Starfield modders are trying to join up maps into complete planets, cue memories of Minecraft's Far Lands

rockpapershotgun.com:

Are Starfield's planets continuous spaces? Are they just collections of sealed-off maps that fake the presence of landmarks such as named cities beyond their invisible boundaries? I just don't even know any more, but modders are looking into it. One intrepid soul, Draspian, has tinkered with the code to disable said invisible boundaries, and in the process, revealed that planetary maps do, in fact, join together, though as you might be expecting, Starfield doesn't take kindly to being treated this way.

The mod in question is over here (thanks to PCGamer's Morgan Park for spotting). Draspian has posted screens and videos of an expedition from an outlying map tile to the city of New Atlantis on Jemison, showing that the game does try to render the city itself, when you bypass the invisible wall, but undergoes bizarre terrain glitches and ultimately, crashes to desktop.

"This should be conclusive and undeniable proof that all tiles on a planet are connected," Draspian wrote on Nexus Mods. "And the millimetrical scale it takes to visit a directly adjacent tile (requiring the removal of map markers through console commands) shows how massive the planets actually are."

1) "I kept the boundaries on for the experiment to prove that I didn't just run far enough away to fake the distance, and I bring up the map (the controller controls partially froze so that part is a bit confusing) but you can clearly see the Activities quest markers going far below the available land, towards New Atlantis."

2) "It gets better. This time I disabled the border again and tried to get as close to New Atlantis as possible before the game crashed. It looks like the reason for the crash might be the game trying to load the entire next tile, because