Starfield pilot proves fast travel isn’t needed after 7 hour flight to Pluto
Alanah Pearce | TwitchVideo game writer and content creator Alanah Pearce set out to prove that it’s possible to travel from planet to planet without fast travel, leading her to fly for 7 hours straight before she ultimately arrived on Pluto.
The universe of Starfield is vast, with many secrets just waiting to be discovered by players. People have already been hard at work when it comes to fully exploring the map.
However, many players have had gripes when it comes to the way traversal works. Even though some have discovered it’s possible to fast travel without seeing a menu, players are still saddened by Starfield’s reliance on the mechanic to get from place to place.
Thus, video game writer and content creator Alanah Pearce hatched a plan to see whether or not fast travel is really needed to reach planets. After traveling to Pluto, she set a course for the planet and flew in a straight line for roughly 7 hours to find out if it’s really possible to make landfall.
Alanah Pearce proves you don’t need fast travel in Starfield
Pearce knew that the process of flying toward a planet and traversing thousands of kilometers would take a long, long time. So, she instead started streaming right before bed and turned it into an experiment.
After plotting a course, she went to bed and let her ship fly. Though she had to get up and find a fix for her controller automatically turning off, the voyage took around 7 hours overall until she reached her destination.
And, while she did technically get there, she wasn’t exactly able to land and walk around.
Pluto began to look less and less like a planet as she got closer, with the texture that represents it losing resolution as she got closer than the developers would have ever intended.
Once she reached the planet itself, she phased right through it. In the blink of an eye, it looked like she was back in open space again.
A bit of a disappointing end to her lengthy journey, but it at least proves that flying to a planet is possible. It also proved that combat arenas put players right in the solar system rather than a small play area that creates an illusory skybox to fool players.
Alanah left her ship on a course directly toward the sun for another 5 hours, only to come back and find out she didn’t even move a noticeable amount on the map. Starfield’s universe really is that large, and it goes to show how big the game is. Even if a lot of that space is empty.
While it isn’t yet possible to fly directly to a planet and land on it, who knows what’ll happen when modders get to work on changing the game?