Starfield Modder Achieves Seamless Planetary Landings

Ever dreamed of flying your Starfield ship straight from space into a planet's atmosphere without a single loading screen? Well, one modder is making that dream a reality.

Frederik Wessberg has been working on a "Seamless Landings" mod for about half a year, and he recently shared a clip showing a ship descending from space to a planet's surface 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. "I'm bringing Seamless Landings on planets and moons without any loading screens to Starfield."

The mod works whether you're flying manually or letting autopilot take over, so you can leave the captain's seat and just enjoy the view. And yes, 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," Wessberg adds.

During your descent, you'll fly through real 3D volumetric clouds driven by climate data and weather systems, complete with thunderstorms, lightning, auroras around the poles, airglow above the night-side horizon, and physically-based atmospheric scattering based on the game's actual atmospheric composition. It's a huge visual upgrade over the vanilla game.

Wessberg initially thought this would be a small project, but he ran into a major hurdle: planet rendering in space in vanilla Starfield is very limited. A planet is basically a texture with maybe a moving cloud layer and an atmosphere. Landing on it would be like landing on a flat texture. To fix this, he had to completely reimplement Starfield's planet rendering in 3D. "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," he says.

The mod will be completely free on NexusMods when it's ready. There's no release date yet, but the progress is promising. For players who felt let down by Starfield's loading screens, this could be a game-changer.

What do you think? Will you be picking up this mod when it drops?