Starfield doesn’t require fast travel after all… sort of

Pluto is not a planet. This shouldn’t be a controversial statement anymore, but it’s bringing back new excitement with the release of the epic space RPG, Starfield. Developer and streamer Alanah Pearce wanted to know if Bethesda’s epic space RPG really required fast travel for all interplanetary travel, by setting out on a seven-hour journey from Earth to the dwarf planet.

Starfield Players intend to use fast travel to move between planets and solar systems. Much to the disappointment of many, who had been hoping for a more natural ability to fly from one orbit to another, it was widely speculated that the game was instead sending players into skyboxes enclosed within the solar system, with uninhabited planets merely… Decorations on the walls. Intrepid explorer, podcaster, and writer at Santo Monica Studios, Alana Pierce decided to find out the truth.

Pierce’s plan was to fly within the familiar paths of the Milky Way to discover if it was possible to reach those additional worlds using the player’s space steam. To do this, the plan was to point to a location, then leave the game running while it slept. However, pers The first problem was where to go. Starting In an attempt to aim for Earth, it turned out that the game’s highly realistic planetary orbits would have made it unrealistic to aim accurately before heading to bed. Instead, after much deliberation, the decision was made to steer the ship to the right of Pluto.

Read more: 17 things I wish I knew before I started playing Starfield

It turns out it’s not that simple. It’s never that simple. Every time Pearce’s Xbox controller went to sleep, the game paused, meaning there were periods of the night where no progress was made until the streamer woke up to hit A, then went back to sleep.

Upon waking up after seven hoursWhat Pearce has proven unequivocally is that the game does not use skyboxes. The solar systems depicted in this massive space map are real, and like the real thing, mostly consist of terrifyingly vast expanses of nothing at all. Now she was 47 kilometers away from the dwarf’s body.

At this point, the textures were significantly blurred, indicating that Bethesda did not intend for anyone to do this. Rather, it confirms that, upon actually arriving at the non-planet, Pierce flew directly through the skin of Pluto’s surface, and at some level went “inside” it, and then the trans-Neptunian object She became invisible to reveal the rest of the space around her ship.

Coming out the other side proved somewhat more difficult. Because despite Pluto being endlessly maligned for its small size, it still has a diameter of 2,376 kilometers. Traveling at these speeds in subspace means it would take hours. so you know, Alana Pierce went back to bed.

After another five hours, the ship was off-planet again. Surprisingly, in the process, Pierce reported that she was so tired that upon returning to bed, she fainted and hit her head. But it was for science.