STFI HD Overhaul

STFI HD Overhaul

This is a global mod that improves the environment textures of the game. It covers nearly all in-game objects, specifically enhancing 32,334 textures and affecting a huge variety of objects that surround you and that you can interact with. The total size of the mod is 168 gigabytes.

(Original Game + Shattered Space DLC + Terran Armada DLC)

Why this mod?

Original textures in Starfield have several limitations related to aggressive compression and relatively low resolution. Many _color textures are stored in BC1 format, which leads to visible compression artifacts, loss of fine details, and poor gradients. _rough, _ao and _mask maps often contain noise and pixelation, while normal maps frequently have limited resolution, reducing micro-detail and surface depth. As a result, materials can appear flat, blurry, and repetitive, especially on large tiling surfaces.

These decisions were made by the developers primarily to optimize game size, reduce VRAM usage, and ensure stable texture streaming across a wide range of systems. Using aggressive BC compression and lower resolutions significantly reduces archive size and improves loading performance, but at the cost of visual quality.

STFI HD Overhaul rebalances this approach by increasing texture resolution, reducing or removing compression artifacts, and improving material maps while maintaining an optimized balance between quality, size, and performance.

Features

STFI HD Overhaul uses a hybrid texture resolution approach designed to significantly improve visual quality without excessive VRAM usage or file size increase. In this approach, primary _color textures are increased to 4K resolution, as they define surface detail, color fidelity, and material readability. This applies to all categories including Landscape, Architecture, Common, SetDressing and Decals.

Secondary material maps including _normal, _rough, _ao, _mask and _opacity are optimized to 2K resolution. This allows improved detail across terrain, architecture, props, decals, and environmental materials while significantly reducing VRAM usage and overall mod size.

The hybrid approach provides high detail where it matters most while preserving correct PBR behavior and stable texture streaming. The result is sharper surfaces, cleaner materials, and more consistent visual quality across the entire game.

Technical Details

All textures were processed using a multi-stage pipeline. First, original textures were extracted and converted to a