The Most Bizarre Things Players Have Done In Starfield

If there's one thing that can be guaranteed about gamers, it's that they can and will push the limits of any game they get their hands on. "Starfield," Bethesda's new sci-fi open-world RPG, is no different. Like "Cyberpunk 2077" and "GTA 5" before it, players are already delighting in finding ways to exploit the new release. When you have a game as deep, complex, and densely packed with content as "Starfield," players can produce some truly wild things. 

With its open world exploration, complex physics engine, and huge variety of characters, "Starfield ” offers players ample opportunity to experiment with its mechanics and systems. Within days of its full release, players discovered fun tricks and nonsensical glitches as they stretched the mechanics of the game in ways the devs never intended. Combine that with Bethesda's openness to modding in a huge variety of ways, and you've got a true intergalactic sandbox of possibilities. Here are some of the most bizarre things people have done with these tools in "Starfield" — so far.

This particular exploit was one of the first things people discovered after jumping into the game. Throughout the many cities in "Starfield," you'll find armor locked inside of see-through cases. Normally you'd need to try and pick the lock — and potentially get caught stealing it in the process — to get to them quickly. It turns out, however, that there is a gap of a few pixels between the door of the cage and the rest of the lockbox. 

If you align your cursor precisely with the gap, you can pick up the armor like you would any normal item lying on the ground, and it magically appears in your inventory. Since you can find a very strong suit of early game armor locked in a case like this in New Atlantis, this small bug can grant you a huge advantage early on. It takes barely any effort or cost, aside from the time it takes to line up your cursor.

In a video that has already gone viral across multiple platforms, streamer and Sony Santa Monica writer Alanah Pearce decided to test the limits of "Starfield" by completely ignoring the game's fast travel system between planets. Instead, she chose to fly all the way out to Pluto the old-fashioned way. Pearce's ship arrived seven hours later, and that's when things got really weird. 

Pearce did not see the normal landing animation, nor she crash into the surface or deflect away from the planet. Instead, she ended up just phasing through the planet. After bouncing around inside of Pluto for a moment, she came out the other side. Pearce's ship was undamaged, and fully functional, which she confirmed by seeing that other objects were still moving closer. With that hilarious discovery, she ended her stream, having tested the game in a way the devs at Bethesda clearly thought no one would ever have the patience to do.

One thing about "Starfield" that received a lot of attention, even long before the game was released, is its physics engine. It's incredibly complex and detailed in a way few games have been before it. Knowing about this, Reddit user Moozipan decided to try and test just how far this engine could be pushed. Their method came straight out of the dreams of Samwise Gamgee: 20,000 potatoes. 

Time To Let Something Go
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u/Moozipan in
Starfield

Moozipan placed them all in their ship's cockpit, then opened the door. The results were astounding: Not only did the game have no trouble handling so many objects in such a tight area, it managed to give every single one its own individual physics and fall animation. While Moozipan said their frame rate did decrease to 20 FPS as potatoes spilled out of the cockpit door, "Starfield” still admirably handled such an extreme (and weird) situation — and got to show off its lauded physics engine in the process.

Here we get to see the impressive degree of detail "Starfield" modders can control for the first time. Beyond normal stuff like adding in new backgrounds, music, or NPCs, modders quickly figured out how to manipulate the projection from the player's flashlight. Players have already done this with a variety of different things, but the wildest one so far has to be the face of A-list actor Nicolas Cage. 

There's something equal parts hilarious and creepy about seeing Cage's visage warped to fit the dimensions of the "Starfield" protagonist's flashlight, lighting up the walls of a darkened room. Other modders have changed the flashlight to make it project the face of former President of the United States Bill Clinton, while another mod makes it show Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer. Not to be bound to just using faces, however, one modder even turned it into the Bat Signal.

You usually don't want to get arrested in a game. It tends to be an annoying inconvenience at best and completely game-ruining at worst, depending on the game. In "Starfield," getting arrested actually has a major upside. If you commit a crime on a UC planet, you'll be brought to a man who will give a choice: Go to jail, or work for him. 

If you choose the latter, you'll be asked to infiltrate the space pirate organization known as the Crimson Fleet. This will take you on a journey spanning multiple planets and quests, during which you simultaneously act as both a UC spy and a member of the Crimson Fleet. The quest ultimately introduces you to a huge amount of lore and a number of characters you wouldn't get to know otherwise. You'll see the galaxy's seedy underbelly by way of the Crimson Fleet, but you'll also learn of some of the darker parts of the UC, which exploits you to do the group's extremely dangerous bidding.

Another feature of "Starfield" that has gotten a lot of attention is the shipbuilder. This section of the game allows for an extremely high degree of customizability and detail in your ships, and players have used this to the fullest. With a seemingly endless supply of parts and paint jobs to choose from, players can finally achieve dreams of flying through aboard whatever ship they can think up. Because of this, there's even an entire subreddit dedicated to the ships people are making in the game. 

One of the uses "Starfield" players have found for the shipbuilder is to make close replicas of the ships from their favorite sci-fi franchises. One Redditor, travvy87, Reddit user vewave made the SSV Normandy SR2 from "Mass Effect." their best approximation of a "Star Trek"-style ship, clearly in the vein of the first Enterprise:

Tried to make a Star Trek ship, but alas can only build so tall/long
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u/vewave in
StarfieldShips

Another Redditor, VantaGenesis, made a version of the Consular's Ship from "Star Wars." There are seemingly thousands of examples of people making ships like these. It's hard not to imagine the joy players can get from seeing their favorite ships from fiction made real by "Starfield," let alone actually getting to fly them.

Clone Wars Era Consular-class Frigate (Charger C70)
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u/VantaGenesis in
StarfieldShips

This one hasn't been fully reproduced since the game's public release, but it was something that apparently existed during the game's development. According to one of the men in charge, Bethesda's Head of Publishing, Pete Hines, this was one glitch he wanted left in the final product. Hines told Gamesindustry.biz, "we had a bug where a shark was able to get on an elevator. Then the elevator doors would open on a street level and the shark would come sliding out – everybody screams and starts running in every direction. I'm laying into it with weapons, people are screaming and guards are running. I said: 'Do not take this bug out of the game!' I'm almost positive they did but I love that stuff." 

Players can only hope that the bug hunters and QA analysts in charge of polishing the game listened to Hines and left the hitchiking shark in, even though it was undoubtedly the kind of thing they'd normally remove. The idea of a shark terrorizing the narrow hallways of an underwater city conjures images of the most terrifying shark attack horror movies out there. If it still exists, it would surely be a sight to behold.

Much like the shipbuilder, "Starfield" allows for an extremely high degree of customizability in its character creator. Players have taken advantage of this in order to make their own characters look like near exact copies of their favorite characters from other media or celebrities. Twitter user Julian Wolf claimed to be the first person to use the character builder to make a clone of Bryan Cranston's Walter White from "Breaking Bad." A few players have made their own versions of David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust. Meanwhile, Redditor fofuh decided to channel their inner mob boss and create a lookalike of Tony Soprano from HBO classic "The Sopranos." 

Woke up this morning, got some gabagool
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u/fohfu in
Starfield

Some Redditors have decided to lean into the memes and try and make Shrek. While making the ogre himself is probably beyond the game's capabilities, seeing as the player character needs to be human, Redditor OleiferousOwl managed to create a version of Shrek's nemesis from the first film in the series, Lord Farquaad. This version was (of course) christened as "Lord Starquad."

The one the only Lord Starquad
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u/OleiferousOwl in
Starfield

Anyone who has ever been in the lobby of a multiplayer game knows that gamers love creative uses of profanity. Although "Starfield" isn't a multiplayer game, players have found at least one way to be creative with swear words in it. The game's robotic companion, VASCO, is programmed to say a lot of things, including your character's name. Naturally, Redditor andy24olivera went ahead and datamined every single name VASCO can say — including some dirty ones.

List with all the names that Vasco can say!
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u/andy24olivera in
Starfield

Players wasted no time getting to work, making VASCO call them nearly every horrid name in the book. Some, like Twitter user @EPICTREASURE have even posted a videos of VASCO calling their character dirty titles. The fact that Bethesda chose to include these humorous profane names — and not some actual names – has irked some players, who feel left out. While a lot of fun has been had with profanity, some feel their experience could have been truly immersive if the studio had spent less time on making room for joke names. They are perhaps a bit annoyed that the studio chose to spend their time and effort on silly meaningless jokes like this, rather than including as many names as possible. The more names they had added, the more players could have had a truly immersive experience made even more so by hearing their own name said in the game.

Some ships in "Starfield" aren't meant to be interactive. Instead, many crafts are just meant to be props that the players aren't supposed to board. Undeterred, streamer and podcaster N7TheLegend decided to put this to the test. He was able to sneak onto a ship that was supposed to be inaccessible by running quickly into the open cargo hold. N7TheLegend even managed to stay there for a moment as the ship took off. At first, everything appeared normal, other than the fact that N7TheLegend had gone somewhere they were not supposed to go.

What happens when you sneak into an inaccessible ship's landing bay as it's taking off #Starfield pic.twitter.com/8HhpMaTp98

— N7 Legend 🚀 (@N7TheLegend) September 6, 2023

They were briefly pulled up into the air as the ship left the ground, staying put in the cargo hold. Then, however, instead of being taken to wherever the ship was headed, N7TheLegend suddenly phased through the bottom of the ship and was left floating in the air above the planet they'd just left. N7TheLegend briefly continued to rise up as the momentum from the initial liftoff carried them — and then they fell back to the planet below, just as slowly. The ship, meanwhile, continued on its way, seemingly unbothered and none the wiser regarding its attempted stowaway.