Starfield modding is now a bit less of a mess with Mod Organizer 2 support

Anybody who’s tried setting up some mods for Starfield will know that the process is a tad bit more complicated than it was with prior mainstream Bethesda releases, like Skyrim or Fallout 4. That’s partially due to the changes made to Starfield‘s game engine, but there’s hope on the horizon.

Notably, while the Vortex mod launcher hasn’t been able to handle Starfield‘s mods all that well due to them needing to be installed into several different directories, depending on their file format, an alternative has now sprung up. The legendary Mod Organizer 2 now officially supports Starfield “with some general caveats,” according to the announcement, which should be a huge boon for those who haven’t been able to get mods to work just yet.

Mod Organizer 2 could resolve Starfield’s problematic modding setup

While MO2 support for Starfield has been in beta for some time now, the developers have finally released a stable, mainline version of the modding tool for anyone to use. The official statement says that features such as “save parsing, archive extraction and packing, plugin management, automatic archive invalidation, INI-enabled plugin and archive detection.” In a broad sense, installing mods should be fairly easy and straightforward now, which hasn’t been the case.

Even though Starfield on PC already has a wealth of important and interesting mods to choose from, such as the recent survival-focused gameplay revamp, the game is yet to receive official mod support from Bethesda itself.

More specifically, Todd Howard has already confirmed Starfield will receive its Creation Kit sometime in 2024, which should give players much more power over the game than they now have. Regardless, this hasn’t stopped prospective modders from working on Starfield in the time interim, and it quickly became clear that Bethesda has changed things up from the days of Fallout 4. For example, installing simple texture replacers now necessitates dropping loose files into the game’s ‘My Documents’ folder, which led to some confusion on the matter.

To that end, the fact that MO2 now includes support for “both the My Games Data directory and the game Data directory” should make the process of modding Starfield far simpler. “This provides maximum mod support with minimal work needed by the end user,” the statement explains.

Mod Organizer 2 version 2.5.0 can be downloaded from the project’s GitHub page, and it appears that this is going to be the recommended mod management tool for Starfield, at least for the time being.