Starfield Free Lanes update isn't "Starfield 2.0" but greatly improves the game

Free Lanes will be available on April 7, alongside PS5 version and new story expansion

Bethesda Game Studios announced Tuesday that Starfield is coming to PlayStation 5 on April 7, alongside a major story expansion and a price drop. But the most significant change to Bethesda’s space-faring RPG is the (free) Free Lanes update, which Bethesda says is Starfield's "biggest update since launch."

Free Lanes, which also rolls out on April 7 alongside all that other stuff, effectively adds everything Starfield players have requested since 2023. Polygon recently sat in on a hands-off preview showing the extent of the update, where Starfield lead creative producer Tim Lamb meticulously walked through everything Free Lanes will tweak about the game. At a glance, here are the most notable changes and additions:

• A space station that serves as a home base
• A Milliwhale pet for your outposts
• A new land vehicle, the Moon Jumper
• Fast travel improvements
• New party members to recruit, including old human NPC Maria Hughes and new robot NPC Model G
• Sweeping changes to the crafting system(s), including new resource X-Tech and revamped old resource Quantum Essence
• A “cruise mode” that allows you to fly between planets in real time

Reiterating that last one because of how big a deal it is:

• A “cruise mode” that allows you to fly between planets in real time

“I mean, I wouldn’t call it [Starfield] 2.0,” Lamb said. “There’s a certain sort of narrative baked into what that would mean. I think we've looked at a number of systems where we had interest, or where we had heard things from the community, and we tried to level up a number of different systems.”

Since launch, one of the major critiques players have directed at Starfield is that, for a game about exploring the vastness of space, it felt small. Most travel was relegated to layers of menus, and the fact you couldn’t pilot your ship from one planet to another shattered the immersion of being an interstellar captain.

Free Lanes finally addresses that line of critique. It’s the “if you can see that mountain, you can walk to it” from Skyrim, except with planets. While in a star system, you can select a planet to head to, and fly your ship there in real time. (Your spacecraft accelerates to a speed that streamlines interplanetary travel.) You can set your ship on autopilot, walk around it as you normally would — crafting, talking to crew members, appreciating sandwiches — as your ship heads to its destination. When traveling between planets, you can also come across random anomalies like asteroid fields or wrecked ships. Exploring these locations can grant rare loot, including X-Tech, a resource new to Starfield with the Free Lanes update.

If crafting is the sort of thing you come to Starfield for, X-Tech adds another layer of depth to the system. X-Tech, which Lamb said “will start to appear in different places around dungeons, mostly in boss chests,” can be used to customize your ship’s attributes (like shield strength and weapon power) and to tailor your weapon’s perks. With Free Lanes, you’ll be able to add up to four ranks of legendary modifiers to your weapons. You can reroll each perk, and after five rerolls, you can just pick whichever attribute you want. Lamb demonstrated this in real time, eventually choosing to customize an equipped SMG so it fired explosive rounds with an extended clip and increased fire rate, augmented by a perk that occasionally tripled his clip size.

Bethesda is also taking steps to make loot more permanent by expanding the usefulness of the Quantum Essence resource. The Free Lanes update will allow you to bring items through the Unity — the endgame event that time-loops Starfield’s main story and resets much of your progress — through something called the Quantum Entanglement Device. So, if you end up with an SMG that shoots unlimited rockets, you can store it in the Quantum Entanglement Device, meaning you no longer have to part with your hard-earned loot to experience the cyclical nature of Starfield’s narrative. (You can use Quantum Essence to upgrade the chest’s capacity for a maximum of 200 items.)

On a similar note, Quantum Essence will also be able to upgrade your Starborn powers directly from the powers menu — meaning you don’t have to go through dozens of temples just to level up your gravitational abilities by marginal percentages.

“We had heard from the players that it's a lot of work to go through the Unity, go through all the temples, go through the Unity, go through all the temples again to power up the Starborn powers,” Lamb said.

Elsewhere, Lamb said Bethesda heard feedback from players requesting that Maria Hughes — a scientist NPC who plays a role in the pivotal “Entangled” mission — be a recruitable party member. In Free Lanes, she will be. The update will also add brand-new crew members, including a “Model G” robot, who is useless in combat, according to Lamb, but at least is pretty cute.

Not as cute as the Milliwhale pet, however. The Milliwhale is a reward for a quest introduced in Free Lanes, and though the creature can’t follow you in combat, it will post up at your outpost (and… not really do much beyond elevate the vibes).

With the Free Lanes update, Bethesda is adding two new ways to travel around the Settled Systems. The first is the Moon Jumper vehicle. In a 2024 update, Bethesda added land buggies to Starfield, an attempt to address player complaints that navigating vast expanses on planets was a slog. The Moon Jumper is more or less the same thing — except with a “crazy boost capacity,” as Lamb put it, which you can spam to effectively turn the thing into a hovercraft.

The second is a bit more straightforward: You can now add your favorite fast-travel locations to a list so you no longer have to tab through three menus just to get back to Jemison.

And if there’s one place that’ll end up on every player’s favorites list, it’s the new asteroid base. During the preview, Lamb acknowledged that Starfield has lacked an “aspirational” item. Over the course of a completionist playthrough, you’ll earn hundreds of thousands of credits (if not more). But there was nothing to blow that money on; you could buy all the high-end ships in the game and still be obscenely wealthy.

Enter the new home base. Nestled into the side of an abandoned asteroid, the base is, to use Lamb’s words, a “Bond villain chic” space mansion. It’s got a gym, a greenhouse atrium, a ship hanger, floor-to-ceiling windows, a bunch of bedrooms. Of all the houses in Starfield, it is easily the fanciest. No word yet on how much it’s listed for on Starfield Zillow.

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Starfield’s Free Lanes update will be released on April 7 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.