Starfield is all about pushing the limits of exploration within its huge, open-ended galaxy. Players have been trying to find the limits of Bethesda’s new RPG since launch, and there have been many interesting discoveries that substantiate rumors surrounding the game’s development. One YouTuber’s journey to Starfield’s Sun, which is considered impossible to reach, only raises more questions.
Alanah Pearce is one of the biggest names pushing the boundaries of Starfield, and she already found out what happens when you fly directly into a planet without using the starmap. It took 7 hours, and soon after, development theories started to circulate across the internet as Pearce discovered that planets are rendered as images during flight sections.
It’s safe to say that the planets seen from space are for aesthetic purposes, and are never meant to be traveled to directly, but that didn’t deter Pearce from taking on a harder challenge. This time she decided to travel to the Sun, which is estimated to take around nine years to reach without the grav drive.
To get to the Sun in a timely manner, Alanah used a mod that allows the home ship to fly at ludicrous speeds. It still took over an hour to see, and Pearce was surprised that the gas giant even showed up, but she was even more astonished when she finally reached her destination.
For a celestial body that no-one was expected to witness up close, there’s a surprising amount of detail on the Sun, including animations showing solar flares on the surface. The Sun is another single-sided image that your ship can pass through, but there is one thing that makes the Sun stand out. There are many effects that make the Sun so animated, and you can see them independently if you travel past the burning sphere.
Pearce theorized that Bethesda originally intended for players to burn up if they got too close to the Sun, which explains the low-resolution textures and detailed effects. She further speculated about Starfield’s development, noting that it “has to have been built this way because they initially intended for us to fly between planets.” This makes sense, as it would have been simpler for Bethesda not to include these impossibly hard-to-reach details in the final game.
At the end of the experiment, Pearce announces that she will attempt to travel between systems in an upcoming video, which may force Bethesda to reveal new information surrounding Starfield’s development process and early plans.
