Meet the Starfield Player Who Surveyed All 1,000 Planets

ign.com:

Ahead of the launch of Starfield, Bethesda chief Todd Howard said there were over 1,000 planets to explore in the science fiction role-playing game. "From barren but resource-heavy ice balls, to Goldilocks planets with life,” Howard said during the Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase in June. “And not just this system, but over 100 systems — over 1,000 planets, all open for you to explore."

It was a number that would go on to dominate pre-release discussion around Starfield. How could any game have so many planets for the player to fully explore? How could such a thing be fun? Bethesda's answer came in the form of procedural generation. Not all 1,000 planets would be hand-crafted by developers at Bethesda. A small portion would be. In fact, Howard would go on to reveal only 10% of Starfield’s planets would have life on them.

Still, over 1,000 planets. It was one hell of a number, a number that sounds fantastic in an advert. Starfield is a game so vast that exploring all those planets would take any right-thinking player an age to do. Now, a month after Starfield came out, one player has done it.

Josh, or as they are known on Reddit, DoomZero, is that Starfield player. Last week, DoomZero took to the Starfield subreddit to stake their claim: “A True Scientific Explorer,” the thread title reads. “Fully Surveyed Every Planet Possible.” And there’s a screenshot showing the details of this monumental effort:

It’s that ‘planets fully surveyed’ figure we’re most interested in here. Howard, in hindsight, undersold Starfield with that over 1,000 planets to explore line. DoomZero was able to fully survey an eye-watering 1,694 planets. A few planets are apparently bugged (more on that later). But to give you an idea of just what was