Summary
OneStarfieldplayer discovered that shooting enemies outdoors can sometimes make them reach the escape velocity of a given celestial body, or at the very least appear to do so in a highly amusing fashion. Their discovery adds to the growing list ofhilarious shenanigans thatStarfieldplayers have been up tosince the game reached early access at the beginning of September.
WhileStarfield’shundreds of planetsand moons are modeled realistically so that each of them has its own mass, diameter, and resulting gravity, escape velocity isn’t actually a part of the game’s underlying calculations. For clarity, that physics term refers to the initial speed that an object needs to reach to escape the gravity of any given body by virtue of inertia.
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Yet one fan recently stumbled upon a peculiar interaction that allowsStarfieldplayersto seemingly propel enemies into outer space. Doing so is as simple as aiming the killing shot at their jetpack, which can trigger a scripted sequence that sees the device malfunction, launching them into an erratic spiral. Alternatively, it turns out that the same animation can also send enemies flying into outer space before vanishing, similar to how Team Rocket tends to disappear when blasted off in thePokemonanime, minus the sparkle. The first known evidence of one such humorous incident was shared by Reddit user AndrewEffteeyay.
While it’s intuitive to assume that this unusual interaction is only possible in low-gravity environments, that is actually not the case. Namely, AndrewEffteeyay’s footage was clearly taken on Procyon III-a, the sole habited planet in the Procyon binary star system, which has an in-game gravity of 1.07g, or 7% more than Earth. Naively assuming it has the same diameter as that of humanity’s home planet, its escape velocity would amount to 11.984 km/s, or roughly 7.45 miles per second, a ludicrous speed that this unfortunate enemy clearly did not reach.
Combined with the fact that there’s been no indication of escape velocity being coded into the game, it would appear that this unexpected death animation is not an actual feature, but merely one ofStarfield’sphysics bugs. Entertaining glitches of this sort are nowadays synonymous with Bethesda games, with the developer’s fans largely accepting them with endearment instead of frustration, as underlined by the reactions to this newly surfaced incident.
The seemingly buggedStarfielddeath animation can also be highly amusing to trigger indoors; shooting an enemy’s jetpack can cause them to crash into the ceiling, leaving them hanging by their heads, which is by design.
Starfieldis available now on PC and Xbox Series X/S.
