Highlights
- A Starfield player demonstrated the impressive physics in the game by showcasing their collection of potatoes, which can be gathered in large quantities for cooking and crafting.
- The game’s use of the Creation Engine allows for items to remain in the game indefinitely, adding to the immersive experience.
- The deliberate choice to run Starfield at 30 FPS on Xbox Series X/S consoles ensures consistent quality and performance, even when players accumulate massive quantities of in-game items.
A Starfield player recently showed off their incredible collection of potatoes, demonstrating the impressive physics implemented in the space-faring RPG by Bethesda. Many people have voiced discontent with the fact that Starfield only runs at 30 FPS on Xbox Series X/S consoles. However, that was a conscious choice made by the developer in order to ensure consistent quality and performance across the board, even when people accumulate massive quantities of in-game items.
Like Fallout 4 and Skyrim before it, Starfield uses the Creation Engine, though an upgraded version of it, and one of the features of the tool is that many items spawned into the game remain there indefinitely. This means loot, armor, and other objects dropped on the ground or inside buildings can usually be retrieved days later, and the evidence of chaos wreaked in shops and houses will remain throughout a playthrough. Even corpses of some NPCs can be found lying about, usually stripped of valuable goods, long after they’ve died.
A Starfield player who goes by the Reddit user name of Moozipan demonstrated this aspect of the Creation Engine in a video recently shared on the social media site. Titled “Time To Let Something Go,” the uploaded footage shows the player opening a hatch on their spaceship, out of which spills thousands of potatoes. Not only is it impressive that the game still performs well with that many in-game objects spawned in, but the realistic manner that the potatoes tumble out of their enclosure is equally noteworthy.
Like the iteration before it, Bethesda’s Creation Engine 2 utilizes Havok, a 3D physics engine that is owned by Microsoft. Among other things, Havok provides real-time collision for objects, including bodies, and it also simulates the movement of cloth, hair, and foliage. Combined with the increased level of detail that was implemented for Fallout 76 and Creation Engine 2’s improved real-time lighting, the effect on something as mundane as a pile of potatoes is pretty remarkable.
Some people might wonder why Bethesda’s latest title has collectible potatoes in the first place and why they can be gathered in such large quantities. As with Skyrim and the Fallout games, Starfield features cooking and crafting, which requires stockpiling necessary ingredients like carrots, tomatoes, a variety of fruits, and of course potatoes. There are numerous recipes to be found throughout the game, and the meals prepared at a cooking station or found throughout the game world can recover lost health and provide other temporary benefits, like improved oxygen recovery or damage resistance.
Starfield is available on PC and Xbox Series X/S.
