Starfield's most important mod has already arrived, days before the game's full release

Most of the hardcore Bethesda RPG fans who’ve invested thousands of hours into Skyrim and Fallout 4 couldn’t wait for the chance to start digging into Starfield.

After a thank you message from Todd Howard and a couple of heated discourses got fans nice and warmed up for the game to finally arrive, most of those who paid for early access are now many hours into their adventures through space.

While these players have been busy hunting down Artifacts and making interesting discoveries, modders have been hard at work putting together a huge range of early tweaks for the game. One of the works that’s already hit the Nexus is a massively important mod, which’ll be key to delivering a lot of the more complex works people are planning.

Have you been surprised how much of a bang Starfield modding has kicked off with?

The mod in question is the ‘Starfield Script Extender (SFSE)’ and is the work of modders Ian Patterson and Stephen Abel, who go by the usernames ianpatt and behippo. Ianpatt previously uploaded the Nexus Mods pages for Skyrim and Fallout 4’s script extenders, on behalf of the teams working on them.

If you’re wondering why the 1.0 version of the Starfield script extender having arrived this early in the game’s lifespan is such an exciting development, it's because of the framework it’ll provide for other modders. By “adding additional scripting capabilities and functionality to the game,” the script extender should, in time, allow for the creation of much more advanced mods for Starfield than would be possible without it.

For example, Skyrim’s script extender has proven key to the development of everything from incredibly in-depth UI overhauls, such as SkyUI, to tools that allow modders to do things like fix complex bugs and make detailed changes to the game's world.

“As the game has literally just released, [the script extender is] mostly a plugin loader for now,” writes Patterson in the mod’s readme file, continuing: “Depending on where modders show interest, this will expand to Scaleform and Papyrus [or other things] over time.”

As of writing, the script extender only works with the Steam version of the game, with the Windows Store/Xbox Game Pass version not currently being supported.

As of right now, only a couple of mods that use the script extender have been released, with powerofthree’s ‘Enemy Friendly Fire' being a prime example. As you might imagine, this work is a plugin that simply “enables friendly fire for all NPCs,” but given that the game has only been out in early access for a matter of days, it serves as a worthy harbinger of what’s likely to come.

Regardless of whether you’ve already achieved the status of hardened interstellar explorer by dedicating your entire weekend to Starfield, make sure to follow us for lots of guides to Starfield’s quests and mechanics.

You can also check out our latest mods of the month.