A heroic Starfield modder just straight-up deleted those repetitive temple ‘puzzles’ from the game
Without getting too deep into spoiler territory for those who haven’t played much Starfield yet, there’s a quest line in the main story involving temples. The first temple has a sort of puzzle inside that takes a few minutes to figure out, and there’s a nice reward at the end of it.
When I finished my first temple mission I thought “That was cool.” But that was my first temple mission. Thing is, there are more temple missions—24 of them altogether—and they’re all 100% identical. The puzzle, which is barely a puzzle to begin with, never changes. It’s like the temple and its contents were copy-pasted onto different planets, and it just becomes a mindless, time-sucking chore.
But that chore is now over forever, thanks to modder johndoebowler who created a mod called No More Temple “Puzzles.” (Yes, they added those sarcastic quotes.) Now you just step inside each temple and wait a few seconds, get your reward, and bail. Nice.
If you just heard a sound in the distance, it was the collective sigh of relief from a whole bunch of dedicated Starfield players, because here’s the truly awful thing: if you really want to collect all of the temple rewards, you need to go through Starfield’s New Game Plus a total of 10 times, and that means doing a total of 240 temple runs to completely max out the rewards. Doing the same exact thing 240 times, when you were already sick of it the second time you did it? Ouch.
So, this mod will be a real boon for a lot of players, though unfortunately you still have to get to the temples, which in itself is a bore. For the uninitiated, here’s the entire process: A character gives you a temple location, you fly to the moon or planet, you land, and then you run and boost across the planet’s surface for roughly 800-1200 meters until you reach the temple. If you’re lucky the front door of the temple is right in front of you but typically you’ll have to kind of circle around a bit to find it, usually over some rough terrain and temple walls, another nuisance. Then you enter the temple, do the “puzzle” which involves using your boosters to fly in zero-G through a bunch of sparkling lights in a chamber. Then you wait for a spinning mechanism to stop spinning, fly into it, leave the temple, and then fight a guy who is always waiting right outside.
At least now the puzzle part has been snipped so you don’t have to boost around the room while trying to stay awake. With the mod installed the mechanism pops up and starts spinning, so you just wait a few seconds for it to stop and step inside it. Bingo, bongo, donezo. You’ll find the mod here at Nexus Mods.
Of course there are other, easier ways to collect those puzzle rewards, and that’s by using cheats. You can find out how with our list of Stafield console commands.
