Can you fly into planets in Starfield?

Aden Carter

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Do you want to fly directly into a planet in Starfield? How about at least landing without the need for a loading screen? Bethesda games typically have a focus on exploration. Games like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim allow you to explore vast landmasses. Starfield isn’t much different.

In Starfield, you will use a spaceship to explore the universe similar to No Man’s Sky. There are multiple galaxies to comb through and many planets to wander. With so many star systems in the game, it makes you wonder if you can fly directly into planets or if it is all loading screens.

In No Man’s Sky, you can go straight through a planet’s atmosphere to land your spacecraft. In Starfield, you can navigate asteroid fields and explore planets, though there is talk about invisible walls. With all the travel, can you fly into planets in Starfield?

Does Starfield have atmospheric flight?

Nope. Unfortunately, Starfield doesn’t allow players to fly from a planet’s surface to space and vice-versa. Instead, all of that is handled via loading screens. Thankfully, those loading screens shouldn’t take very long thanks to the power of the Xbox Series X/S and modern gaming PCs.

Todd Howard from Bethesda confirmed this during an interview with IGN where he said, “We decided early in the project that the on-surface is one reality, and then when you’re in space it’s another reality.”

This decision is probably for the best as it can be difficult to have seamless flight with how many planets are in the game. Adding something like atmospheric flight might hinder the gameplay experience and ultimately end up hurting Starfield instead of helping it.

Instead, there are plenty of other features that you can use throughout the game like building space stations and interacting with the many NPCs that exist throughout the various cities and towns on the different planets.