Summary

• Latest Starfield update adds ship interior customization, enhancing player creativity in building unique ships for space exploration.
• The new update breaks ship-building mods, requiring modders to rebuild modules from scratch due to game file renaming.
• Bethesda's official Creation Kit modding tool has been announced, and could prevent these problems in the future.

Starfield's latest patch has broken a cool ship-building mod, and further proves the need for a highly anticipated feature that Bethesda's previously announced. Ship building is one of Starfield's main mechanics, with players able to customize their transportation with different modules designed for speed, combat, cargo, and more.

Players previously used this tool as a way to reworking a design to make it practically invincible. As revealed by Bethesda Softworks' latest development video - which also gave players their first look at the land vehicles and the Shattered Space expansion - the new May 2024 update is adding plenty of new content to the ship customization tool.

Starfield's New Ship Builder Tools Allow Players More Control

And Introduces Interior Customization

While players were able to customize their ships' exterior - which is the part players would be seeing most anyway - as soon as they entered them they'd be met with a fairly generic interior, regardless of their build. The new Ship Decoration mode transforms these interiors into blank slates and allows players to truly make their ships feel unique with free-form placement of furniture and decoration throughout these interiors.

This essentially incorporates of the more robust features of another major mechanic in Starfield: outposts. Although most will likely use outposts as a way to get resources out of a planet, players could also use them as build residential bases where crew could be assigned after hiring them, or these bases could be used for storage, power sources, mining equipment, and more. The base version of Starfield's ships already let players assign a set number of crewmates and use its cargo hold for storage, but by essentially adding these more creative outpost customization features into the ship builder, players can now take their creative endeavors on the go with them.

As of the time of writing, these tools are currently available in Starfield's 1.11.33 beta and will be added to the main version of the game at a later date.

Unfortunately, The May Update Has Broken Some Mods

DerreTech Legacy And Others Won't Work After Version 1.10.31

Unfortunately, this update will break several ship building mods that have been made since Starfield's launch in September 2023, not because of the new ship building mechanic itself, but because all of the game’s .mesh files were renamed, which breaks some ship builder mods to the point all modders can do is rebuild every module from scratch. This has been noted on the Nexus Mods page for DerekM17x's DerreTech mod - which ties into WykkydGaming's DarkStar and DerreTech - The Ultimate Shipbuilding Patch mod and others - which states that the last version of the game that this mod will work with is Starfield Update 1.10.31.

Those who have installed the mod already are encouraged to remove all of its modules from all of their ships before updating the game and before uninstalling the mod. According to the mod's newest description, once all of its modules are off the ships, this mod is safe to uninstall during a play-through and players don't need to start a new game or New Game Plus. DerekM17x has announced a new mod page for a new DerreTech after renaming the previous one "DerreTech Legacy" and is working on building this back up, but points out that the modules will not be the same despite some large, obvious similarities.

Hopefully, The Starfield Creation Kit Will Reduce These Issues In The Future

Bethesda Can Creation Kit Mods

If there's one thing that has become apparent over the years, it's that Bethesda's games will become heavily modded by their communities, with new features expanding the studio's original vision and being a huge reason for why players find themselves returning so many years on from the games' original launches. While some mods will work fine after Bethesda's official updates to their games, others have become prone to breaking extremely easily.

This was recently the case with Fallout 4's official next-gen patch, which broke any mod using the popular Fallout 4 Script Extender (F4SE), a third-party mod that expanded the scripting capabilities that most non-Creation Club mods needed to run. A similar sort of issue occurred when another of Bethesda's titles, The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, released its "Anniversary Edition" patch back in 2021, causing several mods to stop working. Bethesda had stated that it had worked to "minimize impact to the majority of community mods" in a post on X days before the patch launched, but it's possible that these were mostly for those using the Creation Kit.

Bethesda had released its official Creation Kit for both of these titles, letting players produce content within Bethesda's Creation engine that the games' developers could help and offer to console players through the Creation Club, building upon a concept established by The Elder Scrolls' Construction Set for Morrowind and Oblivion and the Garden of Eden Creation Kit for Fallout 3. A Creation Kit has been announced for Starfield, but there isn't a release window for this.

Hopefully, Bethesda will release Starfield's Creation Kit before the major updates that will likely accompany Shattered Space's release this Fall. Not only would this better ensure mods would be compatible with the DLC's content as well and prevent major overhauls or rebuilds like the DerreTech mod is currently experiencing, but it would also provide players on consoles with further reasons to revisit the game before the expansion's launch by offering them a similar flow of regular content that the PC community currently has.

Sources: DerekM17x/Nexus Mods (1, 2), WykkydGaming/Nexus Mods