Summary
Though it could be argued that the forests inStarfieldpaled in comparison to what past Bethesda titles could offer, a few adjustments to the game’s configuration file can turn even the most random jungle into a lush landscape. Theprocedurally generated planets ofStarfieldwere a bold attempt by Bethesda to evolve the Creation Engine beyond just Radiant Quests and Radiant AI. On paper, it offered the freedom to explore hundreds of worlds in the Settled Systems while keeping the experience consistent without ballooning the cost of development.
In practice, however, many fans felt that the experience lacked the Bethesda charm of aimlessly exploring handcrafted landscapes such asSkyrim, or even the Commonwealth fromFallout 4. It had all the ingredients of a Bethesda sandbox, but its lack of variety resulted in players often coming across the same pirate base layout, the same mine, the same vegetation – all wrapped up under a scanning mini-game with no means of tracking the missing flora and fauna needed tocomplete a planetary survey inStarfield.
AStarfieldplayer named -Darkstorne- shared a neat trick on how the game’s procedural generation could be pushed beyond the vanilla settings. Credit for the discovery belongs to Caleb Chambers, whoposted a guide on Imguron how to editStarfield’s configuration file to achieve better results when generating zones with vegetation. Though this may not necessarily fix the underlying problems that players have had withplanetary exploration inStarfield, it should make the experience much more immersive when coming across forest or jungle biomes while out adventuring in the Settled Systems.
In order to make vegetation dense,Starfieldplayers on PC must locate their StarfieldCustom.ini file in the “My Documents” folder for the game and make the following changes:
[ProcGen]
fObjectMapMinPct=0.15
fObjectMapMinPct=-5
fProcGenFootprintDitheringScale=0.139
fProcGenFootprintDitheringScale=0.115
Doing so will result inStarfieldcreating denser, more varied forests whenever players set foot on a new planet or moon that supports vegetation. The results speak for themselves, as the forests outsideNew Atlantis inStarfieldlook breathtaking compared to the vanilla game, seemingly at little cost to performance. Players who have had a chance to test the denser vegetation have reported that the game did not slow down for them by any noticeable measure, but it did add a few seconds to the loading screens.
Starfield’s burgeoning modding community has already made strides with modifying the game, and onceStarfield’s official modding toolscome out, players can expect to see huge improvements to its procedural generation. Creating more varied biomes, making rivers more common, or even implementing more alien environments are improvements thatStarfieldplayers can expect to see within the first year of modding. As shown by this simple change made toStarfield’s configuration file, the true potential of the Settled Systems is still untapped.
