Most of the hardcore Bethesda RPG fans who’ve invested thousands of hours into Skyrim and Fallout 4 couldn’t wait for the chance to start digging into Starfield.
Some chose to pass the time until it arrived by getting caught up in the discourses surrounding leaked aspects of it, or, more recently, reading through the message Todd Howard has posted on the game’s subreddit.
With those who paid for early access to the game now being able to set off on their adventures through space, modders have already been hard at work putting together some early additions to it, with two of the most noteworthy focusing on its graphical fidelity and performance.
Have you been planning on modding Starfield right out of the gate?
While Starfield’s dedicated Nexus Mods page has been peacefully empty since it went live midway through last month, now that we’ve hit September 1, it’s already begun to fill up with plenty of interesting works.
One of these is PureDark’s ‘Starfield Upscaler - Replacing FSR2 with DLSS or XeSS’, which, as you might have gleaned from the name, swaps AMD’s supersampling for the Nvidia or Intel version of the same thing. The modder has previously produced similar works for both Skyrim and Fallout 4, as well as their VR variants.
Supersampling has been much more of a highly publicised topic with regards to Starfield than it was with either of those games, due to a partnership between AMD and Bethesda which means that, as of writing, the game only currently supports FSR.
In order to get PureDark’s mod working, you’ll need to grab another of their works, ‘UpscalerBasePlugin’ and follow the instructions in the mod’s description.
Meanwhile, if you’ve been struggling to run the game as smoothly as you’d like so far, it might be worth checking out another early mod, E3roKK’s ‘Starfield Performance Optimizations’.
Developed by the same modder who was involved in creating a mod to help boost the FPS numbers of those playing Cyberpunk 2077’s Ray Tracing Overdrive Mode, this latest work aims to do the same for Starfield.
In practice, once its files are properly extracted to your game folder, E3roKK suggests that their mod will simply switch out the game’s default graphical presets, for example ‘ultra,’ for versions that come with some of the optimisation-based tweaks they’ve made. Though, it looks like you may have to do some switching between presets to get the changes to take effect as intended.
Regardless of whether you’re planning to devote your entire weekend to delving into Bethesda’s latest RPG, make sure to follow us for lots of guides to Starfield’s world and mechanics.
You can also check out our latest mods of the month.