Starfield data miner uncovers fossilized remains of a much cooler, more hardcore game tucked away in its files: 'We had a washed version of the game'

pcgamer.com:

Space travel in Starfield is pretty easy. Remarkably easy, actually. You just bring up the map, click a dot and go. Sure, some things might be out of immediate jump range, but if all the yawning void of the cosmos has to threaten me with is «mild inconvenience,» then I'm gonna complain that documentaries like Event Horizon really overhyped the horrors that lie in the great beyond.

Things weren't always that way. For one thing, Todd Howard himself has spoken about versions of the game where it was possible to run out of fuel and find yourself stranded among the stars, a feature which ended up getting yanked out because it was a «fun killer». But now a player on Reddit (spotted by GamesRadar) has found evidence lurking in Starfield's files of a much crunchier, and riskier, kind of space travel. 

I've spoken with the thread's creator—Reddit user Redsaltyborger—myself, and verified the existence of the starmap texture in Starfield's game files. I'll paste it below in convenient and parseable .jpg form. Yep, it sure does look like a relic of a different, more hardcore Starfield we never got.

The thing that leaps out to me—beyond the fuel consumption gauge, which Todd's already told us about—is the presence of environmental hazards in the game's solar systems. In the texture left lying around in the game files, you can see that Leviathan IV is home to both «Solar Radiation» and «Micrometeoroids.» 

The former threatens to weaken your ship's hull while the latter, enticingly, «can cause catastrophic stop.» I don't know about you, but I wouldn't mind a catastrophic stop or two to spice things up a bit as I'm ticking things off my Starfield task list.

We've also got filters to see different map modes and a full-on, Mass