Bethesda reveal Starfield's Terran Armada DLC: it's about a space robot army and drops alongside a beefy free overhaul of the base game

You can cruise around the galaxy in controlled fashion starting next month

Bethesda have followed up being one of the studios gushing about Nvidia's face yassifying DLSS 5 tech by revealing two updates coming to Starfield. Dubbed Free Lanes and Terran Armada, the former's a free update overhauling the likes of ship travel, while the latter's a second story DLC. Both are set to arrive on April 7th.

The two were revealed during the Developer Direct stream above and rounded up in a blog post. Terran Armada's a DLC about battling its namesake faction, who believe they're "the 'true' children of Earth". As such, this group, "made up of members of the United Colonies and Freestar Collective who vanished during the Colony War", are trying to take over the galaxy with their army of robo-soldiers.

"When the Terrans first arrive their motivations are unclear, but the fate of the war against the Terran Armada will have consequences that ripple throughout the galaxy," Bethesda wrote, adding that you'll be fighting them in "incursions". These incursions look to be a new type of world event or mission which can pop up in various places throughout space, and if you run across one, you can end up unable to grav jump away until you've defeated the Terran baddies that lurk within. The DLC's also bringing a robo-soldier companion, Delta, pitched at characters on the bad or morally ambiguous side.

The name Terran Armada might be one you've heard before, as Starfield fans unearthed it in a video Bethesda posted last year to commemorate the game's second birthday. Naturally, the conclusion jumped to by plenty of folks right away was that this could be the name of the second expansion the studio had mentioned back in 2024.

Moving on to the Free Lanes update, it's a free and more generalised overhaul of a bunch of the base game's mechanics or features. Its headline addition is the ability to finally fly freely between planets in a star system and enable a cruise control mode mid-flight so you can sit back and be auto-piloted to your destination. The latter also means you can get up from the controls and go do some crafting or chat to your crew during commutes, which is pretty neat.

In addition to Terran Armada's incursions, Bethesda have added a bunch of new points of interest and encounters you can run across as you fly around the galaxy in this freer fashion, with the goal of making space a bit less of a boring empty void. Beyond the travel, there's some extra customisation in the form of a new resource called X-Tech and a new tier of legendary effects for gear, plus the ability to upgrade your Starborn powers to godly levels without the need to start a New Game+ playthrough. Outposts have also gotten some new additions, namely a quirky pet alien called a Milliwhale.

The Milliwhale's one of the rewards for completing new side missions included in Free Lanes, which are dished out at a freshly added star station dubbed Anchorpoint. Finally, two of the additions that actually do have hovering over the reinstall button are a new boost-heavy moon buggy dubbed the Moon Jumper and a player home built into an asteroid.

All in all, it's certainly a heap of stuff and there's enough of note to aspects of it - especially the likes of the ship flight changes - that I'll likely stick in a few hours to give post-Free Lanes Starfield a go. I'm less sold on the DLC being anything beyond meh, even if it's fairly reasonably priced at £8.99/$9.99 or free for premium edition owners, but you never know.