On the planet of Starfield, there are invisible walls, but players found a way to overcome them – although it currently does nothing.
What is the deal with the invisible wall? Shortly after the early access launch on September 1, it was confirmed what many had already suspected ahead of the official release of Starfield: You are limited while exploring planets. Bethesda’s RPG puts invisible walls in front of you if you walk too far.
If you walk in one direction on a planet for a long time, you will hit an invisible wall and receive a message saying “boundary reached.” You can then turn back or use fast travel and disappear.
The boundaries of the planets have led to criticism of the reliance on that fast travel already in the first tests of Starfield. Players need to overcome loading sequences not only when traveling between different celestial bodies but also when changing the area of a planet.
Player develops mod to remove invisible walls
How can you break the boundaries of a planet? With your legs – and a mod.
Some players have figured out that the different areas of a planet are likely really connected. Reddit user WhiteLight506 reported, for example, that he landed outside New Atlantis and could see the city (via Reddit).
A user of the site nexusmods – where mods for games like Skyrim, Cyberpunk 2077, and Starfield are available – posted a similar video where he approached New Atlantis from a different landing spot. Additionally, the user created a modification that removes the invisible walls of a planet section.
- You can also find the mod to remove the invisible walls on nexusmods.com
The first step to free exploration
Why does overcoming the boundaries do nothing? As the creator of the mod found in his tests, Starfield crashes as soon as you cross a point where an invisible wall would run.
Currently, the mod is mostly useless for the average player, and there’s no point in trying to overcome the boundaries. However, the modification is not completely pointless, as it is the first step towards being able to truly explore planets freely.
Could the boundaries potentially be overcome without crashing in the future? Yes, possibly. The mod creator suspects that the game crashes because it is unable to load the adjacent planet section.
Another nexusmods user then suggested the idea that a message with the option to “Continue” could help (via nexusmods).
The game would load the next planet section when the “Continue” button is pressed, and you wouldn’t need to fly into orbit and select a new landing position for further exploration.
If you want to know which of the many contents you can discover in Starfield are randomly generated, then take a look here:
Many things in Starfield are randomly generated, but what exactly? An overview
