Pre-Starfield Shattered Space update finally fixes EM damage

Just two weeks before Starfield Shattered Space kicks off on Monday, September 30, 2024, Bethesda have released the next Starfield update to Steam Beta. Along with a number of Starfield vehicle fixes, this update fixes two crucial elements: electromagnetic (EM) damage, and a fan-requested ship building feature which was originally a bug.

Ever since Starfield launched, EM damage has counterintuitively been useless against mechanical opponents, including Robots and Turrets. Despite electromagnetic forces wreaking havoc on electrical systems in the real world, it appears that a Starfield bug was preventing the same phenomenon from appearing in Starfield. Fortunately, the 1.14.68 Starfield update fixes this oversight, which ironically doesn’t apply to the other major change bundled with this update: ship building. 

If you aren’t the most familiar with Starfield ship building, all you need to know is that ship components cannot overlap when you’re installing them onto your ship. However, for a very long time you could overcome this overlap by flipping the part, moving the part to the area you plan to install it on, and then flipping it back. This would force the part into the joint, and allow players to overcome the collision issues. 

What this allowed players to do was build unique ships in a way Bethesda hadn’t intended. Unfortunately for those players, Bethesda patched the bug, and invalidated ship build changes which utilised what was known as the “Flip Merge” bug. What ensued was a public outcry for the patch to be reversed, and for the bug to be reinstated.

Though it may have started as a bug, it seems Bethesda is more than open to the ones that players love, and so Bethesda decided to officially restore the “Flip Merge” behavior via an optional toggle in the Starfield settings. 

The experimental update is up on the Steam Beta branch as of Tuesday, September 17, 2024, allowing PC players to opt into the Starfield Steam Beta branch and test out the latest changes before there is a wider deployment to consoles and other PC players. 

Of course, this patch also introduced a huge number of fixes for quests, audio, textures, and you can read the full details on the official Bethesda announcement.

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