Starfield mod expands the base-building system with 40 new farmable plants, massive bio-domes, and your very own Chunks franchise that earns passive income

On my personal Starfield wishlist is an expansion to the planetary base system. Bases can be useful—you can hire NPCs to work there and generate resources from the planets you build on—but they're not much fun, and once you've set them up there's very little reason to hang around. It's a part of the game I was looking forward to the most, but it feels like a big step down from Fallout 4's base building system.

I was expecting to have to wait for Bethesda to release the Creation Kit before we saw any big overhaul mods, but TG's Galactic Colonies Expanse mod looks and sounds pretty darn hefty. Created by modder TankGirl444, it's described as "an immersive space colonization simulator" that will let you "land on any world and build your own empire." That includes lots of new buildings, tons of farming and food options, and perhaps most enticingly, a Chunks restaurant.

Farming is a major feature of the mod, with more than 40 new plants to tend and harvest. All that food means new recipes to cook, from quantum milkshakes to Earth classics like burgers and fries. Other buildings include massive "bio-domes" that let you build sci-fi greenhouse on any planet you like. Wish you could import trees to barren worlds? Now you can. And with such a big colony, you'll naturally want to defend it, so the mod includes craftable mechs and turrets, "experimental anti-gravity cannons," and anti-ship lasers.

It all looks incredibly cool, and some of the screenshots show impressively large bases with industrial agriculture operations and fearsome defenses. I don't know if Bethesda is planning to expand on Starfield's base-building system in the future, but the developers should probably take a look at what TankGirl444 is doing first.

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TG's Galactic Colonies Expanse mod is a work in progress with more features planned for the future, like giving NPCs living in your colony needs like hunger and thirst, and even adding a terraforming system to change a planet's atmosphere. Stay tuned.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.