We know you probably know this by now, but Bethesda’s Starfield is absolutely huge. With over 1,000 Starfield planets to explore, you’ll be spending a lot of your time searching the stars for the best Starfield weapons. Although, Starfield’s exploration limits may mean you’re taking advantage of Fast Travel a little more than you would like. If you do want to fly to planets in Starfield using your own steam, you can. Although, it really won’t be worth your time.
Ahead of the full Starfield release date, dedicated cosmonaut and videogame writer Alanah Pearce decided to spend seven whole hours trying to see if you can actually fly to planets manually when you arrive in their orbit. In-game, when you get close enough, you are prompted to open the surface map and Fast Travel to either a POI or a random location – these include things like Starfield cities. However, Pearce opted to ignore that prompt and set her ship on a straight course to hit the planet of Pluto in the Sol System.
After seven whole hours of straight space flight, of which Pearce spent some away from the game, she made it to Pluto and thus proves that you can indeed fly to planets manually without Fast Travel in Starfield. It’s just going to be a huge waste of time if you do it.
As you can see for yourself below, the closer Pearce gets to Pluto, the less and less it looks like a planet you’ll be able to land on. In fact, the increasingly lowering texture of the planet’s surface actually turns out to be a flat, two-dimensional image of the planet itself.
What does this strange experiment actually prove, though? Well, it proves that Starfield really is as big as it looks – and bigger. However, it also proves that Starfield isn’t No Man’s Sky, once again. We’re really not surprised that Starfield doesn’t load and render the entire planet for you to explore when you arrive in a planet’s orbit, but this does ruin the illusion a little – even if you’re getting closer to a planet than anyone at Bethesda assumed anyone would ever get.
Still, Starfield is so big that it’s like “a bunch of different games” in one and there’s so much to do when you think about all the Starfield characters you can encounter, all the Starfield factions you can join and infiltrate, and then Starfield’s new game plus mode. So, don’t worry about having nothing to do. If you want to spend seven hours flying to a planet, you can, but we wouldn’t recommend it. There’s so many more exciting things to do.
Still looking for more? While a good Starfield wiki can be a handy source of information, our new Starfield Database goes further, offering you daily news, searchable databanks, and even interactive tools.