New Starfield Update Possibly Sets the Stage For Land Vehicles

04.05.2024 - 21:08 / gamerant.com / Dominik Bo

The latest Starfield update has reportedly improved the way the game handles dynamic loading of map cells. While the change didn't result in any immediate player benefits, its very existence suggests that Bethesda may be rethinking how Starfield's map boundaries work in preparation for the recently confirmed arrival of land vehicles.

While all the planets in Starfield are fully explorable, it's not actually possible to circumnavigate them on foot, as their maps are divided into smaller sectors separated by loading screens. Called landing zones in the game's jargon, the majority of these quadrants span one, four, or nine map tiles. In terms of real-world units, these dimensions correspond to 3x3km, 6x6km, and 9x9km areas. The exception are corner zones and city regions, which occupy two map tiles. Hitting a landing zone boundary requires repositioning one's ship by going through a loading screen in order to reach another area of the map.

Starfield update 1.11.33, which entered beta on May 1, doesn't change any of these fundamental principles. But what it does do is improve how the game handles loading map cells on the fly, even without the luxury of loading screens. That's according to some new findings by Reddit user Baggetto, who recently went through the effort of removing Starfield's map boundaries via a mod to see how the RPG performs in such taxing circumstances following the new update. To their surprise, the game remained stable even after they had traversed 190km away from their ship, at which point they gave up trying to crash it out of boredom.

The previous time they conducted the same experiment, after Starfield's big March 2024 update, the game would crash whenever they moved about 150km from the landing zone. But problems with geometry and physics started popping up much sooner than that. This time around, even flora and fauna remained visible and scannable until at least the 30km mark, more than three times the length of the largest possible landing zone in an unmodded version of the game.

It would hence appear that the update quietly introduced some major performance improvements that make dynamic landing zone loading more feasible. While the likelihood of Bethesda actually implementing such a feature appears slim, the recently observed changes do suggest that Starfield's landing zones could realistically be much larger than they currently are.

Increasing landing zone sizes may not have been high on the studio's priority list up until recently, as few players ever hit a map boundary on foot. But with Bethesda's latest dev diary confirming that at least one rover-like Starfield land vehicle is in the works, current landing zone sizes may start feeling much more restrictive once players