The 9 Least Essential Starfield Mods You Can Install Right Now

As is all-too-often the case, Bethesda releases its games with half-baked UIs, dodgy animations, and painfully slow menus, knowing that its community will clean it all up for them via mods. So as expected, over the weekend all manner of essential mods for Starfield have appeared that will clear up the game’s most immediate problems. Also there are these ones.

Starfield launched without DLSS support: modded. It has a clumsy, oversized inventory presentation, like all their games: modded. It doesn’t let you adjust your FOV, ffs: modded. But forget all that. We’re here to talk about what happens when you order the mods from lowest to highest popularity. These are the people who see a brand new game, and immediately learn how to modify it for the stupidest possible reasons. This is to celebrate the people who make the flashlight show Nicolas Cage’s face.

Ryan Gosling Character Preset

We understand the situation you’re in. You’re a busy person, and with work and family you don’t have the time to play Starfield AND sculpt your character as Ryan Gosling. But cacon5 has you covered with the Ryan Gosling Character Preset. As this video shows, this modder dedicated their time and energy into crafting someone who…is also a human being.

Celebrity Flashlights

If that’s not enough Ryan Gosling content, then you’d better bloody believe we’ve got more for you. Because why not also have Dollar Tree Ryan Reynolds as a beaming point of light? That’s yours via the Ryan Gosling Blade Runner Flashlight from MozzyFX.

But it doesn’t stop there. In fact, we get the feeling this is something that’s only just getting started. Because there’s also the Nicolas Cage Flashlight Mod, which presents the actor like some sort of horrendous moon-face.

Or perhaps you’d like to show your eternal loyalty to our lord and savior, Todd Howard himself, via the Todd Howard Flashlight Replacer.

If your affections lay with even more senior deities, then you might want to opt for the Phil Spencer Flashlight.

Umbreon Ground Crew Helmet

This one perhaps doesn’t quite meet the remit of the article, because it’s honestly astonishing that Bethesda released the game without this already implemented. It’s the Umbreon Ground Crew Helmet, which replaces the ground crew helmet with one showing a picture of the Pokémon Umbreon.

“Truly the best mod ever created,” says fellow modder jetray1000, despite the mod inexplicably sitting in second-from-last place in Nexus Mods’ Trending list. (Last place is a widescreen mod that is flagged as containing “suspicious files.”)

A Massive Effect

How much would you like to see a crossover between Mass Effect and Starfield? Yeah, us too! Meanwhile, the John Shepard mod promises to add a player character who kind of looks like the lead character from Mass Effect—you know, the game which also has a character creator, that lets you make him (or preferably her) look like anyone you want. Well, we say “looks like,” but modder ctxrlsec hedges their bets, adding “probably not perfect because the character creation is kinda limited but it looks close enough.”

Hello Killy

Right now, at this early point in Starfield’s life, it’s not yet possible to apply skins to your weapons at will. For the while, it requires entirely replacing the game’s default skin, which is perhaps more cumbersome. Although we would argue, entirely worth it when it’s the Hello Kitty Laser mod.

Entirely Ruin Starfield On Purpose

Sick of the game working properly? Frustrated by the way it won’t let you introduce narrative-breaking situations? Finally, there’s a solution for you. It’s the Kill Essential NPC mod, that prevents plot-vital characters from getting back up once you’ve knocked them down. (Yes, Starfield relies on that old Beth-gem!)

Rather excellently, in case installing this mod weren’t already obviously a spectacularly bad idea, it seems it also allows enemies to perma-kill essential characters, meaning ruining your entire game doesn’t even have to be by your own hand.

There. We hope this has proved completely useless for you, and we look forward to seeing even more ridiculous and unhelpful mods once the game is officially released on September 6.