Space travel in Starfield is so easy. It's amazingly easy. Just display the map, click on the dots, and go. Sure, some of the distances may not be immediately jumpable, but if the only thing that the great void of space threatened me with was "mild inconvenience," I would complain that documentaries like "Event Horizon" overstated the horrors that lurk in the great universe.

Things were not always so. Todd Howard himself once talked about a version of the game where you could run out of fuel and be stranded on the stars. But now a Reddit player (discovered by GamesRadar) has found evidence of more crunchy, risky space travel lurking in Starfield's files.

I spoke with Reddit user Redsaltyborger, the creator of this thread, who confirmed the presence of starmap textures in Starfield game files. I paste it below in a convenient and parsable .jpg format. It certainly looks like one of the more hardcore Starfield relics we didn't get.

What jumps out at me, besides the fuel consumption gauge that Todd has already mentioned, is the presence of environmental hazards in this game's solar system. Textures left in the game files show that both "Solar Radiation" and "Micrometeoroids" are present in Leviathan IV.

The former threatens to weaken the hull, while the latter is fascinating in that it "can cause catastrophic stoppages." I don't know about you, but I don't mind a catastrophic stoppage or two to spice things up a bit when I'm checking something off my Starfield task list.

There are also filters for viewing the various map modes and a full Mass Effect-style system description of selected destinations, which is a nice little tidbit that is unfortunately absent from the final version of Starfield. Indeed, there are 120 systems in Starfield, compared to about 40 in Mass Effect.

Of course, we do not know what this minor episode means for the development of Starfield. Or perhaps Starfield's space travel was, at some point, going to be a bit more rugged than it ended up being. Systemic hazards like fuel consumption may have been the "fun killer" in the eyes of Bethesda's decision makers.

In any case, I'm convinced that the textures were made for something bigger than just "something to slap on the ship's screen as a display prop."

Redsaltyborger told me that "the Xbox controller button at the bottom of the map was there, he said he felt it showed that it was part of the (UI) concept at some point." I have to agree.

Other players seem to share this yearning for an otherworldly Starfield. In a reply to the original Reddit thread, a user named Space_ananas wrote that even though he likes Starfield as it is, "I wish [Bethesda] would just keep going. Day by day it is becoming clearer that we had a washed up version of the game."

Another user, TorrBorr, wrote, "This little tidbit makes things seem a little depressing about the game and how much unfinished and/or cut stuff happened to Starfield. As much as I love this game, it needs a serious overhaul."

Unfortunately, the Starfield we got made the galaxy feel tiny because of the easy and plentiful fast travel. Perhaps such a feature will be added to the game in the course of DLC, and plenty has already been added in the form of mods, but as it stands, we will have to be content with seeing the galaxies we might have gotten from the data files.