Summary

• Starfield's exploration lacks variety due to cookie-cutter planets with repetitive points of interest and lackluster space travel.
• Players discovered the unique planet Tirna II with a lava biome, offering a visually distinct experience in the game.
• Starfield's deliberate procedural generation choice provides quantity over quality, making truly unique planets rare but surprising.

Starfield's aliens lack personality, its points of interest are repetitive, and its space travel is overall lackluster.

That all amounts to a major problem for Starfield, and many players ascribe their eventual burnout, in no small part, to the diminishing returns of sustained space exploration. Still, there may be some worthwhile planets out there yet - they're just few and far between, and it might take players a while to find them. But whether the sights they see, and the rewards they discover when they finally get there, are worth it is another question entirely.

Starfield Players Have Discovered A Unique Lava Planet

Tirna II Offers Unique Biomes & Hazards

Starfield player jCrizzwald has discovered a lake of lava on the planet Tirna II, creating a sight unlike anything seen elsewhere in the game. The lava lake appears to be located near a point of interest - a small base consisting of a single structure and a few stacks of crates. Appropriately, it's within a larger biome of dark, seemingly igneous rock, and there doesn't appear to be much plant life in the area save a single tree that appears in the corner of the video.

This is a truly unique area, and one that, as many players profess in the comments, appears to be pretty rare. Some didn't even know such a thing was possible, and haven't seen lava elsewhere in-game. But the lava isn't just a cool visual effect; it also creates an additional problem for the player to solve. The point of interest they may want to reach is right in the middle of the lava lake, so they'll have to jump or jetpack around it to explore the area.

All that makes Tirna II a sight to behold, and a potentially memorable moment in a player's Starfield journey. That's exactly the problem, though: that this slightly different area makes Tirna II entirely unique means Starfield players are starved for any hint of originality. It's not the entire planet that's like this, but just one small area. It poses a unique challenge, but it only lasts a couple of minutes. It's out there somewhere, but most Starfield players will never discover it. That's a bit of a shame, but Tirna II isn't the only interesting planet out there.

Starfield Has Other Unique Planets, But They're Few & Far Between

Why Starfield Needs More Planets Like Tirna II

It's not just Tirna II - Starfield does have a number of unique planets that are markedly different from anything else in the game. Still, those planets may be too few and too far between to justify the amount of exploration it takes to find them. For example, there's Muphrid I, a desert planet with purple-hued sand. The pink trees of Heinlein IV-b are quite a sight, as are the lush forests of Bardeen V-c. Nemeria IV-a boasts beautiful, tropical beaches, while Schrödinger III is home to swathes of deadly beasts.

But those are only five planets out of a thousand, only half a percent of the entire explorable area of Starfield. It could easily take players hundreds of hours to find and explore just one of these planets, not to mention all of them. In between, they'll inevitably land on hundreds of less interesting planets, each one cut from the same mold as the last.

Why Starfield's Coolest Planets Are So Hard To Find

Procedural Generation & Open-World Exploration

Ultimately, the lack of interesting planets in Starfield is a deliberate decision in game design. Most of Starfield's planets are procedurally generated, made by a machine with set parameters instead of by hand. That's why so many of them are similar; they're literally made from the same set of options. While there's some variation in of points of interest, flora density, and species distribution, the overwhelming majority of their features can be easily found on hundreds of other worlds.

But in its current state, Starfield couldn't exist without procedural generation. 1,000 planets would take an impossibly long time to design by hand. A smaller number of more detailed planets would, of course, be possible, creating something akin to Mass Effect. But the resulting game would be a lot shorter, and the galaxy would feel much smaller as a result. Starfield instead strives to create a world that's more immersive in scope, but less engaging in variety.

And while there's something to be said for a hypothetical universe of handcrafted planets, each one of which has some incredible discovery on it, that kind of spectacle would get old before long. Exploring an entire galaxy needs to have highs as well as lows; the coolest planets in Starfield wouldn't be as memorable without the more boring ones to balance them out.

Still, the number of truly unique planets in Starfield seems relatively low. The list above certainly isn't exhaustive, but players who have invested hundreds of hours in the game should probably know that a lava biome exists. But on the other hand, the fact that Starfield still has the ability to surprise its most devoted players is impressive in its own right. In that way, it truly does feel like the player is exploring uncharted worlds from time to time.

In short, Starfield opted for quantity over quality - 1,000 procedurally generated planets instead of ten hand-designed ones. Whether that's a positive or negative depends on the individual player. It provides more content to wade through, but means that most of it doesn't even come close to its most interesting parts. Places like Tirna II do exist, and they can be welcome surprises when they do appear. But Starfield feels like a bigger galaxy - if, at times, a more repetitive one - as a result of its procedurally generated planets.

Source: jCrizzwald/Reddit