Starfield’s rain has captivated players after a bizarre photo mode discovery

Starfield is a galaxy-spanning RPG with over 1,000 planets to explore. With a summary like that, you’d think players would be focused on more than the weather but a photo mode capture of how Starfield’s rain works has gamers intrigued.

Starfield is full of strange and wonderful sights and occurrences. Some of them are player-created, some were put there by the developers, and others continue the long Bethesda tradition of happy accidents.

Some of the weirder stuff you could encounter in Starfield are hamburger-shaped spaceships, your own ship being hijacked by Skynet, or your loving parents peer-pressuring you into drug use.

So why in a game with all these potential shenanigans are we talking about the weather? Well, it’s because of a screenshot uploaded to the r/gaming Subreddit that shows off the rain in Starfield involved in some tomfoolery of its own.

In Starfield, rain only exists in a small area around the player.
byu/thelastfastbender ingaming

u/thelastfastbender posted a photo mode capture of how Bethesda chose to implement rain in Starfield. It’s pretty common knowledge that when rain is depicted in video games, it’s concentrated to a very small area in the immediate vicinity of the player.

One user perfectly summarised the design philosophy as: “Why render many rain when few rain do good?” What other developers in the thread pointed out is that usually, the rain effect is locked to the game’s camera.

“All games do this except you’re supposed to attach it to the camera, not the player character,” one user explained. Locking it to the character model creates a Truman Show effect when zoomed out in photo mode.

However, some players in the thread have reported that bugs have caused the rain in Starfield to remain attached to their character. “I have a bug where there’s always rain around my character but only in photo mode,” one user revealed. “I can’t even use it anymore.”

It looks like a similar issue to the one that’s been causing asteroids to follow players’ ships around like pets. In a more extreme example of this sort of bug in Starfield, one player had the entire city of New Atlantis cling to their character.

Interestingly, users in the comments who worked in game development did classify this as a bug and said that Bethesda likely meant for the rain to lock to the camera in photo mode. There’s no telling if or when they’ll fix it but in the meantime, there’s room for some hilarious captures.