Thanks for this. I honestly feel that Bethesda exclusively used 12-year-olds for the games test group, and if they didn't see the flaws, it was good enough for release.
Todd needs to change his tagline from "It just works" to "Meh, good enough".
Hi i was waiting for a mod like this since the release of the game but unfortunately it doesn't work for me its still the same Luna unchanged any suggestions ?
I didn't even consider this until seeing the mod and picture comparisons. I'll give this a try. Any good space / sky textures replacements you use or suggest? I've used a few, including 8k ones, and they all look worse somehow than the vanilla games space, so I keep switching back. I just want space too look more dark and black when on a planet without an atmosphere.
When I landed on the moon my first issue was that it was too grey. The moon is actually light brown not grey. Its covered in 2-4 inches of dust, so its the color of dust. Our dust leaves our atmosphere, space is full of dust (and gas) its not an empty void.
Just check out China's lunar rover pics online to see the true color of the moon. The moon just looks grey from earth because dust is very reflective.
Mars bothers me too, in real life the sky is grey most of the time and sometimes even blue. The pictures Nasa show us are (color corrected) and or taken during sand storms. Mars has red-ish sand because of all the Iron Oxide (rust).
Again check out True Color images of Mars released in the last 2 decades.
Dont forget Nasa is the company that still claims they have no evidence for life... so you really cant trust anything they say or do. They are just a division of the MIC. They've hid more information than they have ever released to the public.
"The color of dust," LOL. Because dust only comes in one color guys. Minerals, plant fibers, animal (and human) dander, all the millions of things that make dust come in a rainbow of colors across the world (and other worlds). My dude, you can literally see the color of moon dust in samples astronauts have brought back. The dust on the Moon didn't float up there from Earth, it's leftover from meteoroids that have smacked into its surface over billions of years, as well as ancient (and possibly current) volcanic activity. You can look up the minerals that make up most of the Moon's surface and check what colors they are, in the absence of atmosphere which would induce oxidation or other changes. (Spoilers, they're mostly, but not all, grey.)
Sure not all moon pics are the same color. There can also be variation based on distance and angle, amount of light, quality of camera...you know, like photos of literally anything. It's not people lying to you, it's just how light (and evolving technology) works. The newest pics (the ones from China) come in both grey and brown. They are taken on the dark side of the Moon and therefore lit in the color of whichever lamp is being used. You can easily see this in the pictures that include the lander. It's all tinted yellow brown by the light. The true color ones are....grey, slightly brown. Exactly (ish) the color you can see in the picture used for this mod. The Starfield original moon texture is also very close to that color, and the surface textures are a mix of grey and light brown, you can see it in the screenshots.
Mars on the other hand, has atmosphere; it's thinner than ours and a different composition but still present. Unlike the Moon it has weather, wind, clouds. It rotates just like Earth, giving it night and day and seasons. So yeah, you are going to get many different colors of sky and tints to the land based on those factors, just like on Earth. Nasa's rover photos have a decent variety, for being constrained to one area, and yes they are hazy and dusty because there's not enough water in Mars' atmosphere for a precipitation cycle that would clear it up. And Starfield's Mars mostly reflects this. If you're an obsessive completionist like me and wander around long enough, you'll see blue skies and grey along with the brown and red.
Anyway that's the science-y bits. (Verified by the incredible research of half an hour of google searches; this ain't a goddam thesis paper.) I'm not gonna touch conspiracy theories about the guv'ment and aliens, because I don't want to find my eyeballs under the couch after they've rolled so hard they fell out of my head.
TLDR; Starfield's Moon is fine. Starfield's Mars is fine. Not amazing, but fine. This mod makes the Moon look much better, download it.
@Tiamat042 thank you for responding to a message that I quite literally didn't have the energy for. I don't know how someone could possibly think the moon is brown, when it literally doesn't even have an atmosphere. Those China rover pics are obviously from the lamp they used, because their other pictures show gray.
Check out this picture of the Yuta-2 taken from its lander. Clearly the ground is GREY. As shown here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutu-2#/media/File:ChangE-4,_Yutu-2_(cropped).png
See here as well: https://english.cas.cn/newsroom/cas_media/202301/t20230128_326516.shtml
Also, not all the photos from the rover itself are brown, some do indeed show grey ground, too.
Wow, something felt off about the Moon and now I know what it was.
This reminds me of Destiny's Moon, in a good way.
Everyone is saying modders won't be able to fix Starfield but seeing what you've done to make me want to visit two locations that were completely generic before... damn.
Great! Do you think you could do something like this for Io? (Jupiter's moon). It doesn't seems like the real Io at all. I was very dissapointed not seeing volcanoes, lava pools, vividly colored landscape... Instead we got a barren lazy copy of the Earth's moon.
You can see more complaints in Reddit about this. It's one of the most outstanding places in the Solar System and yet the game does not make it justice at all. Something should be done with this.
Imagine if Bethesda actually implemented more elliptical orbits that simulate tidal forces to generate accurate volcanic planets like Io to land on. Seeing that in action on your star maps would be just perfect.
....you do know they worked with nasa for this game and all the pictures of the planets are literal pictures nasa took of the planets..... it even says it in the beginning videos....the only ones that arent real are earth and the planets not in the sol system
a) they didn't "work with NASA" - they simply used the data from SVS and GSFC, both of which are freely available in public domain to literally everyone without request and used widely by tons of different media. b) the data in question refers to the Moon texture while in space as well as topographical data for terrain - but not for ground-level textures that this mod deals with (using actual imagery for the entirety of Moon's ground textures would be fuckin insane anyway; best you can do is make it look as close as possible to the real thing using the existing biome system - which Beth obviously half-assed if you compare it to actual images from the surface of the Moon or even low lunar orbit).
22 comments
Todd needs to change his tagline from "It just works" to "Meh, good enough".
I've used a few, including 8k ones, and they all look worse somehow than the vanilla games space, so I keep switching back. I just want space too look more dark and black when on a planet without an atmosphere.
Just check out China's lunar rover pics online to see the true color of the moon.
The moon just looks grey from earth because dust is very reflective.
Mars bothers me too, in real life the sky is grey most of the time and sometimes even blue. The pictures Nasa show us are (color corrected) and or taken during sand storms. Mars has red-ish sand because of all the Iron Oxide (rust).
Again check out True Color images of Mars released in the last 2 decades.
Dont forget Nasa is the company that still claims they have no evidence for life... so you really cant trust anything they say or do. They are just a division of the MIC. They've hid more information than they have ever released to the public.
Such a long winded way just to let the world know you like to wear tin foil hats.
Sure not all moon pics are the same color. There can also be variation based on distance and angle, amount of light, quality of camera...you know, like photos of literally anything. It's not people lying to you, it's just how light (and evolving technology) works. The newest pics (the ones from China) come in both grey and brown. They are taken on the dark side of the Moon and therefore lit in the color of whichever lamp is being used. You can easily see this in the pictures that include the lander. It's all tinted yellow brown by the light. The true color ones are....grey, slightly brown. Exactly (ish) the color you can see in the picture used for this mod. The Starfield original moon texture is also very close to that color, and the surface textures are a mix of grey and light brown, you can see it in the screenshots.
Mars on the other hand, has atmosphere; it's thinner than ours and a different composition but still present. Unlike the Moon it has weather, wind, clouds. It rotates just like Earth, giving it night and day and seasons. So yeah, you are going to get many different colors of sky and tints to the land based on those factors, just like on Earth. Nasa's rover photos have a decent variety, for being constrained to one area, and yes they are hazy and dusty because there's not enough water in Mars' atmosphere for a precipitation cycle that would clear it up. And Starfield's Mars mostly reflects this. If you're an obsessive completionist like me and wander around long enough, you'll see blue skies and grey along with the brown and red.
Anyway that's the science-y bits. (Verified by the incredible research of half an hour of google searches; this ain't a goddam thesis paper.) I'm not gonna touch conspiracy theories about the guv'ment and aliens, because I don't want to find my eyeballs under the couch after they've rolled so hard they fell out of my head.
TLDR; Starfield's Moon is fine. Starfield's Mars is fine. Not amazing, but fine. This mod makes the Moon look much better, download it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutu-2#/media/File:ChangE-4,_Yutu-2_(cropped).png
See here as well:
https://english.cas.cn/newsroom/cas_media/202301/t20230128_326516.shtml
Also, not all the photos from the rover itself are brown, some do indeed show grey ground, too.
This reminds me of Destiny's Moon, in a good way.
Everyone is saying modders won't be able to fix Starfield but seeing what you've done to make me want to visit two locations that were completely generic before... damn.
(i would suggest Gas giants that are a colour different than orange.)
You can see more complaints in Reddit about this. It's one of the most outstanding places in the Solar System and yet the game does not make it justice at all. Something should be done with this.
Glad to see the mod author doing Io next though!
b) the data in question refers to the Moon texture while in space as well as topographical data for terrain - but not for ground-level textures that this mod deals with (using actual imagery for the entirety of Moon's ground textures would be fuckin insane anyway; best you can do is make it look as close as possible to the real thing using the existing biome system - which Beth obviously half-assed if you compare it to actual images from the surface of the Moon or even low lunar orbit).