Starfield isn’t set to release for another two months, but that hasn’t stopped fans from trying to uncover every secret that the game holds. Players will finally be able to play Bethesda’s sprawling sci-fi RPG when it comes out on September 6th, though there have been years of pre-release trailers, interviews, and screenshots to tide fans over.
One eager fan has compiled all of this information, along with extensive theory-crafting and analysis, into one Google doc that now spans more than a thousand pages. That’s more pages than planets Starfield will have to explore.
Prior to the 2022 Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase, fans had known about Starfield since 2018 but had little in the way of official information. A handful of screenshots and videos about the game from Bethesda existed, which was enough for Reddit user Gokamo to create a comprehensive document spanning 120 pages to collect everything about the game ahead of the 2022 showcase. “With so much information so spread out,” Gokamu writes in a recent Reddit post, “I wanted to make a single source with all of it.”
The original 120-page document now seems minuscule in comparison to how the document — now titled ‘An Attempted Complete Starfield Compendium’ — has grown. After the 2022 showcase included a hefty slice of Starfield gameplay footage and new information, Gokamo brought the page count up to 409, and before 2023’s Xbox Games Showcase and Starfield Direct, the page count stood at 459.
Following the extensive Starfield Direct, Gokamo had a lot of new information to add to the compendium. But now the latest update to the compendium has been released, as announced by Gokamo on Reddit. The new page count? 1071. That translates to roughly 86,000 words according to Gokamo.
The gargantuan number feels right, considering Todd Howard’s claim that Starfield will have “over 1,000 planets all open for you to explore.”
The compendium’s purpose is two-fold. First, it acts as an archive of every available piece of published information on Starfield. That includes screenshots, trailers, interviews, the ESRB rating description for the game, and even a record of every piece of merchandise for the game. If it exists, it is probably recorded somewhere in the compendium.
Secondly, the compendium is an extensive theory document. All of those archived pieces of information exist for Gokamo to craft theories from in an attempt to uncover every bit of possible information about Starfield’s gameplay and world. For example, there is a page dedicated to the official Starfield Xbox controller’s design and what it tells us about the game’s flight controls and therefore how that element of gameplay will feel.
For those worried about potential spoilers for the game’s major plot points or ending, don’t worry. The compendium touches on recounting what official information has been said about the narrative, but no bold guesses are made on how it all plays out. Mostly because even with over 1000 pages worth of content to work with, we still don’t really know much about what the story of Starfield will be.
The ‘Attempted Complete Starfield Compendium’ isn’t the first extensive fan-written document about a video game. ‘The Paleblood Hunt’ comes to mind, a 108-page deep dive into the lore and narrative of Bloodborne. But what sets ‘An Attempted Complete Starfield Compendium’ is that this has all been written before the game is even out! Imagine what players will have to say about this game when they actually play it.
As for the future of the compendium, this may be the end of the line. While Gokoma plans to correct any mistakes that readers find and might add more for the launch trailer of the game, there won’t be any more extensive updates. As a sign-off on the document’s final page Gokoma writes “It’s been wonderful writing for you all, and for likely the last time, I’ll see you all in the starfield.”
