Bummed that your Starfield character's beard doesn't look nearly as lush and masculine as you'd like it to? Well, worry no more over patchy stubble, because this absolute hero has just raised the bar—or more specifically, the texture resolution—for Starfield beards.
Thanks to creator BulwarkHD on Nexus Mods, beards just got a whole lot more impressive with HD 4K Beards, which appears to have improved some of the issues fans have had with Bethesda facial hair. And I don't just mean there are issues with Starfield beards either, this complaint has been going on for years.
Starfield's got a pretty "highly detailed" character creator, all things considered. But even before the game was released, fans made it clear they were concerned over a "recurring facial hair issue" in Bethesda games.
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's March patch brings zoomer haircuts for Henry and the return of the hardcore mode that can kill you before the game even starts
- Bethesda intended Starfield to be more violent, including 'meat caps' for beheaded astronauts, but the gore was toned down for technical reasons and because it 'didn't fit thematically'
And while Bethesda has made significant improvements to its in-house Creation Engine (now Creation Engine 2 for Starfield), its pretty clear the character creator didn't get as much love as some fans would have liked. Beards and hair in particular haven't had as much love as some other character creation assets, despite the engine improvements.
Players have been going on about this frankly immersion-breaking problem on the Starfield subreddit. The consensus is "Hair is bad and unacceptable for a 2023 game. Still buying Starfield tho." The patchy example image given in the post speaks volumes, but until now no one had made a move to improve it.
Players have been calling for dark textures underneath facial hair, too, in order to "give the illusion of shadow." I knew there was something uncanny about the beards in Starfield and after seeing dreamonto's much-improved rendering I finally see what the issue was.
Now, downloading this 4K beard mod might not add shadow to your character's facial texture, but it does up the resolution of their beard to impressive effect. It's a simple solution, and one that commenters seem pretty darn pleased with. It might put a little more strain on your PC, though.
So if you're planning on speeding across the galaxy with a cosmically large beard to hide all your contraband inside, now you can do so in a slightly higher resolution. Praise be to the beard gods. You'll still have a despicably baby-faced countenance, but at least you can just about hide it under all that scruff.
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