Starfield expansion Shattered Space is out September 30, but you can drive its new moon buggy today

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Bethesda popped up at Gamescom Opening Night Live to reveal that the Rev-8, a vehicle for traversing Starfield's giant planets in bumpy style, is "available tonight" for free. I gotta say I'm getting big Mass Effect Mako vibes from this thing, but in a charming way—it looks bouncy, seemingly has the ability to hover to help you clear large gaps, and yeah, of course it's got a gun on it.

The bigger news, though, is that Starfield's first expansion, Shattered Space, has a release date. As teased at the end of the trailer above, it's out on September 30. You can read more about the surprise patch on Bethesda's website, which includes details on a number of bug fixes and details how to get ahold of your own Rev-8 (okay, it's pretty simple: just talk to your ship technician).

Today's ground vehicle DLC release answers what may be Starfield's most-requested feature. Almost immediately upon release last year, Todd Howard was fielding questions about why there were no vehicles in Starfield to drive around despite its scale. (His answer, that you had a jetpack, didn't quite satisfy). We were disappointed in Starfield's exploration, but Shattered Space may well be a major boon on that front.

When Bethesda shared a look at Shattered Space in June, we learned it's going to explore the House Va’ruun, a "weird space cult" who "believe in an eternal space snake" that our writer Chris Livingston was bummed not to learn more about in the base game.

While we only get a few teasing seconds of Shattered Space at the end of the Rev-8 trailer above, it's definitely going for a spooky, cosmic horror vibe, including a character who outright looks like a ghost (or maybe whatever the space hologram version of a ghost is). With the Rev-8 parked on a rocky outcropping overlooking some kind of otherworldly base at the end of the trailer, I'd say it's a safe bet that the new vehicle will feature heavily in some of Shattered Space's new campaign missions. We'll find out in just six weeks.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).