Starfield was released a little over a week ago, but for players who are planning on embarking their through the stars, here are some of the essential mods we recommend you before diving into the game.
For all the achievement hunters out there, sometimes when using console commands in Starfield will have your save file be marked as modded which in turn disables you from earning achievements.
With the Achievement Enabler mod, you won’t have to worry about that anymore.
Starfield by default only supports FSR 2, which is more optimal for users using AMD graphic cards, as NVIDA RTX graphic card users would rather have DLSS upscaling. This mod is for those who use NVIDIA RTX graphic cards as you can get increased performances as well as more optimal image quality.
Starfield Performance Optimizations
To make Starfield perform better on PC, it’s not just about having the graphic settings be put on the per-existing presets, but instead you should tweak those settings in more detail. However, if you don’t want to deal with the complicated terms, introducing the mod made by user E3roKK.
The way the mod works is simple, it’s essentially just some numerical tweaks to the existing graphic settings. However, those values can’t be changed through the Options menu and can only be tweaked through the .ini files. This mod basically does the tedious work for you.
Given the sheer number of items that are available in Starfield, inventory management can be annoying. StarUI is a mod that makes the inventory menu easier to view and organise.
If you’ve played modded Skyrim before, you’ve probably heard of the SkyUI mod that almost every player uses. In just one screen, you can see which items are worth selling, discarding or to be kept.
One of the annoying things in Starfield is when you open certain menu UIs. An example being opening the inventory / skill menu, the various animations used are capped at 30 FPS which makes it less smooth when from tab to another tab, especially when scanning or transitioning menus. The 60 FPS Smooth UI mod as the name suggests, updates all UI elements so that they run at 60 FPS.
The BetterHUD mod comes with a number of configurable customisations to the Starfield UI that help tidy up the screen and avoid distractions during combat. Location finding text and XP indicators can be minimized and moved to the bottom instead of the center of the screen, enemy attack markers and health bars can be disabled, and the crosshair can be made dynamic so that it only appears during combat.
Moreover, the modder also customised many settings that can be used according to the player’s preferences. Changes to Quality of Life features like these can make the game much more comfortable to play.
A handful of players including myself aren’t a big fan of the colour filters you get from the base game where they sometimes make the colours look unnatural and sometimes even blurry.
The Neutral LUTs mod will aid in showing off more accurate colours by removing the colour filter. Do note that this mod isn’t a ReShade, so it won’t be affect the game’s performance.
There is no option to set the FOV in vanilla Starfield. While you can change the FOV in Starfield yourself, the In-Game FOV Changer mod is a much more user-friendly option than fiddling with the .ini file itself, allowing you to customize first-person and third-person viewpoints on the fly.
For reference, Starfield’s default FOV is set to 85 for First Person. and 70 for Third Person. By using this mod, you can adjust the numbers according to your own preferences.
There are plenty of missions that require you to go back and forth from one mothership to another. Every time you go to a mothership, you’ll se a pretty cool docking animation and while that may seem cool at first, over time it becomes boring and time-consuming. For that reason, this mod is useful for removing those cutscenes.
One of the fun things about playing Starfield is the “Ship Building” feature that allows players to be creative when building ships. However, in the vanilla version there will be certain restrictions on installing a component. This mod used to remove those restrictions and allow you to be even more creative.