Starfield
I did not exactly give Starfield’s base-building tools much attention during my playthrough. I built some storage crates, a room or two on a pretty planet, a landing pad that wouldn’t let me land my ship on it, and I moved on. I didn’t have points sunk into that skill tree anyway.
Well, it turns out I may have been missing the literal most complex thing in the game, something that makes ship design look like child’s play. There is a depth to Starfield’s base-building that few have been able to extract, but one of them is Niko Mueller.
After spending many, many hours, Mueller has managed to build no less than a fully functional city in Starfield. It has to be seen to be believed. He set up shop just outside Akila, and he says it is…almost as big as Akila itself, in terms of its footprint. Check it out:
Mueller says that eight crew members and six robots live there. The base has 100 production instructions (I have no idea what this even is) to do a correct “material flow” so the city essentially runs itself and prints anything you could ever need.
I’ve actually see a few of these from Mueller over the past week or two. He built a farm near New Atlantis:
I also saw his city in the early stages which had auto-transport ships for manufacturing lines, connected to all 16 of his outposts connected to the “distribution center” which would later become the city itself.
Is there any real point to do this in Starfield? I mean no, there isn’t. As I’ve said before, this is a game that allows you to become a combat god pretty easily, even on max difficulty, so you don’t really need a zillion upgraded pieces of armor, weapons, pharmaceuticals, XP, anything a place like this can make. Of course, the fun is really just in making the creation, not actually needing it to do anything useful for your character. Just like people don’t need their ship shaped like an X-Wing to win in combat, but it’s fun.
I have to respect the time and knowledge it took to make something this complex. As much as I loved Starfield, I really did not engage with base-building at all (same as Fallout) and this is a wonder to behold. Looking forward to what he (and others) make next, and you know Bethesda will be adding more base pieces in the future.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
