Some of us might be familiar with the radiant quest and encounter systems from Skyrim and Fallout, and that design is being expanded in Starfield to populate planets with locations and quests. In Skyrim, radiant encounters were triggered at certain spawn points throughout the map, and were limited to NPC encounters. The random groups of Stormcloaks or Imperials hauling a prisoner along, an old Orc who wishes to die in battle, and M'aiq the Liar are all examples of these NPC random encounters. There's also a radiant quest system that will choose among a set of locations, prioritizing unvisited locations, for the destination of certain quests (eg. the bounties that innkeepers, Jarls, or stewards could tell you about).
According to Will Shen (Lead Quest Designer) in this video, they have new tech that will take entire locations and place them on planets, and integrate these locations into dynamic quests. For example, you might discover an outpost where an NPC got kidnapped and the people at the outpost will tell you where the kidnappers might have gone. Will says, "So, it is a dynamically placed settlement that is taking you to a dynamically placed dungeon as you're walking through the planet."
We can see an example of this in the Starfield Showcase from this week! These two players are in the same location on a planet - the mountains and lake are the same - but this player sees some kind of natural feature and this player sees a base or structure.
I think this feels like a natural extension of the radiant system from previous games, and it makes me wonder about a couple things: are spawn points in hand-picked locations across planets, or are they generated at a certain distance away from wherever you land on a planet? How many random locations have they created? Are we going to see repeat locations across planets during one playthrough, or would we only start to see repetition on a second playthrough?
I'd love to hear your thoughts and theories about this too!