The best Starfield mods to try out right now

Thomas The Tank Engine's massive face smiles down at a Starfield character.
(Image credit: Bethesda / Trainwiz)

The best Starfield mods will enhance your spacefaring experience with gameplay changes, performance improvements, or some downright weirdness. Now that the game has been out a while, we're seeing a healthy dose of mods emerging out there to twist Starfield with interesting quality-of-life changes and some fun and interesting novelties. Though there are new mods made every day, I've curated a list of mods I think are most useful right now, although that all depends on what you want to do. Below you'll find Starfield mods covering simple improvements that will elevate and streamline the overall experience. 

How to install Starfield mods

Starfield mods

(Image credit: Nexus)

The majority of Starfield mods will come from Nexus. Depending on how you want to do things you can either download and use their Vortex installer to manage all your mods, or you can install them all manually. Generally most mods will work by downloading some files and extracting them to a specific folder, so check the instructions carefully for the specifics. It's worth noting that most mods will favor the Steam version of Starfield, while the Game Pass version has different levels of support.

Some mods will deactivate achievements as well, so check out this mod before you install anything to keep achievements in place with a modded game. 

Back up any saves before you try anything as it's possible to break the game with mods. You can alway reinstall the game to get a fresh, clean version if you have problems but make sure you have copies of saves if you don't want to lose your progress. 

Starfield performance mods

Starfield DLSS or XeSS options

You'll need to download the Upscaler Base Plugin first but this mod will let you replace FSR2 with DLSS/XeSS in Starfield. DLSS/DLAA is only supported by RTX cards though, while XeSS will work with other cards, but you might not see any improvements over FSR2.

You'll also need to download whichever DLSS/FSR2/XeSS dlls you need from the relevant sites for the base plugin. 

Starfield performance optimisations 

If you're having trouble running Starfield on your system this mod will take some of the load of your CPU, boost your FPS and let you access an ultra low settings potato mode. You could potentially see a 10% GPU performance boost if that's where the your set up is struggling. Or less to nothing if your CPU is the issue. 

There's also this mod which offers up a performance lift from things like changing shadow resolutions and terrain meshes to offer a GPU boost of between 5-15% depending on your hardware. 

Starfield visual mods

Remove Starfield's colour filter

Starfield color mod

(Image credit: Bethesda)

This is a mod that just take out the greeny tinted colour filters that permeate Starfield. It'll make the game render everything as it is, but it's not the easiest thing to set up with ini file editing required. There are also some slightly different steps depending if you're playing the Game Pass or Steam version. So it all depends how much you hate the game's tinting as to whether you give this a try. 

Remove all Starfield intros

If you want to remove all the logos and idents that play when the game starts, this will do just that and take you straight to the start option. Handy if you can't wait the seconds to get past all that. 

Starfield UI mods

Starfield UI mod

(Image credit: Bethesda / m8r98a4f2)

You have a couple of options to change the UI in Starfield. This mod will clean up your inventory and let you see all the info you need more clearly. While this mod will move your on screen HUD and make it smaller, so it gets in the way less. 

Starfield FOV mod

Starfield FOV mod

(Image credit: Bethesda / hellstorm102)

In case you missed the memo, you can adjust your Starfield FOV in the game's menus, so you no longer need a mod unless you want ridiculously wide viewing angles.

Starfield gameplay mods

Easy lockpicking in Starfield

Starfield Lockpicking

(Image credit: Bethesda)

This mod lets you more or less remove the lockpicking minigame from Starfield. Once installed you'll only have to place single pins to open a lock, although you will still need level up lock picking skills to access things, which you can do with Starfield console commands

Easy speech in Starfield

This mod will make all persuasion checks in the Starfield dialogue system a 100% pass rate, so you'll always win any conversations you have with NPCs.

Change the Starfield walking speed

This mod will let you alter the walking speed in Starfield so that walking is slightly faster and jogging slightly slower. You'll need to install Autohotkey as well and even its creator says it's a quick fix while they wait for a better option. But, if movement speed is annoying you, give it a go. 

Remove bullet sponge enemies 

Starfield enemies can take a lot of damage before they go down and this mod fixes that. The problem arises from the way enemies level up with you - as you work your way up the ranks the enemies get extra HP which can lead to finding fairly ordinary opponents that can take load of shots before dying. This changes their initial health values so they die more easily. 

Starfield shipbuilding mods

Improved shipbuilding in Starfield 

Starfield review

(Image credit: Bethesda)

This mod will increase the overlap tolerance when building ships. By letting you slightly overlap things very slightly you'll be able to access more build options when placing modules that would otherwise clash. There's also this mod which just improves things like camera movement as you look around, while also adding more floors to what you can construct. 

© 12DOVE. Not to be reproduced without permission

Leon Hurley
Managing editor for guides

I'm GamesRadar's Managing Editor for guides, which means I run GamesRadar's guides and tips content. I also write reviews, previews and features, largely about horror, action adventure, FPS and open world games. I previously worked on Kotaku, and the Official PlayStation Magazine and website. 

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