Starfield Community Patch Team Is Not Happy With the Mod Support From Bethesda

The Starfield Community Patch modders have voiced their concerns with the current mod support from Bethesda, the company behind the popular sci-fi single-player RPG game. Starfield released two months back on September 6, 2023, and the game still has a number of bugs and issues that are plaguing the gameplay experience.

While the Bethesda team has been rolling out patches, there’s a large unofficial team known as Starfield Community Patch which looks to fix up stuff that Bethesda overlooks or is not working on fixing at the moment. You would think that a modding team such as this one would be in contact and collaboration with Bethesda but the modders talked to Eurogamer and explained that there is little to no support for modding in the game.

Starfield Community Patch

Specifically, the Starfield Community Patch is an attempt to develop an unofficial, community-owned, open-source patch platform, according to Timothy “Halgari” Baldridge. He explained in the report that they have been working on unoffical patches since 2021, which is long before the game was even released. “There are some times where you just say it’s going to take too long to fix that and we won’t make any money off it,” added Baldridge.

Baldridge is frustrated because, due to a lack of mod support, Bethesda hasn’t made it easy for a modder to fix Starfield, if it’s taking Bethesda too long to get to fixing a particular problem. He also pointed out that most of the modders have been able to get mods out after spending a lot of hours, solely because Starfield is built on the same legacy code in its engine from previous games like Skyrim and Fallout 4.

He also pointed out modder ElminsterAU who put in over 400 hours to get a version of xEdit working for Starfield. This is a mod tool that was made for Skyrim, and the modder required that much amount of time to get it working for Starfield because the game is using the same Creation Engine 2 which is a better version of the engine from Skyrim and Fallout 4.

Balgridge was also direct in his approach when he said that “a lot of stuff is really broken compared to the other games” and that the only reason Starfield Community Patch has been able to roll out patches is because they have “modded the other games using the same engine and we know what to do.”

Bethesda is known for its support, and reliability on the mod community which has driven its previous games’ popularity. However, that is allegedly not the case with Starfield. He even added that Bethesda has not been great with communication either. “Companies do talk, but Bethesda don’t. You would think that a company that has 100,000 mods to download, that has petabytes of data for modding your game would [talk about it].”

Starfield Community Patch revealed that they have 400-plus issues with the game in its backlog to fix. “Is Bethesda actually going to fix this stuff, are they going to fix the performance issues?” said Baldridge.

With bugs, and issues prevalent, it is understandable why a big project team like the Starfield Community Patch is not happy with Bethesda, not making it easier for them to be pitching in and help improve the game so that more people can enjoy it without running into issues and problems with gameplay.