Starfield's starmap is more useful than you think
A subtle bit of design makes the difference.
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You might not have realised it, but there's a subtle design element in Starfield's starmap that makes navigating the game's universe a smidge easier.
Starfield has an absolutely massive number of planets to explore; more than 1000, in fact. But using the game's starmap isn't necessarily the easiest thing in the world, unless you know exactly what it's telling you. As spotted by one user in the game's subreddit, there's actually a nice piece of visual design on the map which tells you exactly which star systems you've been to, and which ones you can or can't visit easily.
I'm level 34 and I JUST realized this about the star map, while trying to visit every star.
byu/raging_pastafarian inStarfield
As you can see from the post above, there are three visual queues which tell you about the various star systems. On the left, you'll notice that the stars have a soft glow surrounding them, which as it turns out indicates that you've previously visited that system. In the middle, you can see some stars that don't have that same glow, which means you haven't visited them, but they're close enough that you can jump to them. And then finally, on the right, there are some stars that are red, and also aren't glowing - these ones are star systems that you can't jump to without jumping to another one that's closer by.
It's a really nice little piece of design that once you know what it means, it should make getting from system to system just that little bit easier. Starfield's menus aren't the best, after all, but at the very least modders have put the work into making them much easier to use.
Modders have also made exploring planets easier too. As it currently stands, you can't just walk around a planet in its entirety due to various boundaries, but one mod has made that possibility, with another adding more landing zones too.
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