Mapping Starfield

Starfield consists of 121 star systems (120 from the base game and one from a DLC), all in the near vicinity of our own solar system. The game, for the most part, makes our work that much easier, as it contains real-world IDs for most stars. Discounting our Sun, which requires no identification, 108 contain real-world IDs from the Gliese catalogue of stars. Some of these use archaic denominations from older catalogues (e.g., NN 3781A, Wo 9540C), which have since been merged into the Gliese catalog as part of the Gliese-Jarheiß extension.

As the HYG dataset we use as the baseline contains the entirety of the Gliese catalogue (including the Jarheiß extension), mapping is straightforward. As we can see, these stars form a very neat rectangular region on a 2D projection, similar to the in-game galaxy map in shape if not in placement. Furthermore, the 3D projection shows that they follow mostly the same plane, rising diagonally from the Sun diagonally towards the "top" of the galactic plane.

The remaining 11 unidentified systems are a much harder challenge. Two of these retain their original names: Algorab and Kang. The former is well within the same region as the other stars, and I am confident on the match. Kang, however, is a star that is far from the region, and I am hesitant to establish the connection. That leaves us with 10 systems lacking identification.

It is unclear whether Bethesda based these on real stars, or just made them up on the spot. In-game, these are all late game, high-level star systems that are the farthest from Sol, so we can establish a ballpark for their distance of 20-30 parsec. Furthermore, they are annotated with additional information, such as mass, radius, temperature and, most importantly, their spectral class. If Bethesda really based these systems on real stars, and omitted their designation for not being part of Gliese, then we should be able to track them down.

I wrote a script that queries SIMBAD, the leading astronomical database, with a fuzzy search query in order to track down candidate stars for each system.