Bethesda's game is a complex beast, full of all sorts of cheese wheels, sweet rolls, and duct tape that can be picked up and used to commit physical crimes. So it's no surprise that there are bugs that Bethesda's official patches don't apply to. Hence the existence of community patches such as Morrowind's "Purists' Patch," Oblivion's "UOP," and Skyrim's "USSEP."

The Starfield Community Patch was released yesterday on Nexus Mods and aims to "make the game better by providing fixes in a free and cooperative way," even though the game has not yet released a full mod tool. They are trying to fix "object misplacement, scripting errors, item property inconsistencies, mission/quest glitches, game violation exploits, missing attributes (tags, header flags, etc.), spelling errors, etc. So, there are quite a few parts of the game. Given that the game is still being actively developed by Bethesda, I'm a bit curious to see what happens when the fan patch fixes clash with the studio's own fixes.

What this patch does not do is change the balance or make adjustments that are "not in line with the original vision (of the game)," which I am all for. The danger with patches like this is that the modders' subjective decisions about what the game "should be" creep in under the guise of bug fixes. [For example, this is exactly why Morrowind's patch for Purists became a de facto community patch. There is no denying that some of those changes made logical sense, but they went too far to be considered "fixes."

In any case, the Starfield Community Patch can be found at a number of dedicated sites where it can be obtained. The makers recommend that you install it using a mod manager such as Vortex or the long-time favorite Mod Organizer 2. If for some reason you don't believe that and you want to do it yourself, just unzip the mod zip file into the directory where Starfield.exe is located and add * StarfieldCommunityPatch.esm to the game's Plugins.txt file. After that" a somewhat bug-free future awaits.