About ten hours into my Starfield playthrough, I started collecting ‘Earth books’ for fun. I thought it would be a fun personality quirk; my celestial cowboy scuttling across systems looking for long-lost literary links to the past. Forget precious ores and mysterious celestial relics, I wanted art, and Starfield’s cluttered landscapes allowed me to cram my cargo hold full of whatever junk I desired. For as long as I can remember, I (and many others) have been sprinting around in Bethesda’s vast, open worlds, hoovering up every form of trinket and treasure we can find. Often it’s something useful, like a rare or valuable resource. For the most part, it’s just junk – it’s worthless, you can’t consume it or craft with it, whether it’s books, weird ornaments or far more potatoes than you could ever need.

Why is it all there? How is it made? And perhaps most importantly – why has Bethesda stuck to its guns on filling its RPGs with endless items, and why are we so compelled to collect them?

To answer these burning queries, I sought out the best possible representatives for Bethesda’s art of clutter. John Valenti, Lead Set Dressing Artist and Robert Wisnewski, Lead Props Artist, have worked together to create thousands of assets for Bethesda’s roster of mammoth titles, from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion right up to Starfield. If anyone can explain how this stuff works, it’s them.

How Starfield’s Items Are Manufactured

So, where do they start? Wisnewski laughs and says while this question might sound simple, it really isn’t. The short answer is, Bethesda began with a huge list of items that Starfield absolutely needed, but by the end of development, that list was about 20 times bigger than their original estimate. One of the main things that guides this ever-growing list of objects is lore created by the wider team.

“We try and learn about the people that inhabit these cities, settlements, and outposts, including factions,” Valenti explains. “What are they like? How do people live and what items would they need to survive? What types of jobs would people have out in the settled systems? What items would they need to use to complete their tasks?”

The research gets even more granular; the team starts to consider the personalities of the individual NPCs that inhabit a particular space, be it a politician, an outlaw, or a miner. What objects would a worker have on their desk? What tools would a medical professional have? What personal items would they keep? All of these small questions contribute to the larger picture of these environments, that are all deeply personal to the characters that live within them.

Managing Thousands of Objects

With thousands of different little items to contend with, a management system is needed. This is where ‘clutter sets’ come in – groups of objects that are organised in some way, be it individual assets that can be used to form other objects – kind of like game dev Lego – or, for smaller items, bits that are pooled together by a theme. Wisnewski tells us that it’s not viable to make unique clutter for every single space in a game as expansive as Starfield, so objects are created with multiple uses in mind.

Setting The Scene

All of Starfield’s environments are populated by hand. There’s a system that can randomly generate important gameplay loot, such as ammo, healing items, and thematic objects for quest rewards, but anything considered ‘non-essential’ – every mug, every coffee stain, every scuff mark on the floor – is placed with intent, and with a personal touch.

“Set dressing is best when artists are doing the work and making the decisions about what should go where,” Wisnewski says. “We generally feel better when things are done that way. I feel there’s no better source material than what you see in the real world. I look at ceilings and lights. Some of the pipework and cables in the Zenimax building were inspiration for ceilings in Starfield. Stains on buildings. Construction sites. Airports. Recycling centers and landfills are a goldmine for ideas to me.”

Wisnewski adds that he often envisions himself in game locations before populating them, and the pair have even added easter eggs from their real lives to Starfield‘s environments. One example is a set of plushies arranged like the cover of The Ten Apples Up on Top by Dr Seuss, which Wisnewksi highlights as a nod to his children. This arrangement of objects appears randomly inside Starfield’s abandoned research towers.

Valenti adds that it’s his goal to use miscellaneous objects to create a scene that has meaning, but is also open-ended enough for the player to come up with their own conclusion based on their own unique perspective. This is where that earlier research of environments and who occupies them comes in. “I work with the designer to figure out who is inhabiting the location, run through the quest and get an idea of who they are, and [then] set dress and design that location based off their preferences and personalities,” Valenti explains.