New ‘Starfield’ Patch Secretly Adds Some Pretty Cool Things

While Bethesda promised its new Starfield patch, currently in beta, would contain a few “surprises,” early testers are now finding out exactly what some of those are. And they are, indeed, pretty neat.

The main unlisted addition that players have discovered is a host of new options for decoration in bases, and now ships as well, given that you can use outpost decorations there as well. Reportedly a couple dozen new items were added to the collection, broadening options and echoing past games like Fallout 4 and 76 which have added more base-building options in time. I’m impressed they didn’t list these as a bonus in the patch, and just waited for them to be discovered.

Mills Builds has a good showcase of the items here if you wanted to take a look, and I’ll list out what there is after that:

• 8 new chairs
• 2 new beds
• 5 new desks
• 7 new framed paintings
• 1 new rug
• 1 new hanging tapestry
• 1 set of numbers and letters
• 2-3 new planters

So that’s pretty cool. I was disappointed there weren’t more base or especially ship-building options with larger pieces, but I assume those will in fact be coming later on, given that they are determined to add more to building over time, which is not a huge surprise.

Past that, while this may not be a “secret,” per se, players are discovering some interesting things about the new maps in the game, that they are actually more detailed than they appear to be. As it turns out, the open world maps show:

• Individual pieces of your base, not just an icon for it.
• Exact layouts of POIs in the distance so you can see in more detail what kind of place you’re heading toward. Includes buildings and geological features.
• The map shows ships on the map, not just your own, but the others that land nearby or at POIs, with enough detail to see what kind of ship they are and if they’re worth pursuing to potentially hijack.

Again, none of this was really explained or shown off in the patch preview, so it’s a lot of cool detail that’s actually quite a bit better than many aspects of open world maps in other games. I can now understand more why it took so long for these to arrive. Again, a thing that would have been ideal to have at launch, but here we are.

These are probably not the last secrets, and maybe more will go in after the beta is over. Look for its official launch in the middle of the month.

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