How's Starfield modding going, so far? Its most (in)famous train-obsessed creator talks life on "the frontier"

“Look at his face,” modder Kevin Brock, aka Trainwiz, says of Thomas the Tank Engine, when I ask him why he thinks the wholesome locomotive has become such a pervasive running gag within modding communities.

“How could you not laugh at that? There's no soul behind those eyes, not a smidgen of regret for the blood he's spilled,” he continues, “Frankly, if he were animated in any way, it'd take away the hilarity of the joke.”

Brock is fresh off of bringing that joke to Starfield in his own special way, by creating a mod which swaps out the default model of every single ship in the Settled Systems for Sir Topham Hat’s best train.

“I started it on Tuesday night,” he recounts. “It took about four hours to make. To start with, Thomas' original model was in pieces that had different things (some transparent, some not), so I had to remake the model as one single object, including turning his entire texture library into one atlas.”

Since those modding Starfield currently lack the tools required to create new materials for models they’re editing, instead having to take them from existing in-game objects, Trainwiz “had to mess around with overwriting materials and textures in Starfield itself, and then figure out how Starfield handles its [Level of Detail] system and how to scale it properly so that [Thomas’] model could engulf most starships.”

And lo, as you can see below, engulf starships it did.

While he's previously had to deal with a bit of trouble from Mattel due the fact that Thomas the Tank Engine is a licensed entity (despite mods generally being able to rely on fair use law for protection provided that their creators don’t make money from them), Brock reports that nothing of that nature has surfaced from their latest work. Yet.

“All they've done is make me double down out of spite. Spite is a potent creative fuel, I've found,” the modder says, regarding how these encounters have influenced his attitude towards creating mods involving the character, adding: “I don't learn lessons when it's a giant soulless corporation saying I should be learning them.”

Trainwiz is very much a veteran of Bethesda game modding, having first cut his teeth working with Morrowind back in 2006 and since made mods for Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Fallout New Vegas. Along the way he's found ways to swap out dragons for trains, outfit the Sole Survivor with some killer locomotive power armour and even given folks a chance to ride around Blackreach using a restored Dwarven railroad, proving, if nothing else, that pretty much anything is possible in the world of modding.

That said, working with Starfield while modding for the game “is still in its infancy” has presented him with some fresh challenges to overcome.

“We have no real editing tools outside of model modification, and even then that requires a lot of workarounds,” he reveals, explaining: “When I first started modding Skyrim, the Creation Kit (was) already out and tools and tutorials were already established. Here, it's the frontier.

“The model format in particular is completely different and, while I think long term this may be better, it's a big adjustment.” the modder adds.

The community taking on the challenges of getting to grips with this modding wild west alongside Brock looks very different to the one he joined back in Oblivion’s heyday.

“Things have changed (massively) since then, partially because Skyrim just brought on so many people to Bethesda games and modding them. We had tools sure, but so many advancements on every level have come with Skyrim onwards, not to mention the amount of new people who have joined the community.

“The biggest thing is less about what's now possible,” the modder summarises, “and more about how easy those things are to do.”

Brock is currently working on an indie game called Underspace. The modder says that this open-world arcade dogfighter, which is inspired by classic space games, “absolutely would not exist without my background in modding.”

He cites “being able to leverage” the fanbase he'd gained through creating mods “to help promote and develop” the new game, which came to be following a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2019, as an example of this, adding that modding also aided him “in terms of how to approach it.”

“Underspace has a lot of Bethesda RPG in its DNA, and as it turns out when you're trying to construct something in that vein, a lot of the ways they approach systems internally, that is, in terms of code and how they're set up, (is) pretty smart,” Trainwiz says. “That and knowing (which) workflows I was comfortable with helped a lot.”

“Finally,” he reveals, “I have done work professionally for Bethesda, working on dungeons that are in Skyrim's Anniversary Edition, and money from that helped fund Underspace initially.”

Given that one of the Skyrim mods he worked on brought a Dwarven spaceship to Tamriel, it seems very fitting that Trainwiz is now working on a full game about interstellar craft, which wouldn’t have been able to blast off without a little steam propulsion from a host of little engines that could.

Much in the same way that you can never quite tell exactly what kinds of horrors could be hinted at by Thomas the Tank Engine's amusing visage, I guess you can never quite tell what the future will hold. Though, odds are it’ll be a steady stream of interesting Starfield mods.