《星空》玩家自发售起想要《无人深空》式无缝降落，如今一位创作歌手而非程序员正在制作该功能

An upcoming Starfield mod aims to introduce what many players have wanted since launch: seamless landings on planets, ala No Man's Sky or Star Citizen.

Interestingly, it's being developed by someone who's not a coder by profession at all. According to his own webpage, Frederik Wessberg is a Danish singer-songwriter and audio engineer, yet he made this his passion project over the last six months or so. Here's his technical explanation, which leverages Starfield's hidden "true space simulator" capabilities:

I thought it would be a fun small project, but I quickly realized how wrong I was. 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 losing 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.

So, the planet rendering is based upon Starfield's biome data and exact surface maps, including climate data, atmospheric composition data, and takes into account things like orbital phase, distance to the sun, distance to the moon(s) orbiting the planet, and how they contribute to moonlight, and so on. The philosophy is: Starfield's data is the "truth", but we then modulate it by real physics.

As shown in the video demonstration, the seamless landings can be autopiloted, but the player can also fly manually and even land on water. Moreover, during the landing phase, Starfield players will actually navigate authentic 3D volumetric cloud formations shaped by climate data and dynamic weather systems, complete with thunderstorms and lightning strikes, polar auroras, night-side airglow, and scientifically accurate atmospheric scattering derived from the game's atmospheric composition data.

There are even city lights emanating from points of interest on the surface, expansive terrain, and cloud shadows rendered globally, authentic biomes, oceans, and ice-covered peaks generated from the game's native data and surface cartography. The ship's re-entry heat shield also produces realistic fume effects against the hull and deposits an ash layer accordingly.

The Starfield Seamless Landing mod is still a work in progress, and there's no ETA on its release yet. However, Wessberg already clarified that it will be PC-only and require SFSE, the game's Script Extender that powers most of the biggest mods.

Back in March, Bethesda Game Studios released the Free Lanes update, Terran Armada DLC, and PlayStation 5 version. In July, when the studio provided its updated long-term roadmap for all the franchises, Bethesda also clarified that work on Starfield was far from done, with new stories, gameplay improvements, Starborn content, and additional updates coming in 2027.

About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.

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