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Slowly but certainly, Bethesda's Starfield has been inching closer and closer to taking up its rightful position as the premier space exploration game on PC. The prior patches and rudimentary player mods ensured that there's much to enjoy already, but there's way, way more on the horizon, as it turns out.
Notably, Starfield is about to receive its biggest, most meaningful content update yet. Billed simply as the 'May Update', this build of the game delivers must-have improvements in critical areas of the game. Most notably in ship customization, gameplay difficulty, and overworld exploration, making the whole package that much more engaging to play.
The best part, though, is that even though Starfield's May Update is coming out around mid-May, you can play it already if you follow your handy guide! So, let's get to it.
READ MORE: 10 Things You Should Not Do When Starting Starfield
How to access the Starfield May Update Beta?
Starfield's humongous May update is currently available on Steam in its beta form. Obviously, it's not the perfectly stable version of the game, and you shouldn't sign up for it if you're already loaded up on mods and whatnot. However, having spent about a dozen hours playing it, we can vouch for its stability. Heck, it even works with some of the simpler mods, such as weapon retextures!
If you'd like to give Starfield's biggest content update yet a shot before its May 15 release date, here's how to do so:
- Right-click Starfield in Steam, select the 'Properties' option from the menu
- Open the 'Betas' menu on the rightmost side of the newly opened 'Properties' UI
- At the top of the UI, check the 'Beta Participation' section; choose the 'beta - Beta' option
- Allow Starfield to update and re-verify its game files
And that about does it! Easy and fast, what do you know? This will set you up with the preview build of the May update, and when the stable version comes out, simply opt out of the beta build by retracing the steps outlined above.
Play Starfield with 2Game's discount today!
Starfield's Biggest Update Yet: May Patch Overview
If we're being honest, all of Starfield's content updates up until now have been somewhat disappointing in the grand scheme of things. Bethesda is, of course, not known for adding major new features with regular patches, but Starfield needed a fair few improvements on day one, and the community has been eagerly anticipating some movement in this regard.
Now, finally, that movement has arrived, as the May update delivers some of the biggest improvements to a mainline Bethesda RPG we've seen yet. It's a big, chunky update and we cannot hope to go over all of its patch notes, but the most important tidbits lie in those three areas we mentioned above, and we'll explain what they're all about in their respective sections.
Overworld Map Improvements
First things first, we cannot believe what an immense improvement the new local planetary maps are, compared to the old ones. Local maps have never been Bethesda's strong suit, of course, but in Starfield they were night-unusable in most situations, and players were rightly unhappy with them.
The new system, though? Well, we'll be darned if this isn't one of the best map systems in any game out there. Incredibly detailed and fully interactive, Starfield's new maps are essentially full 3D miniatures of the actual playing field. They're so detailed, in fact, that they even miniaturize your bases and ships down to their tiniest details!
Useful stuff, too, as you can now far more easily find your way around the planets, cities, and dungeons in Starfield, no matter where you are. This is an immense quality-of-life improvement that we simply did not see coming.
Ship Customization Improvements
Starfield's ship builder system has been amazing from day one onwards, yes, but the interior customization has been wanting. With the May update, however, Starfield allows you not only to customize your ship's interior with all the furniture found in the game's powerful Outpost builder, but there's a huge array of new "empty" ship habs to choose from, in case you don't like the clutter of the baseline habitat modules and want to build your own.
It gets better, though: as long as you don't actually delete a hab you've customized, all of the items and customizations you made to it stick around even after you've moved the hab in the ship builder. This makes it so much easier to retain customizations and keep working on your ship, and should make the whole thing feel far more homely.
So, whether you want to plop down a few simple weapon racks or build out a full forward operating base in your vessel, Starfield now lets you do precisely that.
Game Difficulty Improvements
Arguably, the meat of the May update lies in its phenomenal difficulty tweaking features. As exciting as the improvements outlined above might be, this is the bit that really makes the game more engaging to play on top of allowing you to fine-tune every aspect of its difficulty model.
Starfield's May update introduces almost twenty new difficulty tweaks ranging from granular combat damage sliders to sustenance buffs/debuffs, allowing each and every player to make the game precisely as easy or difficult as they want it to be. Your reward for making things harder? Way more XP!
This is just one step away from being a veritable Survival Mode that we've been asking for since day one, and it is positively game-changing in practice. We highly recommend going through these and setting things up just right as soon as you can, as the effects stack and they tie the game together in a really delightful way.
The Starfield Awaits!
All in all, then, Starfield is being massively improved thanks to Bethesda's continued support. And, really, this is just the start. We already know that driveable vehicles are coming sometime before the end of 2024, likely alongside the hotly anticipated Shattered Space expansion, which is due to launch this Fall.
Bethesda's recent developer vlog also confirms something we've long suspected: that the Creation Kit toolset is already in some mod creators' hands, the goal for its eventual release being that Starfield will have many officially sanctioned mods on day one. It's a thoroughly exciting prospect, and we can't wait to see what comes of that.
Do stay tuned, then. We'll have more Starfield content coming your way as Bethesda pushes for more updates and important milestones, and they're bound to be coming in every few weeks or so.
Get in the Game ! 
