Let’s Fix Starfield’s Terrible Temples With Mods

Early on in Starfield you start becoming a galactic superhero, unlocking stellar abilities like suspending gravity, slowing down time, and peering into the future (though there isn’t one to make Chunks tastier, sadly). Less cool, unfortunately, is that the repetitive process of gathering all your superpowers can quickly wear out its welcome.

See, to get each power (or upgrade an existing power in New Game+) you need to drag yourself to a temple on some distant, far-flung planet. But first you need to go visit Vladimir at The Eye so he can tell you where the next temple even is. Once you actually reach those hallowed grounds, gravity disappears and you need to engage in a painfully slow and woefully uninteresting “mini-game” that requires you to fly around the room and touch a series of swirling lights. A loud 20-second video plays and only then are you granted your new ability, at which point it’s time to head back to Vladimir. If you want to max out every superpower to level 10, you’ll need to do all this a total of 240 times across 10 playthroughs. Dang!

Luckily, a number of mods exist that make the whole process of acquiring Starborn powers dramatically easier, tweaking the process by trivializing the temple mini-games, removing them altogether, skipping the repetitive bits in between, or even just unlocking every power in an instant.

Before we jump in, note that mods are currently only available on the PC versions of Starfield, in particular the Steam version. While some mods work just fine on the Xbox Game Pass / Microsoft Store version of the game, the Steam version is currently the most amenable to mods. So, some of these may or may not work on the Game Pass version.

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Shorten those temple puzzles

If you don’t want to radically change how Starfield distributes its superpowers, but find the practice of flying into swirls of light exhausting, Short Temple Puzzles is a good place to start. With this mod, you’ll just need to grab a single swirling light to gain your new power (or reach the next level of a previously gained power).

You may also want to grab the Starborn Temple Minigame More Exp Mod” to make the whole process feel a bit more rewarding on other fronts.

Find the temples, but skip the puzzles

If you want to preserve the experience of finding the temples, but don’t want to fly around at all, then check out “No More Temple ‘Puzzles.’”

This mod bypasses the entire floating segment. Simply walk into a temple, watch the rings spin up, approach them, and voila: New power.

Seen that video enough already? Skip it

Then there’s that video that plays every time you acquire a power (as well as finding an artifact). Seen it enough times for one life? Then you might want to install “Skip Artifact and Power Video” or “No Visions For Artifacts, Powers, and Unity.” For the first video-skipping mod, if you wish to kill the audio (which will still play despite the vid being skipped), you’ll want “Mute Artifact and Power Video,” too.

Find temples without speaking to Vladimir

Finding cryptic ancient alien installations is a little tedious on its own, but needing to schlep back to The Eye to speak with Vladimir each time to find new potential locations just adds to the exhaustion. With “Skip Vladimir Temple Quest,” all you’ll need to do is hit a hotkey to instantly get the next temple locations added to your quest log. No need to hear him call you “rook” again.

Change how temples grant powers

If you still wish to visit temples but want to try out a different way to rank them up, consider installing “Simple Temple Overhaul.”

Here, you’ll only need to visit a specific temple once per power. Every time you start a new New Game+, all of your powers will automatically get bumped to the next level. Revisiting old temples, meanwhile, will grant you two units of Quantum Essence.

OMG just give me all the powers

If you find yourself saying “screw these temples,” maybe check out the “Instant Rank 10 In All Powers” mod. As it says on the tin, this mod will unlock every single power and push it to its max rank.

That said, as the mod’s page warns, you may want to save this until after you’ve completed the main quest, as it risks breaking the game’s already-fragile difficulty curve.

So if you’re in the mood to bend gravity, slow down time, and shoot fireballs but are sick of having to actually engage with the boring Temples,, consider trying out a few of these mods to make getting the cool powers that much easier.