Starfield map

The Starfield galaxy map is going to be huge. We've rounded up developer comments and fan speculation to answer the question: how big is Starfield?

If there’s one thing we know about Starfield, it’s that the game is shaping up to be huge. With more than 1,000 planets to explore, and a vast galaxy to traverse from the comfort of your ship, you’re going to need a Starfield map in order to stay on course.

Fortunately, Starfield’s developers have already let slip a lot of details about the galaxy map that you’re going to be exploring, including some pretty interesting hints that suggest an answer to the question: how big is Starfield? Whether you’re looking to explore an early prototype of the Starfield map or you’re looking for more detail on just how densely detailed Starfield’s planets are likely to be, read on for more.

Starfield map size

One thing is for certain: the Starfield galaxy map is going to be big. Speaking in interviews, Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard has already confirmed that the list of Starfield locations will include more than 100 star systems to explore and more than 1,000 planets to land upon. While it’s hard to make direct comparisons, those numbers alone suggest a gameworld that’s many, many times larger than anything we’ve seen from The Elder Scrolls or Fallout series.

Let’s look at The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, as an example. The world of Skyrim was huge – particularly back in 2011, when the game launched. The map you explored as the Dragonborn was about 15 square miles, and it would take the average player roughly three hours to run from end-to-end of Skyrim’s world.

By comparison, footage from Starfield trailers shows objective markers on the moon of Vectera that are displayed as 1153 meters (or roughly 0.7 miles) away according to Starfield’s UI. This suggests that Vectera is likely to be several square miles in size. And given that Starfield planets are likely to be a fair bit larger than moons, it seems safe to say that your average explorable planet would take hours of exploration to traverse on foot. Now, consider the fact that the Starfield map features more than 1,000 planets and you start to get some sense of just how vast this game is.

How big is Starfield?

Given how big the Starfield game map is likely to be, you might wonder how much detail the game’s developers are going to be able to cram into all those Starfield locations. One tool that’s helping them achieve the scale of Starfield’s map size is procedural generation. In other words, the developers are making use of procedural systems to generate planet landscapes automatically.

If all that sounds like a recipe for dull, lifeless worlds, you don’t need to worry. The game’s director, Todd Howard, has explained in interviews that procedural generation was also a big part of the studio’s previous games, including Skyrim. Crucially, the developers don’t just let the automated systems do all the work – they go in and hand-build locations on top of the procedural creations. The result is a game map with tremendous scale as well as intricate detail.

“I should also add that we have done more handcrafting in this game, content-wise, than any game we’ve done,” Howard told IGN. “We’re [at] over 200,000 lines of dialogue, so we still do a lot of handcrafting and if people just want to do what they’re used to in our games, and follow a main quest, and do the questlines, you’re gonna see what you’d kind of expect from us. But then you have this whole other part of, ‘Well I’m just going to wander this planet, and it’s going to provide some gameplay, and some random content, and those kinds of things.’ Kind of like a Daggerfall would, if you go way back.”

Starfield galaxy map

If you simply can’t wait for the Starfield release date and are desperate to explore the Starfield galaxy map right now, the Starfield Reddit has you covered. Reddit user i_need_a_fast_horse studied the various Starfield gameplay videos and trailers and attempted to reverse-engineer the Starfield map before sharing his creation in an impressive Reddit post.

Their galaxy map includes 75 stars, and while it’s too soon to say how closely it will resemble the final Starfield star map, their calculations suggest that the distances between stars in-game will closely resemble real-life astrological positions.