With the Creation Kit and Year 2 DLC already in tow, it’s obvious that Starfield isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. However, if you’ve been keeping track of its Nexus page, you may have noticed that it’s not that impressive. As it turns out, Bethesda’s own Creations interface might be responsible.
Historically, mainline Bethesda games have proliferated on the Nexus Mods website, where the vast majority of their respective mods were hosted and freely accessible for anyone to install. Skyrim and Fallout 4‘s Bethesda modding platform, Creations, were often overlooked in lieu of Nexus to the point of effective irrelevance on PC. With Starfield, however, the situation appears to be quite the opposite, as modders themselves chimed in on this Reddit thread explaining how the tides have turned.
Modders confirm: Starfield Creations is way more popular than Nexus
According to modders Nosism123, tjacayne, and Cole-train99, Creations is absolutely the place to be if you’re a Starfield modder. They all responded to KrabbitNL’s Reddit thread explaining that, while Nexus downloads are surprisingly low for Starfield, they’re all getting way more downloads from Bethesda’s official Creations platform.
The differences between Nexus and Creations are remarkable, though they do make way more sense when you consider that Creations is also available on Xbox, while Nexus is a dedicated PC platform through-and-through.
It’s not that it doesn’t make sense that there’d be such a stark difference between Creations and Nexus, either. It’s just that it’s historically unprecedented, and this is the first time that a first-party in-game modding platform has beaten Nexus proper when it comes to mainline Bethesda game mod downloads.
Now, to be perfectly fair, even though Creations is a powerful modding platform in its own right, Nexus remains the go-to spot for the modding community on PC. Notably, Creations does not have a proper forum or even a way to discuss specific mods with other users, and the Creations’ implementation of Script Extender mods can be quite iffy.
To that end, PC players interested in modding Starfield will want to step out of Creations every so often, at the very least. For example, even though powerful mods such as “Ship Vendor Framework” did make their way onto Creations, the arguably more important POI randomizer “Bedlam” isn’t there just yet, and there’s no telling if it’ll drop in anytime soon.
So, ideally, you’ll be using both of these platforms anyhow, but keep in mind that Creations is the more mainstream solution for the time being. Funny, how these things sometimes work out!
