One of the most common complaints you’ll see about Starfield is how unwieldy the user interface can be. Crafting was one of the key areas in the game which was made more painful by this, but for PC players at least, that’s now a thing of the past thanks to a new mod that vastly improves the workbench experience in Bethesda’s latest RPG.
Arriving not long after Starfield‘s release, the StarUI mod proved an instant success with players who wanted a cleaner, more modern interface than the one which the game launched with. That initial mod, StarUI Inventory, improved the inventory menu. Later in September, another mod — StarUI HUD — made similar changes to the game’s heads up display, allowing for more detailed loot menus and the ability to recolor your HUD widgets such as the radar.
Now, the creator of those mods — Nexus Mods member m8r98a4f2 — has released a third mod in the StarUI series with a focus on improving the functionality of Starfield’s workbenches. The StarUI Workbench mod makes several improvements that result in the game’s crafting experience being made much more intuitive. All of this is made possible without changing the overall aesthetic of the UI.
Much as with the other StarUI mods, the biggest advantage of using the new Workbench mod is that more stats are available to view together on one screen. This is considerably more convenient than in the base game, where you’ll frequently find yourself having to click backward and forwards between different menu screens to compare stats.
Finding what you need as quickly as possible when crafting is further improved thanks to the added ability to sort items via their stats, and the ability to display only crafting mods that fit the item you’re working on. You can also tag specific items to keep track of them during the crafting process, and recolor both the workbenches themselves, and their UI elements.
The more detailed menus may make for a slightly more cluttered look, but this is less of a problem for PC players than it is for console players who are typically sitting further away from the screen. Thankfully, the mod allows all workbench UI elements to be customized to however the user wants, with several pre-defined configurations to use as starting points.
Unfortunately, as Starfield’s official modding tools haven’t yet been released, this mod is only currently available for use on retail copies of the game on PC. That means that if you’re playing the game on either Xbox consoles, cloud streaming, or on PC via Game Pass, you can’t yet install mods.
Hopefully this functionality will be added soon, or better still, Bethesda will add better UI functionality to the game themselves in a future patch. Until then, we’re excited to see how the famed Bethesda modding community can continue expanding Starfield in new ways themselves.
