Starfield Mod Demonstrates Planetary Landings Without Loading Screens

Frederik Wessberg's Seamless Landings mod supports manual or autopilot descents, water landings and weather effects, with a free NexusMods release planned.

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Starfield Mod Demonstrates Planetary Landings Without Loading Screens

A work-in-progress PC mod called Seamless Landings demonstrates a continuous descent from space to a planet’s surface in Starfield. Frederik Wessberg’s project changes a break in the game’s travel without being an official Bethesda feature.

In the base game, players select a landing zone instead of flying through the atmosphere and touching down themselves. Wessberg says he has worked on the project for roughly six months. To make the descent possible, the mod replaces the game’s 2D planet rendering with a 3D approach. Vanilla planets are represented in space by a surface texture, sometimes with a moving cloud layer and atmosphere. The mod also adds heat-shield burn and ash during atmospheric entry, with scattering effects based on each planet’s composition data.

Players can pilot the ship manually or hand the descent to autopilot. While autopilot handles the approach, they can move around the ship’s interior. The mod also allows water landings rather than limiting ships to preselected landing areas.

The atmospheric layers include volumetric clouds driven by climate data and weather systems, as well as thunderstorms, lightning, auroras around the poles, and airglow above the night-side horizon. Together, the rendering and flight changes make the approach to a planet part of the journey rather than a transition to a landing screen.

Seamless Landings is still in development and requires Starfield Script Extender. Wessberg plans to release it for free on NexusMods when it is ready, and the current project remains a mod demonstration rather than a finished Bethesda feature.

Would continuous planetary entry make Starfield‘s space travel feel more connected to exploration on the ground? Follow the mod’s progress and other Starfield developments through X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram, Steam, and Telegram.

Starfield is a single-player action role-playing game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and set in an open-world space environment. Players create a customizable character and explore a region of the Milky Way galaxy spanning approximately 50 light-years, landing on over 1,000 planets with procedurally generated landscapes. Gameplay includes first-person and third-person combat using firearms, explosives, and melee weapons, as well as spaceship construction, outpost building, resource gathering, and crafting. Players recruit companion characters, join factions, and progress through skill trees spanning Physical, Social, Combat, Science, and Tech categories.