere.” Trying to land on a planet would essentially be akin to landing on a “flat texture.”
To get the job done, Wessberg “had to completely reimplement Starfield’s planet rendering in space in 3D,” but “thankfully, Starfield is actually amazingly physically accurate, and in many ways a true space simulator – it just doesn’t ever reveal this to the player.”
Starfield’s seamless landing mod will be completely free on NexusMods when it’s eventually ready.