Starfield Player Flies 18 Hours To The Sun (And It’s Pretty Impressive)

Highlights

• Starfield allows players to explore more than 1,000 planets and moons, but flying to the stars themselves is not normally possible.
• One player spent 18 hours using a mod to fly from Mercury to Sol, the Earth’s sun, and discovered detailed surfaces.
• Other players have also reported getting close to the sun in Starfield, suggesting Bethesda may have had more ambitious goals for the game.

It’s no secret that Starfield plays host to more than 1,000 planets and moons that you can explore, but the stars themselves have always been off limits. However, one enterprising player spent 18 hours of real-world time flying their ship from Mercury to Sol, the Earth’s sun, and the results they found are pretty impressive.

Posting their findings and the method for how they got there on Reddit, the player, under the username InfinityPortal, said they used some unorthodox methods to make the long journey, as the game typically only allows you to travel to the gravitational pulls of planets or moons via fast traveling. (While you can’t land on gas giants, you can at least fast travel to them, which is a lot closer than you can normally get to a sun.)

Making the journey did involve the use of a mod that, according to the player, “uncaps the acceleration” of the spaceship. However, they still left the speed low enough to make the journey at least somewhat believably long. After flying for a very long time, they even had to flip their ship around in the opposite direction and fire the thrusters to help with deceleration, stopping “around 2.2LS away from the Sun.”

One of the most interesting findings from the journey is that Bethesda actually placed a high level of detail on the sun’s surface even though players aren’t able to get near it under normal circumstances. Some people responding to the post noted that in a few star systems, there are planets that come close enough to their suns that some of that detail can be seen, and speculation has also been raised that Bethesda may have intended for players to be able to fly all the way to stars in earlier builds of the game. “There are a lot of aspects of the game that suggest they had ambitious goals that had to be scaled back during development,” commented Reddit user XOmniverse.

This isn’t the first time a Starfield player has reported getting close to a sun. Reddit user DaKushyMonster also shared a similar image of a ship near a sun back in September, noting that the star made a unique noise. There’s also this YouTube video from around the same time period, in which the player actually passes through a sun in their ship and uses mods to exit their ship to get a closer look.