A fan made patch that fixes issues with Starfield is only for PC but should come to Xbox once Bethesda launches official mod support.
Last year, a group of Bethesda fans set up the Starfield Community Patch, an open project where anyone with the technical know-how could contribute to fixing Starfield’s bugs. As a reminder, Starfield only launched a month ago, meaning fans fully expected it to be riddled with glitches long before it was out.
As shockingly normalised as the idea of buggy Bethesda games is, it’s hard to blame anyone for expecting Starfield to be any different. Even the promises of it being the least buggy Bethesda game ever didn’t mean much and while that did prove to be accurate, players have encountered frequent issues, from game crashes and freezes to disappearing faces and an infinite money exploit.
It’s not even just bugs; Starfield is riddled with spelling errors, misplaced items, and faulty missions. Bethesda has put out some updates already, to address some of the problems, but this new community mod hopes to target issues that have yet to be fixed.
As a PC mod, this community patch can only be applied to the PC version of Starfield. So, Xbox players need to make do with the official Bethesda patches.
Hopefully, that will soon change since Bethesda has plans to officially support fan mods across PC and Xbox, although that won’t happen until early next year.
‘The Starfield Community Patch project is a collective effort by mod authors and the wider player community of Starfield to fix bugs, errors and other inconsistencies present in the game,’ reads its Nexus Mods page, alongside instructions for how to install it.
‘The overall goal is to improve the vanilla experience for all players. All fixes should be considered unofficial unless the change is carried forward by Bethesda.’
The page doesn’t provide an exact breakdown of every individual fix and change the patch makes, and instead briefly summarises the sort of issues that have been targeted.
These issues include:
- Misplaced objects
- Script errors
- Inconsistencies in item properties
- Faulty missions/quests
- Game-breaking exploits
- Missing attributes (such as tags, header flags, etc.)
- Spelling errors
The description also stresses that the intent of the patch isn’t to add new content to Starfield nor is it to make any balance changes (beyond errors that need correcting) and tweaks that don’t line-up with the original vision of the developers.
The patch will likely see further updates as time goes on, with players invited to report any new bugs they may discover.
While the idea of fans doing Bethesda’s job for them for free seems like a damning indictment against the studio, Starfield ultimately proved successful despite its technical faults.
The game topped the US sales charts and almost singlehandedly drove Xbox revenue up during its first quarter of the 2024 fiscal year and, according to Microsoft’s CEO, generated a lot of new Game Pass subscriptions.
At the same time, though, console sales dipped, suggesting that most PlayStation fans weren’t that bothered by Starfield’s exclusivity, at least not enough to invest in an Xbox themselves.
Starfield is available for Xbox Series X/S and PC.
