Tired of all those fast-travel menus in Starfield? Good news: If you’re playing on PC, you can grab a mod that’ll dramatically ramp up your ship’s speed in space so that you can actually fly in between nearby planets within a reasonable timespan.
Starfield was hyped up to feature an enormous galactic scale packed with item-rich dungeons, multi-part questlines, and tons of other activities. Early on, however, Bethesda made it clear that its new space RPG would not let you directly fly down to planet surfaces in the way you can in No Man’s Sky. Instead, players would access planetary locations via menus and loading screens. That extends to travel between planets and solar systems as well, in that, you can’t; instead, you click on a star map to warp from one planet’s orbit to another’s.
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Solar systems in Starfield aren’t just illusions, however. Each system is technically explorable, it’s just that there’s an enormous amount of distance between each planet and moon. It can take literally hours to travel, at normal game speeds, between even close-looking celestial bodies. (Some have estimated that Starfield’s size amounts to about 1:20 the size of reality, at least planetside, which for the scale of objects in space is still an exceptionally large area.)
Enter the cleverly named STL (Slower Than Light) mod. With it, you can ramp up your ship’s speed to cross the distance between worlds in mere minutes.
The mod’s creator, 105gun, shows off a bit of how their mod works in this YouTube video. In the clip you can see ships accelerate far beyond their normal limits. The mod works by map increased speed options to dedicated hotkeys. As per the mod’s description, and despite its name, the increased speed lets you move at the “equivalent of hundreds of times the speed of light.” While it’s a pretty handy way to get a more immersive Starfield experience, just know that installing mods risks locking your save file out of earning achievements. (There are also mods that protect against that, though.)
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For now, the intrasystem travel experience isn’t totally perfect, as Bethesda didn’t really design the game with this kind of travel in mind. There are a few visual hiccups, and some who have braved the distance and flown manually between planets have also discovered some issues with the game correctly rendering the new space. Usually a simple save/reload resolves everything, though.
While fast travel is often the default way most people get around in other Bethesda games like Skyrim and Fallout, Starfield is unique in how its fast travel is often the only option to access many areas of the game. With the Slower Than Light mod you can now reclaim some of those early-game moments when you still have the patience to traverse a super-large space. That is, before the novelty of sitting there for minutes at a time wears off and you just end up fast-traveling everywhere again.