Starfield Fan Discovers Early Starmap, Hints At Harder Space Travel
Starfield's space travel is pretty simple. You open a map, select a dot, and zoom off. There's no fuel and you won't stumble into any obstacles, aside from the odd raider, but originally it was much more gruelling.
Todd Howard said in 2022 that, during development, "Your ship would run out of fuel and the game would just stop", pointing to more realistic intergalactic travel. The concept was scrapped, with the grav drive being used to limit how far you can go instead. But now we know a little bit more about that old system.
As reported by GamesRadar, a dataminer uncovered a pre-launch starmap with UI elements pointing to fuel consumption and potential hazards. You can see it in the Reddit post embedded below.
On the right-hand side of the starmap we can see the "Jump Data" tab which details how long it will take to travel the distance you've selected. Underneath, it lists how much fuel a jump will consume, with a handy little bar displaying how much you currently have and what will be left after.
Underneath all of these stats are the problems you can encounter on your journey. In this case, we see solar radiation which will result in "light hull damage" and micrometeoroids that "can cause catastrophic stop". It's unclear how you would counter these problems, but upgrading your ship would likely have increased your odds, making it more difficult to reach higher-level areas from the start as you'd be stuck with a scrappy little vessel.
We were playing that and it became very punitive to the player. Your ship would run out of fuel and the game would just stop. You just want to get back to what you're doing. So we recently changed it where the fuel in your ship and the grav drive limits how far you can go at once, but it
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