Starfield player discovers how ship crash sites are generated

destructoid.com:

Bethesda’s Starfield is a delightful game, for sure, though it’s not without its faults. Its randomized nature, specifically, has been criticized for how repetitive it can get, with points of interest such as the Spaceship Debris crash site popping up all over the place with virtually no variance in loot or detail. Now, with players spending more and more time in the game, they’re figuring out that there are ways to deliberately trigger the appearance of certain points of interest, potentially underlining this problem.

Notably, Starfield player and Reddit user sterrre appears to have figured out a way to deliberately spawn Spaceship Debris landing zones on planets: one that is both obvious and interesting, if you think about it, but somehow managed to fly under the radar up until now. According to sterrre’s findings, this particular point of interest will spawn on a planet whenever you destroy a spaceship in its orbit. Though, it’s worth pointing out that the spawn isn’t 100% guaranteed, as others have reported.

Naturally, Starfield‘s way of generating crash sites is perfectly sensible. You’d expect a ship to sometimes make its way onto a planet’s surface, after all. The problematic bit, though, is that Bethesda seems to have only set up the one single aforementioned POI, the Spaceship Debris, as the possible spawn for this event. This means guaranteed repetition, yes, but worse yet is that this particular POI has various features that make absolutely no sense in the context of a newly crashed ship.

Upon looking closer at this POI, players may discover a makeshift camp that the survivors had made, with plenty of environmental storytelling to suggest that the crash had happened quite a while ago. This is obviously