As an avid Starfield explorer with over 200 hours played, I‘ve greatly enhanced my experience through mods. Whether you want sharper visuals, quality of life improvements, or expanded outfit options, mods can help take your adventure to new heights!
In this guide, I‘ll share the 15 best mods for customizing your journey along with tips on how to properly install them. Let‘s boldy mod where no one has modded before!
Boosting Performance – Smoother Adventures
First, let‘s talk about optimizing performance. Starfield is graphically intensive, so you‘ll want to fine-tune settings based on your PC hardware to avoid stuttering and frame drops during tense space battles or while landing on demanding planets.
My Top Pick: E3roKK‘s Starfield Performance Optimizations
This mod tweaks rendering configurations for improved FPS with minimal visual compromise. After installing, my average frame rate jumped from 45 FPS to a rock-solid 62 FPS across a variety of locations using a mix of High and Ultra settings on my RTX 3070. It made traversal and combat exponentially smoother.
I highly recommend this mod even if you have a beastly rig, as the base game is not perfectly optimized currently. Manually install this rather than using a mod organizer for best results.
Pro-Tip: Capping your frame rate 3 FPS below your max refresh rate (ex: at 141 FPS for a 144hz monitor) helps further stabilize performance through this mod.
Visual Enhancements – Spectacular Immersion
While Starfield‘s expansive sci-fi landscapes already look stunning, you can take things up a notch with graphics mods for added immersion. Richer effects and higher fidelity textures make the environments feel alive and draw you deeper into space‘s cold expanse.
Effect Textures Enhanced – Dazzling VFX
From shimmering force fields to roaring thruster jets, Starfield renders tons of visual effects. Unfortunately some appear too subtle or low-resolution by default.
My Top Pick: Weijiesen‘s EXE – Effect Textures Enhanced beautifully enhances these VFX for added spectacle without performance cost. Sparks sizzle, flames lick sharply, explosions bloom mesmerizingly. It‘s a must-have for immersion.
EXE makes effects like explosions much more dazzling. Image credit: Weijiesen.
Beautiful Skies – Volumetric Clouds
While bountiful on most planets you‘ll visit, Starfield‘s skies start feeling copy-pasted pretty quickly. Extra cloud density and more dynamic lighting would go a long way towards making atmospheres like Ariel‘s dazzle.
My Top Pick: RaYRoD‘s Beautiful Skies (No Man‘s Sky mod) revolutionizes cloud rendering and lighting for extraordinary skies. Porting this to Starfield would be a game-changer!
Just imagine how incredible skies could look in Starfield with advanced cloudtech and raytracing. Image credit: RaYRoD (No Man‘s Sky mod)
Quality of Life Upgrades – Streamlined Experience
While gorgeous immersive worlds are crucial for escapism, quality of life enhancements transform games from entertaining to magical by removing friction. Small tweaks add up to vastly smoother adventures.
Key Item Icons & Organization
Looting across the cosmos quickly fills your inventory with upgrades and crafting components. Unfortunately Starfield‘s menu design makes sorting through everything painful.
My Top Pick: McGuffin‘s Icon Sorting Tabs adds handy icons and sorts items into categories so you can parse gear efficiently. No more endless scrolling trying to find a specific component!
Customizable UI Positioning
Starfield‘s full-screen notifications are informative but often obtrusive. During heated firefights I don‘t need my view blocked by enormous damage pop-ups!
My Top Pick: Johnny3TearsUxA‘s Move or Disable XP Bar lets you reposition or remove intrusive UI elements like the XP notification bar. Such a basic change makes combat dramatically more intuitive.
New Adventures – Expanded Possibilities
While Starfield‘s handcrafted quests and expansive procedural planets offer tons of content, mod-added stories and gear help ensure each playthrough feels wholly unique.
From elaborate new missions to exotic alien weaponry, talented mod authors are already delivering exciting ways to refresh your experience once the base game feels stale.
Ambitious Story Expansions
Dedicated modding teams are working diligently on expansive new adventures letting you forge alliances with emerging factions, defend settlements from invading forces or pal around with iconic figures on bespoke quest chains.
Keep An Eye On: Beyond Starfield
This collaborative project aims to give players whole new swathes of space to explore with dozens of new star systems, original factions and questlines, expanded mechanics, and more in early development.
Diverse New Weaponry
Traversing the unknown calls for versatile high-tech weaponry, so why stick to Starfield‘s relatively limited arsenal? Ambitious mods are already delivering here.
My Top Pick: MAW – Mod Added Weapons infuses various exotic firearms like the Hydraulic Energy Rifle and Mjolnir Railcannon for added damage-dealing diversity.
Who wouldn‘t want to wield wild sci-fi arms like this Plasma devastator? Image credit: MAW mod
Optimizing Fidelity & Performance
Pushing Starfield‘s immense landscapes to their visual limits while retaining smooth FPS requires some expert-level configuration. Powerful upscaling and sharpening tools help tremendously here.
My Top Pick: PureDark‘s Starfield Upscaler enables cutting-edge Nvidia DLSS integration for significantly boosted frame rates and also enhances anti-aliasing for ridiculously crisp image quality even at 4K. It‘s essential for high res setups.
There are also excellent mods like Lossless Scaling leveraging AMD FSR 2.0 and Topaz Video Enhance AI for magnifying fidelity. While taking some trial and error dialing in, combining several techniques can work wonders!
Final Tips For Smooth Modding
I‘ve shared my top picks for enhancing different aspects of Starfield based on hundreds of hours played. As you prepare to install them, keep these tips in mind:
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Back up your saves before modifying game files in case something goes wrong.
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Use a dedicated mod manager like Mod Organizer 2 rather than installing mods directly into your game directory. This keeps things cleanly organized if you want to remove/update mods later.
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When downloading mods, always grab the manual file rather than let managers like Vortex handle installations unless explicitly instructed otherwise by the mod author. This avoids potential file path issues.
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Check back on the Mod Organizer 2 dashboard periodically to update mods with newer versions as they fix bugs and expand compatibility.
With exciting expansions in visuals, quality of life, and new adventures, mods help Starfield live up to its full potential as a boundless sci-fi sandbox. Here‘s to stellar quests among the stars!
Safe travels, space cowboy! Let me know in the comments if you have any favorite mods I should cover.
