Summary
AStarfieldplayer has shared an incredible bug that left a planet they visited barren and entirely flat. Bethesda’s games are well known to feature a seemingly endless number of curious bugs, andStarfieldhas proudly carried on that tradition. The procedural generation technology used for spawning planets inStarfieldis one area teeming with such bugs. This flat planetStarfieldbug is one that’s particularly interesting – and surprisingly beautiful.
Bethesda has long advertisedover 1,000 planets to be explored inStarfield. Those planets are not the same game to game, however. The vast majority of them are procedurally generated, built from the ground up asStarfieldplayers approach the planet. What that means is that outside some select few planets that are made directly by Bethesda, most planets are blank slates. Players start flying toward them and the game uses algorithms to fill them with randomized terrain, flora, and fauna.
While there are a good number of examples of what happens when theplanetary procedural generation goes wrong inStarfield, this may be the first example of it simply not working at all. Reddit user CaptainAde made a post titled “An interesting bug rendered a flat world, which led to some nice picks of my suit” to theStarfieldsubreddit. They then attached several images showcasing just what a completely emptyStarfieldplanet looks like.
What’s especially striking about the flatStarfieldplanet is that it isn’t without depth or texture. It could easily have looked like the game swapped into developer mode, with no color and no way of judging near or far. But the images from CaptainAde show the planet has a texture almost like marble, and the land darkens toward the horizon. The planet may not have loaded, but it does still look like atypicalStarfieldplanet. It’s just a very odd and unnatural planet.
SomeStarfieldplayers say that while it may be a bug, if Bethesda added a bit of extra detail it would make perfect sense as a proper biome. It’s close but not quite the same as a salt pan on Earth, a flat natural formation often found in deserts. A planet that’s entirely salt pan would be something to see, though it might look a lot like thisstrangeStarfieldbug.
Unfortunately, there’s no clear way for otherStarfieldplayers to make the game spawn a similar planet in their own games. Procedurally-generated planets don’t carry over to other players' games.OneStarfieldplayer even went so far as to visit every possible planetin their game, landing on 1,441 planets in total. They saw the universe, but they never saw this strange yet beautiful flat planet. That’s part of what makesStarfieldunique.
Starfieldis available now on PC and Xbox Series X/S.
