“One of the least known things about Starfield is how closely it simulates the astrophysics of a real solar system,” modder Frederik Wessberg tells us. Wessberg, a Danish singer-songwriter and full-time software developer, has made international headlines for his new Starfield Seamless Landings mod, a fan project that allows players to continuously fly from a planet’s surface, into space, and then onto another planet.
When Starfield initially launched, the game was largely a fast-travel simulator, but the entire universe of the sci-fi game did exist, the ship was just too slow to go anywhere. That changed with Free Lanes, an update that allowed you to fly across the universe, but players still can’t land on planets in the game. That universe is living, it’s now explorable, but the boundary between space and land is still an immersion breaker for the infamous space game.
“I love Starfield,” Wessberg explains. “The game knows the atmospheric composition of every planet and moon, its distance to its star and its path around it, and which moons orbit it. It has biome maps for each hemisphere and ocean masks telling us where the shorelines are. It knows the gravity, average temperature, length of day, whether there’s a magnetic field, and a lot more. The planets really do move along their orbits and spin on tilted axes, driven by the game’s calendar. If you stand somewhere and wait, the planet is actually turning and moving along its path around the sun.”
Wessberg explains that they’ve “always been a tinkerer”, starting with turn-of-the-millennium motorbike game Elasto Mania, but they’ve made a number of mods in the past. Most famous, prior to Starfield Seamless Landings, is the Fallout 76 High Resolution Texture Pack, which they “completely over-engineered to bring higher-resolution textures over from Fallout 4 and mangle their not-quite-PBR texture maps into the newer (but still not-quite-PBR) texture maps expected by 76.”
When asked about their inspiration for bringing Seamless Landings to Starfield, Wessberg reveals that their favourite movie is 2001: A Space Odyssey, which has led to a fascination with sci-fi sims like Star Citizen. But my love for Fallout runs deeper,” they tell us, which led to a sense of disappointment from Starfield, although they “quickly fell in love with the game’s many other qualities instead”.
“When the ‘Free Lanes’ update eventually gave us ‘Cruise mode’, I felt something foundational shifting in the game. Exploration started feeling more meaningful, because the slower pace of interplanetary travel worked well with it,” the modder explains. “I was pretty sure that if seamless landings were ever to come out officially, it would have been with Free Lanes, and once I saw how much better the exploration loop felt with cruise mode, I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. It had to be done.”
As with most major projects, Starfield Seamless Landings began as a “small project” which would simply prevent the loading screen as a ship moved onto an autopilot zone. “Preventing the loading screen turned out to be the least of my problems,” he says. Bethesda’s brilliantly powerful Creation Engine splits everything into “cells”, and “in Starfield, space is a special cell of its own”, and space and land are not supposed to interact. Each planet, then, is like an interior with space existing around the fully-rendered location in a less-active state with your ship serving as another special cell that moves throughout others.
“The spot on a planet you land on is a worldspace the game generates when you pick it,” the modder explains. “The game never has more than one worldspace active, and it isn’t built to run space and a planet side by side. Going from one to the other requires a swap. Behind that loading screen, the game tick is completely stopped while space is torn down and the area you’re landing in is being built. At that moment, the ship isn’t moving, and the camera is completely frozen. A ‘loading corridor’ needs the game to keep running through that swap, and it simply can’t.”
“Instead of fighting the engine, I decided to lean into its strengths,” he continues. “After you choose a place to land, the mod loads everything related to the landing area it in the background while you fly, so all that’s left at the end is the switch itself. That switch costs roughly 130ms on my own machine for New Atlantis, the most expensive location I’ve tested. To hide that hitch, I hold the last frame before the switch in the framebuffer, and extrapolate new frames from the ship’s known motion, similar to timewarp in VR headsets (which this mod works really well with, by the way).”
As you fly from space to ground, Starfield Seamless Landing can sometimes hide the shift from the game’s blob-like low-LOD planets with clouds, although as Wessberg pushes to lean on the game’s physically accurate universe, that can’t possibly happen for everything. “My philosphy was that Starfield’s own planet data is the truth,” he says, using the game’s wealth of invisible information to “predict things like humidity across the planet, which drives the cloud simulation”.
As players fly down into the planet, which can take sometime although players can tweak this, Wessberg has included multiple sights for the player. “Thunderstorms can form where the air is rising hard. Auroras appear around the poles of planets with a magnetic field, coloured by the atmosphere’s composition. The night side can be lit by nearby moons, and planets/moons with oxygen will have airglow at night. There are large-scale cloud shadows, both on land and on the ocean. The ocean reflects sunlight and its color goes from deep blue out at sea to turquoise near the coast depending on depth, which gives you natural beaches and shorelines… And as we get closer to the ground, all of this has to match the worldspace you’re about to enter. While we know the terrain and biomes up front.”
Wessberg is keen to note that the introduction of cloud layers on landing is “not a loading screen”. In fact, on airless planets, there can never be clouds. Instead, these phenomena are there to guise that microscopic pop, that 130 millisecond space where planets become tangible. It’s not hiding anything, just making it more pleasing to look at.
While Starfield is available on PC and console, this mod will only be available on the former as the game’s required use of Starfield Script Extender. “If there was anything I could change to bring it to consoles through Creations, I would do it in a heartbeat, even if it meant substantial re-engineering,” the modder says, but it would only be possible if “Bethesda ports the mod or re-implements similar work directly in their engine.”
With that said, despite the massive amount of effort they’ve put into the mod, Wessberg hopes that Bethesda will add their own version of Seamless Landings into Starfield. The mod also removed loading screens between the player’s spaceship and the outside world, which could be a much easier addition. While heavy cuts have been made at the studio, there is still a team working on more content and gameplay additions to the game with years of support planned for the often-too-maligned RPG, and this could be an awesome addition.
“I think cruise mode helped bridge two opposing philosophies in the game’s design, and using it has made exploration feel more rewarding to me,” Wessberg says. “So, adding things like seamless landings (and takeoffs) I think would really benefit that core exploration loop. I don’t have the data to back it up, but I think Starfield has grown into a “comfort game” for many people, and leaning into space traveling and the exploration aspects of the game I think is important to its future.”
As the unreleased mod has grown in popularity on social media, many have used it to take digs at Bethesda Game Studios. Some posts using footage of the modder’s work have used it as an excuse to label the studio as lazy and dumb, posts from the same people who malign Bethesda’s internal engine despite the fact that it is one of the more unique and powerful engines for the simulation work a mod like this requires.
“I constantly see people comment on my videos or on social media saying this is ‘embarrassing’ for Bethesda, or that one guy did what they said was impossible. I’m humbled by the kind words, but I don’t agree at all,” they say. “They never said it was impossible. Todd Howard said back in 2022 that seamless flight was ‘just not that important to the player’. That was clearly a design decision they made based on the data they had available, and not due to incompetence.” They add that bringing a mod like this to the less-powerful Xbox Series S would be even more difficult and would likely require significant investment.
It’s clear that Wessberg’s Starfield Seamless Landings mod is a labour of love for an imperfect game, but does every game need to be perfect? “I also think it has some deep flaws, and most of them come from the game stumbling a bit in living up to its own ambitions,” the modder says. “But then I’d stumble upon some fantastic location, like a zero-G casino in a star station, and leave that play session feeling mesmerised. When I see the best the game has to offer, I see how much potential it still has, and I think that’s what makes the community so passionate about evolving Starfield.”
To this day, Starfield is a game with a feverish fanbase. While it hasn’t resulted in the endless slew of mods for Fallout and The Elder Scrolls, it’s certainly resulted in some passionate ones, and Seamless Landings is one of them. While not every fan of Bethesda’s flawed-but-brilliant RPG will be able to play it, it not only shows what’s possible within the game’s sprawling universe, but also a lot of what it hides from you.
