Just saw some comments on the xEdit Discord this morning from ElminsterAU, the primary dev for the project. He’s been backwards-engineering Starfield since it came out, tweaking his project to make it work for Starfield. This is important because, as soon as he does, (safe) plugin-based mods become possible, opening up the floodgates for a whole new class of Starfield mods. Only, in its current state, he’s not sure he can make it work. Or, for that matter, that the CK due from BGS “early next year” can make it work, either.
The image I’ve posted is a collection of carefully selected snippets of a much larger discussion, with all the supporting info being excluded for brevity. This is “headline reporting” at its worst, so I encourage anyone tracking this topic to go to the Discord and dive deeper.
Maybe he’s having a bad morning after spending all night attempting to decipher undocumented code that is, literally, legacy built upon legacy built upon even older legacy. But if it’s really this bad, then the modding scene for Starfield is going to have a much harder time getting started than is currently being anticipated.
I think the key point to take from this is that mod object space is a complete mess and the reason why xEdit has not yet been released is not that it doesn’t work yet, but that it can’t be made to work with the game in its current state.
And, yes, mods are making progress, even with things as they currently stand. But these are generally just texture replacers, command infusion, and configuration tweaks. Nothing is being added. For that to happen, we need these object space issues to be addressed.
Starfield has, what, 1000 planets, and each time you land the engine basically auto-generates a new approx. Skyrim-sized worldspace. The reference system has to have departed significantly from previous games for it to work. Even Skyrim was gently pushing the limits of how many objects can be referenced with the 8-digit refID (roughly 16 billion entries per .esp for all world objects, NPC-s, weapons, armor, outfits, consumables, spells, magic effects, markers, helpers etc etc since absolutely everything has to have a refID).
Of course Starfield is a mess coming from the simple refID scheme of the older games. The reference system in SF must be some sort of convoluted hierarchical system to be able to place probably hundreds of billions of objects over 1000 planets and retain persistency. It won’t be easy to reverse engineer.
Since you posted to this old thread, let me share the latest: As of this morning, ElmisterAU has released the RC of xEdit for Starfield. The caveat is that he isn’t sure how forward compatible it will end up being. That said, we’re already seeing mods built with it hitting the Nexus. Took less than 3 hours.