This modder made such a great change to Starfield's food it's actually making me hungry

(Image credit: Bethesda)

I get the concept behind the way Bethesda designed Starfield's food items. In the year 2330, humanity has become a spacefaring species, blasting across the galaxy in spaceships—and just as people are sealed inside spacesuits for protection, food is kept inside clear little plastic containers.

But there's something unsatisfying about seeing a tasty chicken tikka, some crispy alien nuggets, or even plain old meatloaf sitting in a drab, rectangular plastic container. Maybe it's from my experiences of eating out of plastic containers in real life—lukewarm leftovers, usually—but you just know any meal crammed into a little plastic bin isn't going to taste all that great.

That's why this mod by Me444 called Plated Not Crated is such a shockingly excellent change to Starfield's food. No more eating out of rectangular plastic containers. Food now comes on plates. Honest to goodness plates! Just like we had back on Earth.

I'm genuinely surprised at what a difference it makes. Starfield's food is pretty pleasing to look at already, but placing it on plates makes it look downright appetizing. Looking through the screenshots on the mod's page at Nexus Mods actually made me hungry. Granted, I saw it before I took a break for lunch, but even after (I had a sandwich and it was on a plate) it's still a major improvement.

Is the Plated Not Crated mod lore friendly? Well, not exactly. For space travel, keeping meals in containers makes a lot more sense, especially since you might wind up in zero-G. But when it comes to feasting my eyes on Starfield's food, I give this mod the advantage. After all, no matter how advanced our species becomes or how deeply we explore the galaxy, food is always going to be tastier when we eat it off a plate.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.