Starfield's planets are an illusion: you can't land on them

If you were wondering if you could fly to a planet's surface in Starfield, the answer is technically yes, it'll just take you a very long time.

Space in Starfield is, unsurprisingly, massive. Flying long distances will take you a long time as planets are pretty far away from each other, but that doesn't matter too much as you just use your starmap to choose where you land anyway. However, it turns out you can fly to a planet's surface, even if you can't fly onto its surface the same way you can in No Man's Sky, as demonstrated by Santa Monica Studio's Alanah Pearce. In a recent stream, Pearce wanted to test if she could fly to Pluto's surface.

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Now, if you fast travel to Pluto in space, it'll bring you to the planet (yes, it is a planet, Starfield said so), but you'll be about 2000km away. Again, it should be noted that you're not meant to be able to fly to the surface of a planet, you're just meant to select it and pick one of the pre-selected points to land on. One thing to note though, is that if you want to copy Pearce, you're going to have to set a lot of time aside, as it took her literally seven hours to reach Pluto's surface.

Pearce managed to do this by just leaving the ship with boosters on the whole time, manually adjusting the ship every half an hour or so, as Pluto moved through its orbit. You won't find anything interesting when you get there though, just the planet's textures blow up to a much bigger size than they're meant to be, and when you get that close, they don't look as good. Though obviously you're not meant to see them that close. At a certain point, once you hit a distance of zero metres, it also seems like you just go inside the planet, which isn't textured from the inside.

For most people, this will be a complete waste of time, because you can't land on planets this way, but it's a fun experiment at the very least. If you do find yourself on a planet the normal way, though, and you need a helping hand with scanning the planet, you're in luck! Because we've got a hand planet survey guide that should set you on the right path.

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