Starfield's unofficial radio stations have made me want to keep playing

A radio player open in a spaceship cockpit — (Image credit: Starfield Radio)

Even if you didn't love what Bethesda did to the Fallout series, you have to admit adding radio stations was a great idea. The jarring juxtaposition of doo-wop crooning and post-apocalyptic hellscape was part of Fallout from the beginning, but taking it out of the intro cutscene and making it something you could add to your playthrough at any time elevated Fallout 3 immensely.

I know I wasn't the only person disappointed by the absence of radio stations from Starfield. As always with Bethesda RPGs, modders have come to the rescue. Starfield Radio currently hosts five stations with a sixth on the way, and you don't even need to download a mod to listen to it. You can just play it in a browser window and pretend you're flying the spaceways even when you're supposed to be working.

Of the current assortment of stations, Sol Train: Music from the 3rd Rock is an immediate favorite. Coming to us live from the MAST District of New Atlantis, DJ Black Hole Benny plays a selection of Earth classics from Modest Mouse to Massive Attack, with a fine line in space-themed songs like David Bowie's Life on Mars and The Beastie Boys' Intergalactic. I'm also into The Dust, a lo-fi station out of Neon whose DJ does an amazing impression of the kind of perpetually half-asleep lady who hosts late-night lo-fi shows on community radio stations in our own epoch.

There's also Nocturna: Music of the Ancients if you're into actual classical music like Strauss and Stravinsky, The Black Box with Willy Kino if you're into being shouted at by a talkback paranoiac, and Radio Active which I can't listen to because the DJ makes a clucky mouth sound that sets my brain twitching (neurotypical listeners may have a better experience).

All these stations are also available on Spotify, and via the Starfield Galactic Radio mod. For the latter you'll first need to install Starfield Script Extender and the Address Library for SFSE Plugins. I'm going to hold off on modding Starfield until I finish it at least once and Bethesda's update cadence slows down a little, but I'll definitely have Starfield Radio open in the background until then so I can rock out to Steal My Sunshine and Rocket Man while I hunt for artifacts and pretend to be a pirate.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.