Cheating out of my ship to do a spacewalk in Starfield left me wishing there was something to do out here

Starfield character in space suit floating amid asteroid field above gas giant

(Image credit: Bethesda)

First noticed by user WeirdConcern4666 on the Starfield subreddit, it's actually pretty easy to dip out of your ship and do a spacewalk thanks to two quick Starfield console commands. There's not much to do out there in the void at the moment, but doing a cheeky extravehicular activity (EVA) lends itself to some nice screenshots, and I'm excited for the modding potential here.

Here's how to teleport out of your ship and fly around:

Hit the tilde (~) key to open up the console. Disregard the achievements warning⁠—where we're going, we don't need achievements
player.setpos x 10 will teleport you just outside the exterior of your vessel
setgravityscale 0 will set the game to zero g, letting you jet around out there (forgetting this step will send you into an infinite freefall)

And there you have it, now you can join your goonish little companions clinging to the outside of your ship. Moving around can be a bit odd in the inky black⁠—I've noticed what seem like invisible barriers that aren't present while you're piloting the ship.

It doesn't help that everything is already extremely far apart, making it take quite a while to move around with your dinky boost pack. To get back to your ship, simply fast travel to it⁠—there's no exterior hatch or "legit" way to get back in.

Asteroids also lack any collision for player characters. From what I could tell, your ship actually runs into an invisible barrier a few meters out from each rock's surface, one that doesn't apply to a free-flying little guy. Trying to touch down on a space rock merely has you clip through it.

Still, it was really cool and weirdly scary to do an EVA like this. I get a similar sort of pit in my stomach watching those scale of the universe videos they used to churn out on YouTube⁠—Starfield really does nail the scale and majesty of space on the visual side. There's a lot of promise here for Starfield mods too, maybe to get spacewalks working without having to resort to console commands and, crucially, giving you something to do out there. What if you had to float out and manually grab loot from downed enemy ships, for example?

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Ted has been thinking about PC games and bothering anyone who would listen with his thoughts on them ever since he booted up his sister's copy of Neverwinter Nights on the family computer. He is obsessed with all things CRPG and CRPG-adjacent, but has also covered esports, modding, and rare game collecting. When he's not playing or writing about games, you can find Ted lifting weights on his back porch.