A Starfield fan showcased his 20 best screenshots taken over three years of playing the game

Photo mode has long stopped being a side feature and turned into its own discipline, where patience matters more than texture resolution. Add a level editor and a willingness to put up with ten frames per second, and a screenshot becomes something closer to full-on landscape photography in a fictional galaxy.

One player shared a collection of twenty shots gathered over three years of playing Starfield and tinkering with the Creation Kit. The main surprise is that there's no ENB, no retexture packs, no post-processing involved. Asked about visual mod recommendations, the author explained that everything runs on vanilla assets, and the real work comes down to time of day, lighting, and weather.

Some shots really are straight from the base game, while others involved manual tweaks to biomes through the editor. In the wetland biome on Niira, vegetation got scaled up by at least ten times and paired with dense fog, turning the location into a gorgeous but completely unplayable slideshow. The snowy swamp on Porrima IV-d, already one of the rarest combinations in the game, got made even icier, while on Hyla VII-a the author stripped away all surface clutter and retextured the ground to bring the fissures to the front.

The underwater shots deserve their own mention, since plenty of people assumed they were mod work. Subsurface Sea, a vanilla point of interest with an underwater world, has existed in the game since launch, but there's no normal way to reach it: Bethesda planned swimming but never actually shipped it. Diving in requires the tcl console command to turn off collisions and tgm for god mode, otherwise the character just drowns.

Adding to the irony, plenty of commenters picked the snack box as their favorite shot instead of any alien landscape – a box of Chunks placed by hand inside a food container. Also worth mentioning is the reworked Frontier, a double-decker version of the starting ship built with a C-class reactor and B-class grav drive, assembled entirely from Nova Galactic parts. The extra engine on the back is purely decorative, added just for the silhouette.

The sharpest comment came in response to someone suggesting the shots looked like AI generation:

All the assets used in the screenshots are already in the game files. If Bethesda didn't lean too much into procedural generation, they could easily create the environment like those in the concept art.

Procedural generation handed out a thousand planets, and a truly beautiful shot still had to be built by hand.