Starfield mod spotlight: Ultima Vestigia finally puts the ruins of our cities back on Earth

Earth in Starfield has always been a strange letdown: you fly all the way home and find an empty desert with a handful of landmarks. Ultima Vestigia by modder Schniet changes that by adding the ruins of cities, towns and smaller settlements across the planet. It went up on Nexus Mods on November 2, was updated again on November 3, and the comments are full of players saying this is how Earth should have looked from the start.

What it does. The mod scatters broken roads, surviving towers, collapsed concrete structures and rusted vehicles across Earth’s desert, with some buildings half buried in sand. According to the mod page, it includes:

• Ruin placement guided by NASA nighttime-light data and real settlement coordinates, so ruins show up roughly where people actually lived. Former ocean areas are left alone.
• Four settlement sizes, from small settlements and towns up to cities and big metropolitan ruins, with eight district layouts so far.
• New ruins around all 11 of the game’s original Earth landmarks, based on real street and building footprints from OpenStreetMap. The original landmarks, quests, collectibles and terrain stay as they are.
• Collision, distant detail, and building outlines you can see on the surface map.
• Discovery through exploration: the ruined districts are added to the pool of places that can generate when you land, so you won’t find a city at every landing.

The V2 update is already out. Schniet’s V2 notes list new ruined buildings, rubble and wrecks, reworked layouts for all eight districts at full building scale, reworked ruins around the 11 landmarks, and an optional Nanjing Ruins add-on. That one adds a fixed landing site with an 11.2 × 11.2 km ruin layout based on Nanjing’s real terrain and street network, in English or Simplified Chinese. Early players had pointed out that some buildings looked too small up close, and the author said fixing the scale and look of the cities was the top priority.

It’s a demo, and the author is upfront about that. Schniet calls this a demo release and says the real-world data guides where ruins go, but it doesn’t recreate real cities building by building. Some districts can still show ground-color seams or objects that don’t sit right on the ground, the new ruins around landmarks don’t have full distant detail yet, and there are no new quests or buildings you can walk inside. The mod is tagged as AI-assisted, and the author thanks ChatGPT and DeepSeek for help with planning, coding, asset building and troubleshooting.

Platforms, price and requirements:

• Platform: PC only. It’s on Nexus Mods, not Bethesda’s Creations store, so there’s no Xbox or PS5 version.
• Price: free on Nexus Mods.
• Required: no Starfield Script Extender (SFSE) or other mods needed. Install either the English or the Simplified Chinese package (they use the same file name), and enable UltimaVestigia.esm. If you add the Nanjing map, load UV_Nanjing.esm after it.
• Compatibility: mods that change Earth’s biomes, landmark areas or the same terrain files may conflict, and the author says wider compatibility testing is still going on. A commenter flagged overlap with Earth Redone and the Nomad settlement mod, and Schniet said they’ll try to keep the Nomad and Earth Dome spots clear and add optional compatibility patches later.

PPR take: I’ve always thought landing on Earth in Starfield should hit harder than it does, and seeing actual city skylines poking out of the sand does that. It’s early and a little rough, so expect some odd building sizes and seams for now. But the idea of using real nighttime-light data to decide where cities used to be is really clever, and with V2 already out two days in, this is one I’m gonna keep an eye on.