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.
No matter whether you paid for early access or jumped into the game on September 6, odds are if you’ve avoided spending all day downloading mods, you’ve likely already done plenty of interstellar exploring and moulded your character into a hardened spacer.
While many players have been busy getting up to wacky hijinks as they roam the cosmos, some of which have involved Thomas the Tank Engine, a spaceship shaped like a sandwich, and a bunch of milk cartons, speedrunners have been busy scything through the game as fast as possible, with one now having unofficially beaten it from scratch in under an hour.
Are you close to finishing Starfield’s main story yet?
This feat is the result of plenty of hard work by members of the Starfield Speedrunning Discord server in devising time-saving strategies and routes since the game’s early access period began. Using these strats, runner Dante has managed to achieve what looks to be the first standard any% run through the game to clock in under the hour mark, posting a time of 57 minutes and 58 seconds.
“Shoutout to Micrologist and everyone else in the Starfield Speedrunning Discord for discovering all the little things that make this speedrun fast,” they wrote in the description of their video of it.
As you can see, it still takes runners a good ten minutes to get off of the planet Vectera, where the game’s intro takes place, but once this is done, the accelerator pedal goes flat to the floor in a manic pursuit of artefacts and missions.
Things have certainly come a long way from the just under three hour run set by Micrologist not long after early access players first began to blast off into space.
Since that point, the server’s members have gradually been grinding down the time required to complete an any% run through the game from scratch. Such runs are a little slower than New Game Plus any% runs, which have already dipped below the forty minute mark and, naturally, benefit from the starting foundation of a New Game Plus save.
The game’s official Speedrun.com page is set to begin accepting submissions on September 20, so odds are these records are only going to continue to tumble in the near future.
Regardless of whether you’re now trying to rush through the cosmos at warp speed, make sure to follow us for lots of guides to Starfield’s characters, mechanics, and quests.
You can also check out our latest mods of the month.