Despite promises of post-launch support, old Starfield has been quietly going into that good night, releasing a so-so piece of DLC, a dune buggy, and… er, not too much else, really. With silence deep enough to match the empty vacuum of space, fans have been champing at the bit for some news, any news, on a game-changing feature.
Like a star glimmering through that empty void, some think they've found it (thanks, GamesRadar). Nestled into some recent patch files are a few scarce lines of code, as discovered by dataminers on the Starfield subreddit.
New Findings in the last 2 update suggest Dev team is adding a highly request feature: Interplanetary Travel from r/Starfield
The lines in question? Repeat references to a "cruise" mode, including the following phrases "OnShipCruiseArrival" and "SpaceCruiseEvent". It's the barest, thinnest thread—but one could possibly conceive that this means a FTL cruise option may be replacing Starfield's rather bland loading screens.
It's not a huge hyperspace leap to imagine. As discovered back in 2023 by the highly determined streamer Alanah Pearce, Starfield's galaxies are in fact mostly simulated, and it's possible to spend several hours flying from one planet to the next. The game just doesn't load the new planet in, causing you to clip into a featureless skybox-style orb like you're playing a Gmod space map.
On the other hand, I mean, c'mon. It's been two years. The modding community's growing vocally "disenchanted", and you can only say you're working on "exciting things" so many times before the spectre of doubt looms over the entire project.
However, those same dataminers also noted that these files were later snipped by Bethesda. So either papa Todd doesn't want to get people's hopes up, or I'm about to eat Chunks-brand Humble Pie in the future. But it's not enough to just talk the talk and say you're listening to community concerns—you've gotta walk the walk, too.
Especially given the game that directly stole Starfield's lunch, Baldur's Gate 3, put out eight game-changing patches that added new subclasses, new endings, new features, modding support, and more in the same timeframe. Bethesda's already been shown up, and I'm not entirely sure a FTL minigame'll make up for that, even if it'd objectively improve what we've got. I hope it happens, though—I don't get people who stuck with this game, but they certainly deserve the best for hanging on for so long.
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