If you're anything like me, you were a bit underwhelmed by Starfield's outpost system; it's been eight years since Fallout 4, but the task of putting habitation and mining equipment on the game's five billion planets for countless scrappy farmers in Wasteland back in 2015 It didn't seem much different than building tin shacks for countless poor farmers in Wasteland back in 2015. If only we could build our own space station. My very own orbital prison hulk would be truly amazing.
Well, dear reader, dreams do come true, thanks to the efforts of a modder named Vex, whose "Spacestations for Outposts" mod (discovered by GamesRadar) allows you to build a "fully working star station" in the dead universe. And since it was assembled from "already in the game" but slightly broken code, don't you wonder what Bethesda plans to do with the DLC for this game?
Once the mod is installed, you can start assembling your space base by creating a "space base control pad" on one of the ground outposts. You can then use it to build a space station using the same basic system that you use to build your ship. Once you've modified it to your liking, all you have to do is fly out into space and dock. Or try to anyway. Docking is a bit difficult at the moment.
Frankly, it's quite impressive, especially considering the fact that full modding support for Starfield is not out yet. As Vex says the docking issue is "a deep code issue that currently cannot be edited" and will probably stay that way until Bethesda comes out with the proper mod tools. I am not a modder, but it sounds like something you need a proper toolkit for.
Or perhaps not? We are entering the realm of completely unfounded speculation here, but I have to wonder if Bethesda doesn't have official plans for all the loose strings of code that Vex used to make the mod, right? Putting out an official space station builder DLC like Skyrim's Hearthfire DLC seems like an obvious move, especially considering that fans have been asking for it. Maybe Vex won't have to modify their mod at all since Bethesda will kick them off with an official Death Star Builder. One can only hope so.
But until such a day comes, we must rely on the mod. If you want to install this mod, you can download it from your favorite mod manager and activate it (although Vex points out that you may need to download and activate the Plugins.txt file).
If you want to install the mod manually like our great grandparents did, unzip the contents of the mod into the Starfield folder in steamapps/common, enable Plugins.txt, go to the Starfield folder in AppData, and then go to the Plugins .txt file and add "*StarstationTest.esm" to it. And if you did it that way, congratulations! You have my unwavering respect as someone else who likes to make life difficult for themselves for no reason.
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