2023 has been a massive year for video games, and we even saw the release of Bethesda’s highly anticipated space exploration RPG, Starfield. It may have had its shortcomings, but it’s hard to deny that it’s still very much a solid game that anyone can enjoy. If you know someone who’s a particularly big fan of the game, though, here are 10 Starfield gift ideas for the holiday season.

Starfield Bomber Jacket

We’ll start with the big one. This Starfield-themed bomber jacket from Insert Coin Clothing is one of the coolest pieces of Starfield merch you can get right now. It’s worth pointing out that Insert Coin is known for producing quality clothing, and it’s up there with the likes of Fan Gamer, so you don’t have to worry about wear and tear within just a few months of purchase.

As players continue to explore the deepest reaches of the galaxy in Starfield, the team at Bethesda is still working tirelessly to improve, fix, and refine various aspects of the game, to ultimately provide a a smoother and more consistent playing experience for every space adventurer. Earlier today, an official announcement appeared on the Bethesda website that is setting in motion one of the biggest updates yet, and even allowing players to get an early, hands-on glimpse of what’s to come.

The excitingly detailed update starts off with the introduction to a new Steam Beta patch, which is now available for all those who play Starfield on PC. This provides an opportunity for players to actively engage with all of the performance and gameplay-related updates reportedly coming “later this month”.

Building an outpost in Starfield can be a gratifying process. While the automated resource harvesting aspects of outpost building are profitable, it can be pretty hard to wrap your head around the mechanics behind it.

However, approaching the feature as a way to craft a personalized home is probably one of the most fun ways to spend your time in Starfield, and that’s just what the community has been doing, which has led to some awe-inspiring results. We’re going to highlight the top 10 of the best outposts made by the Starfield community we’ve found so far.

A huge, open-ended game world to explore. Years in development. Bethesda’s latest epic holds more than its fair share of secrets. Here are 10 facts you (probably) didn’t know about Starfield.

Starfield Is Huge but It’s Still Only a Tiny Slice of Our Universe

Even though you’ll probably spend most of your time in the game quick-traveling from location to location, Starfield still offers an absolutely enormous map to explore. In total, there are a whopping 693 planets in Starfield (plus 999 moons that you can also land your ship on). That’s certainly not an insignificant number, with the potential for hundreds of hours of gameplay and untold surprises along the way.

Move over adorable space plushies, there’s a new Sheriff dreamboat in town! That’s right, while the majority of the Starfield community may be busy wrapping up their first playthroughs of Bethesda’s space-faring action-RPG, a lone player has discovered a four-legged beastie that may be the cutest life form in the entire galaxy.

Yes, Reddit user Penetrating_Holes has stumbled upon a strange species of fauna that appears to be a unique cross between a crocodile, a dinosaur, and a big-beaked bird like a toucan. True, while it doesn’t possess a beak per se, atop its head are definitely some feathers, right? Or maybe it’s a shock of brown hair; it’s hard to tell!

One of the absolute strangest things about Starfield is that space travel is mostly done through menus and clicking buttons. You have a whole ass ship! You should be able to fly around in space and do cool things with it! Instead, ship gameplay is mostly reserved for combat. If you try to fly your ship from one planet to another, you’ll find that it’s pretty much impossible.

Except… it’s not.

Lock-picking in Starfield is a must-have skill for sneaky thieves or expert looters. It is especially helpful if you want to gather some extra ammo, weapons, and resources while out on expedition. Of course it doesn’t always work out the way you want it to, as one Redditer has discovered the hard way. After hours in the game you will come to realize that not all locked boxes are a looter’s paradise. Unfortunately, there is no way to know which contain treasure and which contain trash.

Redditor Shows How Picking Locks in Starfield is a Gamble

Reddit user ScienceP1e posted a video of them painstakingly picking the lock of a weapon case they encountered while exploring Jaffa IV. Despite having an Expert level lock, which can mean there is some serious loot inside, they are met with…nothing. The case is absolutely empty.

Starfield has since proven itself to be the most exceptional, open-world space RPG game to date, with a literal galaxy full of nearly 2,000 planets for players to discover and explore. As you grav jump from one star system to another, you never know what to expect upon landing in a new alien world. Some turn out to be quiet and desolate with only a few resources to pick up, while others boast various biomes full of life and plenty of secrets. The game’s ever-growing community has taken it upon themselves to seek out the most memorable planets in the galaxy, for one reason or another, and lately it’s been for the XP grind.

Unlike other RPG games, Starfield’s leveling system doesn’t actually have a foreseeable endpoint. This means that you can literally farm XP to your heart’s content, and continue to level up with no indicative cap to halt your progress. The final leveling-related achievement in the game is at Level 100, but that’s nowhere near where you can and should stop. There are a variety of methods for bolstering an efficient XP grind, but one of the most classic ones that people are noticeably jumping aboard for is essentially “wildlife XP”. That is, finding a temperate planet rich with flora and fauna, and making sure you have plenty of munitions for the occasion.

Starfield has since amassed a bustling community of players that have been wowed, bewildered, transfixed, hilariously entertained, and everything in between by the literal galaxy-sized RPG. It has as many cosmic mysteries to explore as it does comical treasures, and players haven’t been shy about sharing the whimsical and silly random encounters they’ve come across from one grav jump to another.

One such player who goes by ‘3rdShiftHomunculus’ on Reddit decided to share the most recent moment of hilarity they stumbled upon during their intergalactic travels. Upon arriving into the orbit of Proxima Ternion III, they came across a UC Responder ship that hailed them to ask a very simple question, one that undoubtedly makes most of anyone inwardly groan and laugh at the same time. “Do you know the way to Uranus?”

The latest patch has just been released for Starfield, delivering a handful of minor tweaks to Bethesda’s universe-spanning RPG. Chief among the update’s additions is a Field of View slider, allowing you to see more of the game’s worlds than ever before.

As much as FOV sliders can offer players the opportunity to view a little more of the world around them, it’s also an important accessibility feature. Users on Reddit have been asking for their addition since the game launched, as they suffer from motion sickness when playing games with narrow FOVs.

One of the most common complaints you’ll see about Starfield is how unwieldy the user interface can be. Crafting was one of the key areas in the game which was made more painful by this, but for PC players at least, that’s now a thing of the past thanks to a new mod that vastly improves the workbench experience in Bethesda’s latest RPG.

Arriving not long after Starfield‘s release, the StarUI mod proved an instant success with players who wanted a cleaner, more modern interface than the one which the game launched with. That initial mod, StarUI Inventory, improved the inventory menu. Later in September, another mod — StarUI HUD — made similar changes to the game’s heads up display, allowing for more detailed loot menus and the ability to recolor your HUD widgets such as the radar.

Bethesda games are known for strange bugs and glitches from time to time. While Starfield is certainly easily the least buggy game we’ve seen from the studio so far, it has its moments as well. Such as this one random alien dance that this Starfield player encountered upon landing on a new planet.

Reddit user u/Im_Actually_An_Alien (very apt name, by the way) posted a short clip on the forum, showing off a few bug aliens coming together to perform what can only be described as a beautiful, captivating native dance to welcome them to their planet. You can check out the video for yourself down below:

Cue the sausage puns, because this Starfield player has changed the game as far as in-game ship designs go. Reddit user u/Aromatic-Problem7500 has posted various ship designs since Starfield launched, including ones inspired by the Great Serpent itself and the cat from Stray, but this just might take the cake.

Aptly named The Frank, this is a ship that’s made to look like, well, a hotdog. I guess the pictures below speak for themselves.

It goes without saying that Starfield went above and beyond to provide a realistic, intergalactic immersion not seen before in video games; an exceptionally commendable feat that has earned ecstatic praise from players everywhere. However, when tasked with creating a game of this scale, it’s certainly not easy to immaculately polish a literal galaxy full of content. A cosmic blip is bound to happen here and there, but a disconcerted player decided to call one such blip out that is actually quite surprising to us.

Going by the name ‘TacosAreJustice’ (heartily agreed) on Reddit, they shared a rather bereaved post yesterday of their realization that you technically can’t give little, knowledge-starved Cora Coe any books you come across in your travels. If you went an entirely different route with your own playthrough in Starfield and aren’t familiar, Cora Coe is the young daughter of Sam Coe, a member of Constellation. If you choose to have Sam accompany you as a companion, Cora comes with him by default. As you jump from one star system to another, you’ll overhear their amusing family banter towards each other, much of which revolves around Cora’s love of books. She’ll even approach you personally and ask you to bring her any books, specifically ones from Earth, that you can find.

Starfield is the latest open world RPG from Bethesda that has let players push the game’s limits with surprising ease, especially when it comes to amassing piles of random items for the sake of it. In Skyrim, the most infamous case of obnoxious hoarding was probably the hundreds of cheese wheels kept inside a player’s house, and eventually it spawned into numerous videos of fans doing who knows what with even more cheese wheels. In the case of Starfield, however, someone has decided that the floor of their spaceship is the best place for anything and everything they pick up.

Going by ‘foslforever’, this player has taken to flaunting their interplanetary storage habits on Reddit, showing their latest progress yesterday to tell off the “know-it-alls” who claimed it was a bad idea for this or that reason. They first posted about their “no cargo room? no problem!” endeavor a couple weeks or so ago with a screenshot of an impressive haul of items, from resources, to spacesuits, to weapons and even a board game or two.

Bethesda Game Studios is so well known for its particular style of RPG that it can almost be its own sub-genre. Yet, despite the common threads uniting them, all three major franchises under Bethesda’s belt offer a pretty unique flavor of role-playing, each distinct from the other.

Take this fun quiz comprised of 10 deep psychological questions in order to finally determine once and for all which Bethesda franchise suits your personality best. You may think of this quiz as a helpful guide pointing you to your next immersive RPG to play, or as a unique kind of personality test. So, without further ado, let’s begin!

Despite having new game plus and no level cap, players might be ready to play something else. If you’re looking to give that galaxy a break, we have gathered a list of other games with similar aspects for a smooth transition. These games have expansive and alien worlds, enjoyable combat, and entertaining stories.

The Outer Worlds

Probably the most similar game on this list is The Outer Worlds, as it is the most recent Bethesda RPG release prior to Starfield. You still get companions to fight with you as you grow your relationship with them. Just about everything at the core of Starfield can be found in The Outer Worlds. The biggest differences are the lack of space travel and that, while you visit several different planets, they aren’t quite on the same scale. Plus, with a sequel coming, you might as well try this out now.

Much akin to past titles, Bethesda Game Studios’ galaxy-spanning RPG Starfield offers players plenty of activities to engage with. From swashbuckling space pirate to intergalactic bounty hunter to cosmic smuggler, there’s so much to do in Starfield it’s enough to make your head spin. And that’s without mentioning the five major factions in the game, with each one boasting their own distinct questlines.

Nevertheless, one incredibly patient Starfield player has gone off the beaten path and done the seemingly impossible: they’ve managed to fully survey every possible planet in the game. We’ll let that sink in for a second.

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and when it comes to video games like Starfield, that phrase could not ring any truer. Indeed, in a rapidly evolving medium where enjoyment can be a deeply personal and ephemeral commodity, trying to condense an epic 100-hour RPG down to a one-size-fits-all score can be as challenging as trying to defeat a Terrormorph with a wheel of cheese.

Nevertheless, it’s important to open a dialogue about these things, as discussion makes the world galaxy go round. From this perspective, it seems that Reddit user Touny420 has well and truly struck the motherlode.

It’s widely known now that Starfield’s planets rely on procedural generation to populate worlds with locations to explore. This has proven to be an economical system that, in theory, creates an infinite amount of content to engage with. However, the experience of exploring a world has turned out to be rather lackluster and somewhat underdeveloped, making Starfield’s planets feel barren. Now, players are discovering some immersion-breaking limits to the procedural generation system.

Reddit user “Gregistopal” shared a puzzling Starfield experience. While exploring a world, they found a science outpost that was strangely close to one of the alien temples where players receive Starborn powers. Usually, the game populates the area surrounding these temples with other alien anomalies, so any other type of building is peculiar, to say the least. This user reasonably called into question the likelihood of anyone building an outpost in such close proximity to an unknown structure without studying it extensively.