Bethesda breaks out the quality-of-life bat for another Starfield update, promising improved photo mode, scanner, and mission tracking for the sci-fi RPG

A new Starfield update promises quality of life fixes including improvements to photo mode, the scanner, mission tracking, and more.

In tweet chain, Bethesda says the new Starfield update will hit Steam Beta on March 6. The full patch notes will be published next week, but for now we have the big highlights to pore over, including a much-needed addition to the game's photo mode that should make your virtual scrapbook a little more lifelike.

Starfield's photo mode is adding new facial expressions to help your companions match "the mood of your shot" a little better. Oh, and your robot companion Vasco is getting some new poses, too.

The update will also tweak the in-game scanner so that you can carry on collecting resources and opening doors with the scanner still open, a subtle quality-of-life fix that should make exploring various planets a lot less fiddly. Same with another fix that makes it so that setting course on an inactive mission will now make that mission active.

Those are definitely the highlights, but Bethesda also teased a couple of bug fixes. For one, the sometimes elusive David Barron, who some players were reporting unavailable at the SSN during the Sabotage mission, should now be right where he's supposed to be. Finally, a bug that would sometimes cause the player character's head to turn left while sprinting, as well as one that prevents Starborn Temples from appearing correctly, have both been fixed, "among many others."

In December, Bethesda teased a string of updates launching "roughly every six weeks" and introducing everything "from city maps, to mod support, to all-new ways of traveling." The game's "biggest update yet" released in January with over 100 fixes and visual improvements to NPCs and space sightseeing. This one is obviously comparatively minor, but quality-of-life updates can often be sleeper hits that you don't fully appreciate until you actually play them.

Even before official mod support, Starfield is approaching the top 10 most-modded games on the world's biggest mod site.