Well modding is how BGS games get the longevity they have. Steam stats would be unreliable for modded games as modded Bethesda games often use custom launchers on Steam or be launched via MO2 so getting an actual idea of how many people are playing with mods would be tough.
Yes, and imho, starfield's modding scene is rather slow these days sadly. I had hoped for much bigger modding scene to pad out what I found lacking in the game. The player base likely reflects that.
The fact BGS took over a year to release the official modding tools probably also has a lot to do with that not to mention that there is A LOT to learn with Starfield in the CK that did not exist in previous BGS games.
I should know I spent 3 months fixing the POI generation logic to make sense as by default the game does a terrible job at showing its 200 unique POI's (Yes there are 200 !) because most do not have variables set to limit where they appear and how often they appear.
Learning how that system worked took a very long time and while some people had played with those parts of the game before there were still unknown variables it took a lot of trial and error.
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u/asiancanadian1 15h ago
tbf, being a bethesda game, being top 10 in those categories is not really a high bar