Starfield NPCs are hilariously ruining romantic proposals with awkward animations

Starfield's community keeps getting smarter with their ship builds—we've had AI-exploiting nightmares made of corners, ladderless flat discs, and some sci-fi classics. But what about the little guys of the universe—pilots who don't want some big, fancy warship with 500 autocannons?

It was only a matter of time until people started mashing Starfield up with Skyrim. Combining some of the assets of one Bethesda game with the world of another (or vice versa) was an inevitability. Trust the modding community to come through for us.

Starfield players are noticing the same – in my humble opinion, creepy – doppelganger kids filling various non-player roles across the RPG's universe.

There’s a difference between having an “expansive title” that you can do a lot in and a “meaningful title” where your choices affect everything around you. Those who make open-world RPGs must see how well they can balance those elements to deliver something special for players. Regarding Bethesda’s latest title, Starfield, fans are a bit mixed on where the title falls within those categories. On the one hand, there is a massive universe to explore, and you have the freedom to do certain things, but how the game “reacts” to certain things has caused some players grief.

Over the weekend, Starfield players began to share reports of a strange paranormal infestation. There are asteroids in the game that, for reasons known only to gods and/or programmers, follow you from orbit to orbit, flying eerily in formation with your ship, and sometimes even accompanying you to a planet's surface. "In one of my weirdest Bethesda glitch experiences, I've got a tiny asteroid that's been following me for the past 30 hours," user ReverendRoo posted on Reddit, triggering an avalanche of comments reminiscent of UFO chasers spotting each other at a NASA open day. "I would catch a glimpse of it from time to time," wrote fattfett. "I tried to approach it but you can't. It stays away. I assumed it had a deeper meaning [toward] the endgame." Some players, like Blackdius, have multiple asteroids in tow. It seems impossible to blow them up. I've dug up a Youtube video below of one such clingy space boulder from a couple of weeks back. As you can see, it's not just a fixed background point like a screen artefact, but seems to move in response to the player's ship. Most peculiar.

If you've been a fan of Bethesda games for a while, you'll more than likely be well aware of the Invisible Dawnstar Chest glitch from Skyrim. Over a decade ago, one lucky Skyrim player found a seemingly invisible chest packed to the brim with powerful and expensive items, tucked away inside of a random cliff in Dawnstar. This was actually a chest filled with a nearby merchant's inventory, but was accidentally placed too close to the surface, letting fans pilfer the contents of an entire shop without punishment.

Many of us remember a simpler time when wild Skyrim cheese and cabbage physics videos were the best thing on the Internet. The bad news is that you didn’t just wake up from the coma that you had entered after you beat Skyrim. The good news is that Starfield players are bringing that Nostalgia back and making better physics videos than ever before.

By utilizing a quirk of Starfield enemy AI, players have discovered a secret method to make your ship completely immune to all damage — and it isn’t an exploit or a cheat. We’re not glitching the game. We’re just using the AI’s tendencies against them. By building your ship in a very weird way, players are making it so enemy ships can’t hit them. Seriously.

GKIDS announced via X (formerly Twitter) on Wednesday that Blue Giant, the new anime film from Mob Psycho 100 and Death Parade director Yuzuru Tachikawa, will screen in select U.S. theaters on Oct. 8 and 9. In a follow-up post, the film distributor also announced that Blue Giant’s North America premiere will be hosted at the Japan Society building in New York City on Oct. 6, with a Q&A with the movie’s composer, Hiromi Uehara, scheduled after the screening.

It seems a bit odd that I would want to spend any time in Starfield visiting Earth. Humanity is wide-eyed with dreams of discovering new planets, colonizing homesteads among the stars. Our science fiction texts are overflowing with the lofty possibilities of leaving our home world behind to seek a future elsewhere.

It's only been a week since Starfield fully released, but some players have experienced enough to share their tips for others just getting started in the RPG.

Starfield guide: Our hub of adviceStarfield console commands: Every cheat you needStarfield mods: Space is your sandboxStarfield traits: The full list, with our top picksStarfield companions: All your recruitable crewStarfield romance options: Space dating