It goes without saying that Starfield went above and beyond to provide a realistic, intergalactic immersion not seen before in video games; an exceptionally commendable feat that has earned ecstatic praise from players everywhere. However, when tasked with creating a game of this scale, it’s certainly not easy to immaculately polish a literal galaxy full of content. A cosmic blip is bound to happen here and there, but a disconcerted player decided to call one such blip out that is actually quite surprising to us.
Going by the name ‘TacosAreJustice’ (heartily agreed) on Reddit, they shared a rather bereaved post yesterday of their realization that you technically can’t give little, knowledge-starved Cora Coe any books you come across in your travels. If you went an entirely different route with your own playthrough in Starfield and aren’t familiar, Cora Coe is the young daughter of Sam Coe, a member of Constellation. If you choose to have Sam accompany you as a companion, Cora comes with him by default. As you jump from one star system to another, you’ll overhear their amusing family banter towards each other, much of which revolves around Cora’s love of books. She’ll even approach you personally and ask you to bring her any books, specifically ones from Earth, that you can find.
That sounds like a wonderful little side mission to embark on, except for one problem. If you fulfill her wish and bring her a nice big pile of new books to read, you actually can’t give them to her. There is no actual quest that triggers for you to provide her books from your inventory, or a dialogue option that would otherwise give the opportunity. Ironically, you can give them to Sam if he’s your current companion, but he won’t then pass them to Cora. For a man who practically worships his daughter, that certainly seems a bit out of character.
It definitely seems like a missed opportunity for what would be one of the most heartfelt side quests in the game. Bethesda is no stranger to creating quests in their previous games that ask the player to continuously bring an NPC a certain type of item in exchange for an incentive, be it EXP and/or currency, so that’s no excuse. Doing the deed could even help increase Sam’s affinity for your character over time as well. In all honesty, we’re quite surprised this was overlooked, given that it’s the daughter of a main companion of Constellation.
It’s clear that ‘TacosAreJustice’ shares the same sentiment, as they reveal in their post that they tried to compensate by giving books to Sam at least so they “don’t feel guilty”, as well as literally dropping a pile of them at Cora’s feet as seen above. Either way, the effort is there to try and make up for something that Bethesda sadly didn’t follow through on.
Granted, if fans really, truly wanted to make it happen, an idea would be to take it to Starfield’s official discord server and make a communal plea to give Cora the library she truly deserves.
