Only a month after Starfield’s release, someone has already surveyed every planet in its universe

rockpapershotgun.com:

Starfield has only been out a month, and someone has already been to every planet in its universe. While Todd Howard said we’d be able to visit over 1,000 planets, the Bethesda dev actually undersold the sheer scale of Starfield’s galaxy - there are actually close to 1,700 planets, and now someone’s seen them all just weeks after launch.

That person is Reddit user DoomZero, who revealed their achievement by posting a screenshot of Starfield’s menu showing 1,694 planets fully surveyed, with 1,695 scanned - some planets were apparently impossible to survey due to bugs.

Despite the huge number of planets in Starfield, DoomZero’s playtime feels surprisingly small given the work involved in surveying some planets, which require not only entering orbit but scanning specific creatures, plants or resources. (Apparently finding aquatic creatures was the most difficult bit, DoomZero told IGN.)

That took around 180 hours in total, on top of 20 hours spent doing other things in the game - meaning that they needed to play an average of six and a half hours a day, seven days a week, to survey everything so quickly.

That’s a lot of time in a fairly short period, but it also feels quite fast for crossing the entire galaxy - by my maths, it means each planet only needed six minutes to be fully surveyed on average. Having said that, some gas planets can be surveyed simply by flying close enough, so that’s likely to have brought the average down a bit. DoomZero acknowledged that Howard’s statement that only 10% of the game's planets have life on them is likely accurate, with most being moons and gas giants with resources due to the different planet traits in Starfield.

Another detail is that surveying the entire galaxy took