Official mod support for Starfield is coming next year

There are a ton of mods available for Starfield already, adding everything from stormtroopers to support for Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling system. By the standards of most games, this number of mods would be considered a deluge. But Starfield is a Bethesda Game Studios game, which means it’s more like the calm before the storm.

Bethesda is enthusiastic in its support of the mod community (the studio even hired the creator of “clutter mods” for The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim to clutter up some of Starfield’s lived-in environments), and the feeling is more than mutual. The top five most popular games on the Nexus Mods platform are all Bethesda games by a long chalk; the site hosts some 60,000 mods for Skyrim Special Edition, which have been downloaded 2.9 billion times in total.

A big part of the reason for this is Bethesda’s painstaking official support for the modding community via its Creation Kit toolkits. These make it much easier to both create and use mods, and make it possible to distribute them on console. The Creation Kit for Starfield hasn’t been released yet, and things won’t get really interesting in the world of Starfield modding until it’s out.

Bethesda has already promised mod support for Starfield, and now we have a timeline. Studio head Todd Howard told Famitsu that it’s coming in 2024. “You will be able to do almost anything [with mods], just like in previous [Bethesda games],” he said, via Google Translate. “Mod support will be available next year, but we love it too, so we’ll do it in a big way.”

This is consistent with previous Bethesda Game Studios releases. Mod support for Skyrim arrived around four months after its initial release, early in the following year, while the Fallout 4 Creation Kit took around six months to appear. It’s possible Starfield’s Creation Kit might take a little longer, since Starfield runs on a new version of Bethesda’s in-house game engine: Creation Engine 2.

Not a surprise, then, but good to know that it’s coming — especially since this will most likely mean mods becoming available for players on Xbox, too.