Starfield has been in the hands of those who shelled out for early access, and while it may have its foibles, it has proven to be a pretty spectacular foray into space.
The best part about being a PC player of Starfield, of course, is the ability to enforce your ironclad will on the aforementioned foibles by modifying your game to chuck them straight in the bin. Considering I have already augmented my Starfield experience, I thought it made sense to perhaps share a couple of the mods that I was impressed by.
Oh, and a few that are downright cursed. So, what mods do I consider essential?
1. Starfield Upscaler
Remember the crazy response people had to the Starfield AMD deal? Big angry words about AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 being forced on people and alienating the GeForce green nation. Well, bugger that noise because all it took was a few days for some galaxy-brained modder to blow the doors wide open for both Nvidia DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and Intel XeSS (Xe Super Sampling) support.
Starfield Upscaler does everything it says on the tin, with a pretty seamless implementation of the missing options. Absolutely mental.
2. BetterHUD
Look, I am not a big fan of messing with the HUD in a game. I find that 99% of the time, people more qualified than I have made smart enough decisions that a little trust in the process will net a long term benefit.
But some of the element placements in Starfield suck monkey butt. So lets shift them the heck somewhere else.
BetterHUD just does a general tidy of onscreen elements, especially pop-up ones like experience gains or location text. There are also some options to add further immersive elements by nuking enemy health bars, if you are into that kind of thing.
3. Undelayed Menus
Okay, stay with me on this one. Have you noticed how navigating in and out of the games menus seems to take an age? Well, the way they have been configured means they are dependent on a number of cosmetic effects to make them feel all futuristic and ‘NASA-punk’, but in reality it just means that your time jumping in and out of stuff like your inventory or the map has been artificially inflated by a level of ‘prettiness’ that really isn’t all that pretty. Or essential.
Undelayed Menus is a genius mod that actually speeds up all of the random animations that govern your UI menus – as well as stripping out forced delays on activating buttons. While many mods can feel a bit like a minor tweak or a change, this one has substantially improved my gameplay experience.
Sure, you may think it isn’t that bad – but honestly, take a look at this comparison:
The fade-in/out ALONE. It’s nightmarishly slow. Sluggish beyond words.
Go on, treat yourself. Undelayed Menus is your huckleberry.
Honourable Mentions
There are a handful of other mods that I saw as neat, but didn’t quite tickle my pickle enough to remain on my essential list. I know a lot of Bethesda gamers live and die by their colossal mod lists, but I have always been one to keep things slim – in case a mod breaks and I am doomed to live without.
Further neat mods that are worth a look:
- Neutral LUTs – No Color Filters – Basically removes some of the artistic environmental colouring from the game. Screenshots look great, but I feel I haven’t played enough of the game to really consider killing off part of the art direction just yet.
- Starfield FOV – Yeah, the game doesn’t have an FOV slider in the menus. I kind of consider this one essential, but you can achieve that its doing by way of a custom INI file with two lines, So I didn’t need it.
- Achievement Enabler – Some mods kill your ability to gain achievements. This stops that from happening. Easy.
- Cleanfield – A No-Intro Videos And Clean Menu Fix – Remove start menu clutter, game start up warnings and all that rot. I removed the intro video on my own, and felt fine with the other stuff, so didn’t quite see this as essential.
Seriously, changing your FOV is so easy – here’s a bloke showing you how:
And what of some cursed mods? Well, it’s early days so you can imagine that all kinds of people are pumping out random stuff, memes – you name it.
Some of the goofier ones include the Bill Clinton Flashlight, which of course projects a big ol’ picture of Bill in your flashlight beam (not to be confused with the far more legendary Nicolas Cage Flashlight Mod, for obvious reasons) and the nightmare inducing Mr Electric Visor mod, which turns your helmet’s glass into the terrifying visage you may remember from The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. At least, I had forgotten it before I encountered this mod.
My final special mention for the cursed category will absolutely be the Paintjob of mass destruction (Vasco Ahegao) mod, which slathers super porny manga images all over our robot friend. If you don’t know what ‘ahegao’ is, I would suggest you Google carefully – but you have likely seen it on a persons clothing while enjoying public transport at least once.
So with that, those are my recommendations from the fledgling Starfield PC modding scene. I hope you find some useful ones – and if you haven’t installed Undelayed Menus, there is still time.
See you among the stars, traveller.
Or at least, I will when someone eventually mods in multiplayer.
