Starfield's community patch modders find fixing bugs without support or comms from Bethesda frustrating

The team behind the Starfield Community Patch, a modding project aimed at providing fixes for issues with the game that haven’t yet been ironed out by official patches, claim that a lack of modding support for the game is making this task tougher.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Timothy ‘Halgari’ Baldridge - one of the modders responsible for organising the project - has offered a glimpse of what working on it has been like to this point. Despite the team already having released the first couple of versions of the community patch mod, Baldridge suggests that an absence of communication and priority when it comes to modding from Bethesda has made things difficult.

“The only reason we can mod (Starfield) already is because we've modded the other games using the same engine and we know what to do,” Baldridge said, “but a lot of stuff is really broken compared to the other games."

One example of this has been the process of bringing the key Skyrim modding tool xEdit, an “advanced graphical module viewer/editor and conflict detector”, to Starfield, with modder ElminsterAU having had to spend more than 400 hours working to get an initial version working as intended.

The modder also outlined confusion regarding whether bugs that’ve been added to the mod’s issue list, which currently boasts a whopping 432 open tickets, are already in Bethesda’s patching crosshairs, in which case it might be more fruitful for the modders to focus elsewhere.

“Companies do talk, but Bethesda don't, and it's the weirdest thing,” Baldridge claimed, adding: “You would think that a company that has 100,000 mods to download, that has petabytes of data for modding your game would (communicate more).”

Halgari also suggested that they’d like to see Bethesda put out something akin to CD Projekt Red’s modding support for Starfield. If you’re not familiar, CDPR’s REDmod provides those modding Cyberpunk 2077 with a free and fully integrated set of tools designed to help create, install and share mods.

Starfield is currently set to recieve official modding support, likely in the form of the usual creation kit provided for Bethesda RPGs, at some point in 2024.

If you’re keen to read more about what modding Starfield is currently like, make sure to check out our interview with Trainwiz, who explained the work required to swap all of its ships for Thomas the Tank Engine. Also, be sure to check out our coverage of its latest patches and must-have mods.