10,000 milk cartons descend on Starfield's biggest city in newest physics benchmark

08.09.2023 - 23:11 / pcgamer.com

Starfield guide: Our hub of advice
Starfield console commands: Every cheat you need
Starfield mods: Space is your sandbox
Starfield traits: The full list, with our top picks
Starfield companions: All your recruitable crew
Starfield romance options: Space dating

Starfield players continue to push the game—and their computers–to the limit by spawning thousands of items in inappropriate places, like stuffing 20,000 potatoes in a spaceship. Watching potatoes roll out of an air lock is great, but what if you could watch 10,000 milk cartons descend onto a population zone like a lactic artillery strike?

Yesterday, YouTube user Dennios gave us the latest Starfield physics benchmark by making it rain dairy on New Atlantis. Using Starfield's console commands, they blanketed the game's capital city with 10,000 milk cartons and watched them roll boxily toward the streets below.

Dennios' PC manages to render each and every carton with a shockingly stable frame rate. When Lauren was shoving hundreds of food items into her ship for science, she found that rectangular food items were easier on her PC compared to round items, like oranges, and that they bounced in a goofier way.

You can see what she's talking about in Dennios' video. The cartons bounce off of the building and each other in a way that makes me skeptical of what's actually inside them. Whether or not they're FDA-approved, the carton cascade is so impressive that Dennios didn't expect it to go so smoothly.

«I am surprised it runs this well. I spawned 10,000 milk cartons at once, [and] it loaded in just one second,» they wrote on Reddit. «Doing this in Oblivion and Skyrim takes a few moments. The physics stuff is running amazing. Thumbs up for the devs, who did it!»

No matter how good Starfield's physics are though, you'll need a beefy PC to simulate thousands of items at once. Dennios kindly provided their PC specs in a separate Reddit comment to help contextualize this feat:

Their rig isn't absurdly powerful, but they're running Starfield at 1080p with AMD's AI upscaling tech on, which, evidently, leaves them enough overhead to safely spawn in thousands of milk cartons. Anyone playing the game at a higher resolution, however, might struggle with this much dairy all at once.

I keep rewatching Dennios' clip; partly to watch how each carton tumbles, and partly because the gentle thuds of them hitting the building is almost as soothing as listening to brown noise. I think Dennios could take this experiment and run with it for a whole new YouTube channel with videos like «10,000 Starfield milk cartons falling for 10 hours [ASMR]».

Starfield just launched for everyone earlier this week, so I imagine it'll take some time before someone with a godly PC manages to