Starfield Mod Finally Adds Seamless Landing With No Loading Screen

Modders Really Will Fix It: Starfield Finally Gets Seamless Landing Published Oct 10, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT James Lucas is an Executive Editor at TheGamer who has worked in professional journalism since 2018. A Newcastle University graduate with a degree in Journalism, Media, and Culture, they have written hundreds of guides, news stories, and original reports, with bylines in IGN, NME, GaymingMag, and VG247, sourcing interviews with studio heads, legendary industry figures, prominent actors, and more. An expert on FPS games, Soulslikes, RPGs, and survival horror, James has intimate knowledge of a wide variety of titles, providing in-depth coverage and exclusive profiles. Some of the games they have extensively covered include: Half-Life 3, Counter-Strike, Elden Ring, and Fallout. They pride themselves on their consistently thorough research, leveraging nearly a decade of industry experience. You can reach them at James.t@thegamer.com I really wanted to like Starfield. The idea of Bethesda's rich environmental storytelling with a NASA-punk aesthetic, stretching out across the cosmos to take Fallout 4's settlement building to its natural conclusion, was a winning pitch. But every single trailer felt... off. The stilted animations and shooting that were passable ten years ago persisted, and by launch, little had changed. The cracks were only more obvious; the Bethesda jank that used to be charming had lost its luster, replaced by copy-and-pasted POIs and hundreds of barren, time-wasting planets. Compared to No Man's Sky, it was wildly disappointing. Not being able to land seamlessly on a planet, and being boxed into empty zones with loading screens separating everything, made it feel more like an ambitious Skyrim mod than a needle-pushing Bethesda flagship. There was the old adage that modders would fix it, or at least keep it alive, but Starfield's modding scene peaked with the Star Wars overhaul, then kind of just petered out. Thankfully, a handful of players have stuck with it, and one has even managed to solve the problem the community has been desperate to see fixed since launch: landing on a planet seamlessly. "I've worked on this thing for roughly half a year at this point, and finally it's starting to take hold and feel ready enough for me to show it to you!" Frederik Wessberg Is A Nerd posted to YouTube. "I'm bringing Seamless Landings on planets and moons without any loading screens to Starfield. You can do it entirely autopiloted and leave your cockpit seat and walk freely around your ship or enjoy the views while the ship flies from orbit to ground. Or, you can fly manually too. Fly around in low orbit and enjoy the views, or indeed fly uninterrupted to land on the ground. You can even land on water! If you ever wondered how it would look if you were allowed to select a spot in the ocean in vanilla Starfield, here's your chance to see that for yourself." It's More Ambitious Than Just A Landing Animation And this goes far beyond simply removing a loading screen. The mod features 3D layers of volumetric clouds based on climate data and weather systems, auroras, thunderstorms, airglow, atmospheric scattering, glowing city lights, reentry heat shield effects, surface maps, and more. It's a seamless experience rather than another locked landing animation. "I thought it would be a fun small project, but I quickly realized how wrong I was," Frederik Wessberg Is A Nerd continued. "Because, planet rendering in space in vanilla Starfield is very limited: a planet is represented by a texture, maybe a moving cloud layer, and maybe an atmosphere. Flying closer to it than the game allows will mean flying into a flat texture, and eventually also losing the atmospheric rendering. So, to build actual seamless landings, I had to completely reimplement Starfield's planet rendering in space in 3D, in a way that looks detailed and sharp at every altitude. Thankfully, Starfield is actually amazingly physically accurate, and in many ways a true space simulator - it just doesn't ever reveal this to the player, but I could leverage it in my design here." I rag on Starfield a lot, but to be entirely fair, there's a lot to love about its esoteric main story, which leans back into the weird oddities of its older work, like Daggerfall, integrating NG+ as a diegetic mechanic rather than ticking an RPG checklist. But there are a lot of hiccups that stop it from realizing its full potential, and since Starfield 2 seems incredibly unlikely under new Xbox management, thankfully we have mods to show what the game could have been. Maybe in a few years, it'll be worth revisiting with a behemoth modlist to see what could've been: a community-led remaster pieced together independently. Released September 6, 2023 ESRB M For Mature 17+ / Blood, Suggestive Themes, Use of Drugs, Strong Language, Violence, In-Game Purchases Developer(s) Bethesda Publisher(s) Bethesda Engine proprietary engine Genre(s) Action, RPG, Open-World