Two months on from the release of Starfield, players are still waiting for Bethesda to address the numerous bugs which are present. But there's a whole other group of players out there taking matters into their own hands - the team behind the Starfield Community Patch, an ambitious and surprisingly professional taskforce trying to fix the game themselves. The project came under the spotlight about a month before Starfield released. It was wild to think that a group of modders could already be working on a mod for Starfield before it had even released, but there they were - anticipating the Bethesda jank fans have come to expect.
The SCP's goal is to improve the vanilla experience of Starfield for players by fixing everything from major bugs to spelling errors, so long as it presents some sort of issue for players of the base game. The scope of the patch doesn't include new content, balance changes (outside of correcting obvious errors), or anything which doesn't fit with Bethesda's original vision for the game.
I spoke to Timothy "Halgari" Baldridge, one of the founders of the SCP, to find out why the team came together to, in essence, do Bethesda's work for them, and ask whether they've ever had any contact with Bethesda. I came away from our chat with a deeper appreciation for the project, which is more than just a simple effort to improve the experience of Starfield. It's a collaborative effort between several modders and players to create a truly community-owned, open-source project, with standard practices of software development in place.