Starfield's system requirements have landed on Steam, and you're gonna need a 125GB cargo hold

Starfield's shipbuilding tool screens and customisation

(Image credit: Bethesda)

We've suddenly gone from knowing relatively little about Starfield to knowing arguably too much, from its surprisingly great-looking combat, to its unsurprisingly terrible-looking romance options. Yet while Bethesda was exhaustively explaining the various systems and ideas behind its latest RPG, a little more information leaked out of its spacesuit via the game's Steam listing, namely the system requirements.

If you've been struggling to manage your PC storage in the last year or two, you might want to look away now. Starfield's going to eat up 125GB of your SSD, making it the data equivalent of a red giant. Remarkably, this isn't the largest game we've seen recently, Jedi Survivor required a whopping 155GB of storage, adding a whole Prey on top of what Starfield asks of your drive. But it still puts it firmly in the category of +100GB games, which is becoming the norm for PC gaming blockbusters.

Potential Starfielders should also note the phrase "SSD required" at the bottom of the list. So if you're still mucking about with a drive that requires—gasp—moving parts, time to toss it out the window and grab yourself a li'l data brick. One caveat: Steam system specs sometimes have funky bits, so don't panic yet. We've reached out to Bethesda and will update with any response.

Meaty girth aside, Starfield's system requirements are otherwise reasonable. Minimum requirements demand an Intel Core i7 6800K or AMD Ryzen 5 2600X, and a Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 5700. To get optimal performance, you'll need an Intel i5 10600K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, and a Radeon RX 6800 XT or Nvidia RTX 2080. That's more or less my current rig, which I built back in 2019. On paper, therefore, Starfield shouldn't be too demanding, although as we've seen with numerous games recently, that's no guarantee it will run well.

One other point worth noting is that Starfield mandates a broadband Internet connection, something not all games listed on Steam do. This implies it's going to feature an always-online requirement, which for a singleplayer game is a bit rubbish, though we haven't confirmed that. In any case, you can read the full list of specs below: