Highlights
- Starfield's procedural generation allows for endless possibilities of content and exploration on different planets, making each playthrough unique.
- The level scaling in Starfield becomes more challenging as players venture further east in the Settled Systems, providing increased difficulty in gameplay.
- An interactive star map created by the game's community helps players navigate the galaxy, understand level scaling, and locate specific resources for building outposts in strategic locations.
The Settled Systems in Starfield make for a huge setting, but thankfully the game's burgeoning community has created a helpful map which shows all the star systems that players can visit. While opinions on Starfield's space exploration and travel have been conflicting, its procedural generation has been an impressive design feat – being able to spit out content for Starfield players on any planet of their choosing (provided it's not a gas giant).
Though Starfield offers prebuilt zones such as New Atlantis or Cydonia, what sets it apart from the standard Bethesda sandbox is that the wilderness itself is largely random. The galaxy map, and thus space travel, is essentially a bridge that connects different randomized seeds across several hundred Starfield planets. In theory, this provides near-limitless re-playability across multiple Starfield playthroughs, but in practice, the jury is still out. Contrary to previous Bethesda titles such as Skyrim, the level scaling in Starfield is less favorable towards the player, as the further east they go in the Settled Systems, the higher the level of content they'll come across.
To that end, Matt Hook from HardcoreGamer shared the website's star map for the Settled Systems on the official subreddit for Starfield. All 120 playable star systems are displayed on the map, color-coded by their level scaling so that players can know which corners of the galaxy to avoid. However, as outlined in the post itself, HardcoreGamer's database also has individual information on every planet and every moon in Starfield, as well as a breakdown of where players can find a specific resource in the game such as Argon, Chlorine, Lead, or Neon.
Starfield Star System Map
Of course, the real benefit to having a map like this isn't just for the purposes of adventuring. It's generally recommended to create an outpost in Starfield as early as possible, and a detailed star map with resource filters should players decide the perfect location on where to plant an outpost beacon. In many ways, Starfield is an evolution of Fallout 4's settlement system and gunplay, and it's obvious to players that this is where the game received plenty of love during development. Many Starfield fans have praised its combat, and many more have become obsessed with its ship builder.
Though the Creation Kit is no doubt poised to open up the game's features even more, Starfield already has some amazing mods that enhance the baseline experience. Given Bethesda's statements that modders will be able to create custom planets from scratch, the already huge setting of the Settled Systems could get even bigger in the months to come.
Starfield is available now on PC and Xbox Series X/S.