A surprise beta update for Starfield resolves its biggest modding hurdle yet

Regardless of what one thinks about Starfield as a game, it’s a simple statement of fact that its post-launch support has been quite stellar across the board. One thing that’s been left overlooked up until now, though, was its strange mod cap, which has now been lifted.

Specifically, while there’s an absolute glut of cool mods to choose from, ranging from Dune-themed planet conversions to Star Wars doohickeys, going all-in on player-made content would eventually lead to game-breaking bugs no matter what. Players quickly realized that this was due to a curious plugin load cap of 255 index entries in total. Some mods use up multiple indexes, which made it awfully easy to reach the cap and go well beyond it. That has now been resolved thanks to a new and unexpected beta updated for Starfield, which you too can access via the Steam beta update option.

Starfield’s new beta update removes the mod cap, introduces “Flip Merge” option for ship-building

Now, if you’re a fairly casual Starfield player, the odds are that the vast majority of this update is going to go over your head, as it’s more technical than usual. Regardless, it is quite crucial in the grand scheme of things, as it should now be way easier to push things further than ever before, plugin-wise. This is important not only for mods, but also for Bethesda’s own official Creations, DLCs, and expansion packs, as every single piece of Starfield content factors into its index limit.

Starfield‘s update 1.14.68 is even more impressive when you consider the rest of the improvements it makes to the base game:

• Flip Merging is now an officially supported feature for ship-building (allowing for more densely populated ship builds).
• Creation Kit now has a new automated process that creates custom distant LOD models.
• Improved performance and stability in general.
• Various lighting changes and enhancements.
• Certain weapon models have been improved (e.g. the Coachman now has a trigger).

This is, naturally, just a shortlist of a fairly impressive list of fixes and improvements you can check out using the patch notes link featured above. It’s good stuff, and shows that Bethesda is more than keen on working on non-flashy stuff, too, when push comes to shove. After all, not everything needs to be a REV-8 kind of addition, right?

It is curious, though, that we’re yet to hear anything concrete about the hotly anticipated Doom questline that was shown off on this year’s Quakecon. Granted, it’s not like there’s not an immense variety of (arguably) must-have mods available already, so I shouldn’t complain too much on this front. With that in mind, if you’re a Skyrim and Fallout 4 modding veteran, odds are that you’re looking at the Nexus site for your modding endeavors. It just so happens that Starfield‘s Creations UI is way, way more popular this time around, so be sure to give it a whirl as well, even if you’re skeptical about it.