Starfield's Shattered Space patch fixes a modding restriction that could turn your game into a surrealist hellscape

Starfield's first story expansion arrives today: Shattered Space brings a bit of cosmic horror courtesy of those snake-worshipping space cultists we all know and love, and with it comes a fresh batch of fixes in the form of Starfield Update 1.14.70. Our Shattered Space review is on the way, but we've got patch notes to dig through in the meantime—including one particular fix that'll keep your mods from goofing up your game.

Focusing mainly on bugfixes and performance improvements, the patch is a little light on actual gameplay additions, but it does fix an important issue for players who've made some additions of their own. In Bethesda's words, the patch «resolved an issue that limited the number of loaded creations to 255»—«creations» being Bethesda's term of choice for player-created mods.

255 plugins might sound like a lot, but it's common for a single mod to be composed of multiple plugins. With Bethesda's in-game mod browser allowing quick access to thousands of Starfield mods, a player can easily walk away from a bout of modding fever—an affliction we're all familiar with, I'm sure—having installed enough mods to unintentionally cross that invisible 255 plugin threshold.

Before now, passing that 255 plugin threshold meant Starfield would start falling apart at the seams. Quests might fail to progress. Buildings and walls might fail to load. Where the player should load into a settlement, they might instead load into a yawning pit where a city ought to be before tumbling into the space beneath creation.

Anyway, they fixed that. No more hellmouths. You can mod Starfield to your heart's content (once mod creators update their mods, anyway).

Another patch note providing some peace of mind is a fix for Annihilator weapons, which have a chance to generate a damaging disease cloud when they hit an enemy. Previously, those clouds didn't discriminate between enemies and other NPCs like quest characters and companions, which meant they'd start taking damage and react as