Starfield: Essential mods for PC Players; DLSS, UI overhauls and more
While Starfield is already a great experience with the basegame, it wouldn't be a Bethesda release without a healthy modding community working to polish up the rough spots of the experience; and thankfully, modders have wasted no time getting to work to do just that. Even this early on into the game's life, we've already found a few mods that we'd recommend to anyone playing the game on PC - and for the record, every mod we're listing today works on both Steam and Game Pass, is only useful for one of the two, or there is evidence that they might work on both in the near future. As another note; most of these mods *will* disable Achievements, so there's another mod you'll want to install in order to avoid that penalty.
Quality of Life Mods
First up are the Quality of Life mods; improving the gameplay in some way, whether it might be through changes to how the game works internally or tweaks to the user interface.
Achievement Enabler
Modding is fun and all, but by default, most of the mods on this list will automatically mark any savefiles you use them with as incapable of earning achievements. Thankfully, there is a method to circumvent this limitation - though I would suggest some caution if you intend to use this mod on the Game Pass release. Following Priqrade's lengthy instructions on the mod page will help you with ensuring your saves stay pristine, either way.
StarUI Inventory
The first release in the StarUI series of mods by popular Bethesda modder m8r98a4f2 has already released, and it retools the game's inventory so that players can more easily compare items at a glance - offering a welcome ability to determine which items are worth equipping, which are worth selling, and more. We'd keep an eye on their Nexus Mods page in the coming days, too, as considering their history of Fallout 4 mods we'll likely see even more UI overhauls from them in the future.
Ship Builder Tweaks
By default, Starfield's Ship Building experience can feel a bit sluggish and unresponsive; so modder NexusGuy999 has made it a point to fix it with his mod for the game. This improves the overall experience of Ship Building by making the controls more responsive, as well as doubling the space that players have access to when designing their ships.
Better Button Prompts
This one is for those of you who are playing Starfield with a PlayStation or Switch controller - while this can be installed on Game Pass, technically you can only use those controllers out of the box on the Steam release. Regardless, modder TheShoxter's release lets you swap out your console button prompts to match a Dualshock 4, a Dualsense, or a Switch Pro Controller respectively. It's a minor tweak, but one that anyone looking to play the game with a controller might appreciate for sure.
In-Game FOV Changer
For whatever reason, Bethesda opted to not include an in-game FOV slider - and worse yet, there aren't even any options in the console out-of-the-box that will let you edit them for yourself. Thankfully, the same NexusGuy999 that released Ship Builder Tweaks has also made a mod for the in-game console that will let you set the First-Person and Third-Person FOVs to anything you please.
Graphical Mods
While the above mods centered around usability improvements, there have been more than a few mods that have aimed to help users tweak the visuals to their liking. While many of these I wouldn't personally use, there's still merit to their existence - and I'm sure some readers will want to know about them, all the same.
Starfield Frame Generation
Despite its name, this mod by LukeFZ564 doesn't only work with current-generation nVidia GPUs, but also adds DLSS support for any RTX GPU looking to play the game. While the in-game FSR2 scaler is one of the technology's better implementations, it's a fact that DLSS and XeSS are better in terms of image quality; and DLSS Frame Generation is sure to help squeeze out a bit more image fluidity. Best of all, it's completely free!
Native HDR
This mod by Ershin allows you to tone map Starfield to HDR; this works similarly to AutoHDR on Windows 11, or Special-K's own implementation of the feature, but offers a cleaner implementation overall. It goes without saying that you shouldn't be using it if you don't have an HDR display, and arguably its usefulness is near pointless for Game Pass users - as AutoHDR works for anyone using that version, unlike on Steam - but for those of you playing on Steam, it offers a solution for an HDR experience.
Todd Howard Painting Replacer
Replace all of the paintings in The Lodge with paintings of Todd Howard. A mod by ronaldomoon.
Are there any other mods we missed? Let us know down below, and we'll be keeping an eye out for what might be some essential tweaks for anyone playing Starfield on PC in the days to come.