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As far as open-world games go, the sheer scope of Starfield‘s map can be difficult to quantify. With so many planets and solar systems to explore, Starfield sometimes feels more like a group of connected levels rather than one continuous map. That said, in terms of explorable surface area, Starfield‘s map easily surpasses every Bethesda RPG we have seen. Finding an exact surface area or measurement to compare isn’t easy, of course. With so many barriers, like limited areas and the vast number of planets, measuring Starfield‘s map size is a near-impossible task. However, with a little math and hard work, here’s our best effort at defining Starfield‘s biggest map and open world size.
Measuring Starfield’s Biggest Open World Map
A few obstacles are blocking our progress in measuring Starfield’s biggest map. Mainly, each planet only allows you to travel a set distance from your initial landing site. After traveling around two miles from your starting location, the game will force you to move and land again. From our experimentation, we reached around 2.5 miles away from the landing site. If this is our radius, on average, that gives us about 19.408 square miles to explore throughout. Walking this distance takes around 20-25 mins, especially since Starfield doesn’t include any special mounts or land vehicles. This involves simply walking from one end to the other, meaning casual exploration should take longer.
Second, Starfield’s biggest maps use procedural generation to bring the game to life. This makes most planets an odd combination of both handmade and generated content. When combined with the set zones you can explore, this mechanic makes each planet tricky to define. Luckily, it should be possible to compare these segmented maps individually to maps in games like Fallout 4 and Skyrim. Finally, with over 1,000 planets, it’s hard to pin down a common trend between them. However, to try and minimize this, we will take a look at a standard planet, Jemison, to get a good size baseline value.
How Big Is Starfield’s Map?
First, since it’s impossible to walk through and measure each planet in Starfield’s map at this point, we are going to take a look at one of the first planets you visit, Jemison. As many people know, this planet functions as a main base for Constellation and the city of New Atlantis. Landing on New Atlantis and traveling the radius of our explorable map by walking straight south, we discovered the distance to be around 3.5 miles. This equated to approximately 13 minutes of walking. When traveling north, we only made it about 1.8 miles with 10 minutes of walking, giving us a diameter of 5.3 miles for our explorable area. Compared to the average, this zone is quite a bit larger.
Starfield Map Size vs. Skyrim & Fallout 4
A diameter of 5.3 miles gives us a surface area of 22.428 square miles. Comparing this to a game like Skyrim, which has a surface area of around 14 square miles, it’s easy to see just how massive Starfield is. Additionally, although Skyrim takes a little more time to walk through, starting at 30 minutes, the travel time through one bigger Starfield map is comparable to the older Bethesda RPGs. Looking at the slightly larger Fallout 4, the 16 square miles of the post-apocalyptic world you can explore is still dwarfed by Starfield. Though, because it is flatter than Skyrim, it only takes 10-15 minutes to traverse. One Starfield map, on its own, is comparable to the complete maps of other games. With multiple landing sites per planet and a nearly countless number of worlds to explore, Starfield‘s map is the biggest Bethesda map by far.
However, this has its own disadvantages. Although massive in size, Starfield‘s biggest maps are rather empty. Much of the time we spent walking to measure the map, there was very little engageable content to take part in. We’d probably take fewer planets for more dense and engaging open-world maps, even if Starfield does a good job of capturing the boundless expanses of space by offering so many areas to visit.
Hopefully, this article has given you a rough overview of how large Starfield’s biggest map size is compared to other Bethesda games. Of course, it’s rather tricky to give an exact value, and the surface area of every planet combined should far surpass 22,428 square miles. Still, it’s fair to say that each of the game’s planets is roughly equivalent to other popular open-world games purely in terms of geographical scale.
