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About this mod
This mod is intended to make all weapon types viable for space combat. This mod adds noticeable buffs all weapon types except particle beams. If you are a good shipbuilder, this mod will have the effect of making the space combat portion game harder by closing the gap between your excellent ships and the often mediocre ships used by NPCs.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
This mod is intended to make all weapon types viable for space combat. This mod does not intend to make all weapons in a given type more equal, it intends to make the different types overall more equal. For example, generally speaking, the best ballistic before this mod will still be the best ballistic after this mod. In the original game, particle beams are OP for everything except boarding ships, where EM weapons are useful. This mod adds noticeable buffs all weapon types except particle beams (most particle beams only receive minor changes). If you were a smart player and customized your ship with lots of particle weapons, you had a far better ship than any of the enemies in the game. By improving the weaker weapons and making them more viable, the enemies you face will receive some major upgrades. Player ships with particle beams are still excellent, so you could still use nothing but particle beams if you desire... The overall effect of these changes are that the worst ships are improved more than the best ships. If you are a good shipbuilder, this will have the effect of making the space combat portion game harder by closing the gap between your excellent ships and the often mediocre ships used by NPCs. You can now enjoy the art of trying to build optimal ships without having quite as much of an advantage over the poor AI. You can even attempt to build optimized builds using some weapons that you might not have considered before. Tactics and fun gameplay are as important as balance, and as such, the advantages and disadvantages of energy vs. ballistic weapons have been enlarged, leaving more opportunity for impactful tactical choices to be made.
Summary of Ship Weapon Changes:
All Energy ship weapons (this includes lasers, but not particle beams) will do 100% more damage to shields compared to their values in the original game. Hull damage is unchanged, thus making them strongly suited to their niche of taking down shields. Their range was unchanged, so particle beams are still the weapon of choice against shields at long ranges, but there is now an incentive to consider using energy weapons up close due to their greatly increased shield damage. While turret ranges were reduced to less than pilot controlled weapon ranges for some weapon types, this was not done for energy weapons as they are already among the shortest ranged weapons in the game and presumably turrets can lead their targets just fine at such short ranges.
All Ballistic ship turrets do 50% more hull damage and have 50% more range compared to their values in the original game. All other Ballistic ship weapons do 50% more hull damage and have 100% more range. The 106S Shot Cannon is an exception - it does 50% more hull damage like the others, but it only has 75% more range to symbolize the shot becoming overly dispersed, and it has a 10% increased crit damage bonus to symbolize the chaos of multiple projectiles tearing multiple holes in a critical ship component. The justification for the turrets not having as large of a range improvement as their pilot controlled siblings is that pilot controlled weapons are more accurate, so the turrets simply won't attempt shots at the same distances that a pilot will attempt them at. Shield damage was not increased for any ballistic weapons, thus making them strongly suited to their niche of damaging ships once their shields are down.
Missiles had their overall charge time reduced by 25%. Note that their recharge time was reduced from 15 to 10, but their recharge delay was left at 5. This improves their DPS over a long time frame due to more efficient charging, but doesn't make the first few shots any more effective. I did this because missiles fell a ways behind particle beams when fighting larger fleets because it took so long for them to charge once depleted.
EM Weapons were given a 25% range boost, but were otherwise left as-is. The justification for this is that they were already well suited to the niche of boarding ships. Due to the fact that ballistic weapons got a range increase, the overall range of combat in the game is slightly increased so this change is mostly to keep them from falling behind. It's definitely a noticeable improvement, but it doesn't make them OP in my opinion.
Particle Beams were generally the best weapon class in the game, and as such, they were mostly left as-is except for minor range adjustments, with the exception of 2 turrets. Since particle beams are notable in that some of the best weapons are class A or B, I decided to make small range adjustments so that the higher classes have slight range advantages. For pilot controlled weapons, Class A particle weapons lost 150m of range, Class B particle weapons lost 50m of range, and Class C particle weapons gained 50m of range. For turrets, Class B particle weapons lost 150m of range, and Class C particle weapons lost 50m of range (there are no class A turrets). Turrets suffered slightly more than pilot controlled weapons to avoid buffing some of the best weapons in the game, since class C turrets are excellent already. This also keeps some consistency with ballistic weapons, where turrets also have less range than pilot controlled weapons.
There were 2 particle turrets in the base game that had somewhat odd values relating to stored shots and recharge - they held many shots like an auto particle turret, but charged rapidly, like a non-auto particle turret. This resulted in them being rather powerful, but annoyingly, it resulted in them not suffering very much if powered down. For example, the DPS when using 3x Obliterator 250MeV Alpha Turrets at 12/12 power was generally identical in practice to the DPS at 1/12 power because the charge was nearly impossible to deplete. The Disruptor 3320 Neutron Turret was somewhat similar, so I rebalanced them both. To avoid eliminating their primary advantages, they are both still designed to be good choices to use at a reduced power setting, but you are now incentivized to run them at something like 6/12 as opposed to being able to run them at 1/12 without any drawbacks. You can still get away with running them at less than full power because it is kind of cool that some weapons can pull that off while others can't, but the stock values just made it too extreme. Now there is at least some incentive to use auto particle turrets over these, as you can run them at 1/12 power and take advantage of their large number of stored shots as with other auto particle weapons - an advantage that was nullified by these 2 weapons being unable to deplete their charge at 1/12 power in stock form. The two modified weapons are still very efficient in terms of recharge efficiency - for example, the Obliterator 250MeV Alpha Turrets still recharges more efficiently on a charge per damage context than the PBO-300 auto alpha turrets, it is just no longer to an absurd degree. This means that a 1/12 power PBO-300 auto alpha turret group has a bit of a damage boost at the beginning of the conflict when compared to a 1/12 power Obliterator 250MeV Alpha Turret group, due to the former's stored charge (like auto particle beams generally do) but the Obliterator 250MeV Alpha Turret is the king of DPS over the long term and is so efficient that doesn't suffer much from being run at half power... but it will now at least suffer from being run at 1/12 power.
Disruptor 3320 Neutron Turret: Ammo Capacity 20 -> 4, Recharge Time 0.4 -> 2.88
Obliterator 250MeV Alpha Turret: Ammo Capacity 30 -> 3, Recharge Time 0.6 -> 3.6
Their ranges were changed in accordance with the changes made to all other particle turrets (a very slight reduction).
I also improved the weapons used by a certain group of NPCs that you will meet midway through the main quest. The following section contains very minor spoilers - basically the name of their faction and the names of their ship weapons.
Compatibility:
Only Weapon Forms (WEAP) were modified in this mod. No perks, or Generic Base Forms (GBFM) were modified. This will be incompatible with most ship weapon mods, unless those mods ONLY modify the weapons by modifying Generic Base Forms (GBFM) or if they only modify weapon related perks. If that doesn't make any sense to you, just avoid using this with other mods that modify ship weapons in any way. Alternatively, you can check for conflicts using your preferred tool.
This mod was made with xEdit, which is a community favorite tool for modding Bethesda games. It is our best option for creating plugins until the official creation kit is released. Note that plugins aren't yet officially supported for Starfield, so you take additional risk in modding your game at this early point in time. It is recommended that you make a save before installing any mods in case you need to revert to that save. Official updates may break mod compatibility at any time, and could potentially break your save as well. This mod is rather simple; it only overrides some records, it does not add any new records. This may make it less risky than some of the more complicated mods, but all mods carry some risk - especially at this early stage in Starfield modding.
For this mod to work, you need to enable .esm plugins. The community seems to favor using Plugins.txt Enabler by nukem, found here:
https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/4157
This is considered less risky than using the sTestFile method, but it is still rather experimental. Please read the details on that mod page to learn more about installing plugins. Note that you will also need to install Starfield Script Extender for Steam editions of Starfield, or an ASI Loader for GamePass editions of Starfield - the description page for the Plugins.txt Enabler has all the information you need as well as the links to the other required files, so I am not going to include that information here.
Note that this mod is an .esm as opposed to an .esl or .esp due to the way that Starfield loads plugins. xEdit only supports creating .esm plugins at this time, and while this may limit the number of installed mods, they are doing this to help prevent issues with load orders breaking... though plugins aren't officially supported, so issues could still arise. Mod at your own risk.
If you aren't ready to deal with issues such as saves that might break when the game is updated, best to stick to modding older Bethesda games for now, as they at least officially support modding and thus mods are less likely to break with updates. I made a pretty cool new lands mod for Skyrim with an Orc vs. Thalmor questline that can help keep you entertained as we wait for official mod support for Starfield. The Skyrim SE version is here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/99557 and the Oldrim version is here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/116382 so go ahead and check those out if you enjoy Skyrim.
Special Thanks:
Thanks to Bethesda and all of the IP holders for supporting the modding community... yes, it's true that mods aren't officially supported as of this release, but releasing tools takes time and when the official tools are out we will see even more exciting mods.
Many thanks to ElminsterAU and the xEdit team. xEdit is a great tool, which I have used for modding Skyrim, and as of now it is the only tool that can create plugins for Starfield. The Starfield version of xEdit is available here: https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/239
Also, thank you to nukem for creating Plugins.txt Enabler, and thanks to the Starfield Script Extender Team and the ASI Loader team - this mod is easier to install and less likely to break things thanks to their hard work.
If you want to support future mods made by myself, please consider looking at my Skyrim/Skyrim SE mod, which I provided links for earlier in this description. While I am not trying to solicit additional donations for this simple mod, this mod is opted in to DP, and 10% of those have been allocated to ElminsterAU, the original creator of xEdit.
Summary of Ship Weapon Changes:
All Energy ship weapons (this includes lasers, but not particle beams) will do 100% more damage to shields compared to their values in the original game. Hull damage is unchanged, thus making them strongly suited to their niche of taking down shields. Their range was unchanged, so particle beams are still the weapon of choice against shields at long ranges, but there is now an incentive to consider using energy weapons up close due to their greatly increased shield damage. While turret ranges were reduced to less than pilot controlled weapon ranges for some weapon types, this was not done for energy weapons as they are already among the shortest ranged weapons in the game and presumably turrets can lead their targets just fine at such short ranges.
All Ballistic ship turrets do 50% more hull damage and have 50% more range compared to their values in the original game. All other Ballistic ship weapons do 50% more hull damage and have 100% more range. The 106S Shot Cannon is an exception - it does 50% more hull damage like the others, but it only has 75% more range to symbolize the shot becoming overly dispersed, and it has a 10% increased crit damage bonus to symbolize the chaos of multiple projectiles tearing multiple holes in a critical ship component. The justification for the turrets not having as large of a range improvement as their pilot controlled siblings is that pilot controlled weapons are more accurate, so the turrets simply won't attempt shots at the same distances that a pilot will attempt them at. Shield damage was not increased for any ballistic weapons, thus making them strongly suited to their niche of damaging ships once their shields are down.
Missiles had their overall charge time reduced by 25%. Note that their recharge time was reduced from 15 to 10, but their recharge delay was left at 5. This improves their DPS over a long time frame due to more efficient charging, but doesn't make the first few shots any more effective. I did this because missiles fell a ways behind particle beams when fighting larger fleets because it took so long for them to charge once depleted.
EM Weapons were given a 25% range boost, but were otherwise left as-is. The justification for this is that they were already well suited to the niche of boarding ships. Due to the fact that ballistic weapons got a range increase, the overall range of combat in the game is slightly increased so this change is mostly to keep them from falling behind. It's definitely a noticeable improvement, but it doesn't make them OP in my opinion.
Particle Beams were generally the best weapon class in the game, and as such, they were mostly left as-is except for minor range adjustments, with the exception of 2 turrets. Since particle beams are notable in that some of the best weapons are class A or B, I decided to make small range adjustments so that the higher classes have slight range advantages. For pilot controlled weapons, Class A particle weapons lost 150m of range, Class B particle weapons lost 50m of range, and Class C particle weapons gained 50m of range. For turrets, Class B particle weapons lost 150m of range, and Class C particle weapons lost 50m of range (there are no class A turrets). Turrets suffered slightly more than pilot controlled weapons to avoid buffing some of the best weapons in the game, since class C turrets are excellent already. This also keeps some consistency with ballistic weapons, where turrets also have less range than pilot controlled weapons.
There were 2 particle turrets in the base game that had somewhat odd values relating to stored shots and recharge - they held many shots like an auto particle turret, but charged rapidly, like a non-auto particle turret. This resulted in them being rather powerful, but annoyingly, it resulted in them not suffering very much if powered down. For example, the DPS when using 3x Obliterator 250MeV Alpha Turrets at 12/12 power was generally identical in practice to the DPS at 1/12 power because the charge was nearly impossible to deplete. The Disruptor 3320 Neutron Turret was somewhat similar, so I rebalanced them both. To avoid eliminating their primary advantages, they are both still designed to be good choices to use at a reduced power setting, but you are now incentivized to run them at something like 6/12 as opposed to being able to run them at 1/12 without any drawbacks. You can still get away with running them at less than full power because it is kind of cool that some weapons can pull that off while others can't, but the stock values just made it too extreme. Now there is at least some incentive to use auto particle turrets over these, as you can run them at 1/12 power and take advantage of their large number of stored shots as with other auto particle weapons - an advantage that was nullified by these 2 weapons being unable to deplete their charge at 1/12 power in stock form. The two modified weapons are still very efficient in terms of recharge efficiency - for example, the Obliterator 250MeV Alpha Turrets still recharges more efficiently on a charge per damage context than the PBO-300 auto alpha turrets, it is just no longer to an absurd degree. This means that a 1/12 power PBO-300 auto alpha turret group has a bit of a damage boost at the beginning of the conflict when compared to a 1/12 power Obliterator 250MeV Alpha Turret group, due to the former's stored charge (like auto particle beams generally do) but the Obliterator 250MeV Alpha Turret is the king of DPS over the long term and is so efficient that doesn't suffer much from being run at half power... but it will now at least suffer from being run at 1/12 power.
Disruptor 3320 Neutron Turret: Ammo Capacity 20 -> 4, Recharge Time 0.4 -> 2.88
Obliterator 250MeV Alpha Turret: Ammo Capacity 30 -> 3, Recharge Time 0.6 -> 3.6
Their ranges were changed in accordance with the changes made to all other particle turrets (a very slight reduction).
I also improved the weapons used by a certain group of NPCs that you will meet midway through the main quest. The following section contains very minor spoilers - basically the name of their faction and the names of their ship weapons.
Spoiler:
Show
Starborn Weapons were improved across the board, as the Starborn ships are just too weak in my opinion.
All Starborn Torpedoes were given a 50% boost in initially stored shots, from 4 to 6. Since the total recharge time is unchanged, they now recharge all 6 shots in the same time it used to take to recharge 4 shots. This gives them a DPS boost as well. This boost is even larger than the DPS boost given to standard human missiles, and there is also the advantage of better initial burst damage due to more stored shots. This helps Starborn torpedoes catch up to human missiles.
All Starborn Solar Flare Beams were given a 33.333% boost to shield damage and hull damage. They were also given a 40% range boost. Human particle beams are also good at damaging both hull and shields, but they were not improved at all, so this improvement helps the Starborn weapons catch up.
All Starborn Supernova weapons were given a 20% boost to shield damage and a 50% boost to hull damage (these weapons don't seem to be obtainable, but I wanted to keep the balance between Starborn weapons in case a DLC/Mod uses them). This rebalance amplifies the hull advantage that they already had, making them better overall, but especially better at their niche. They were also given a 20% range boost. This is a similarly large improvement as was made to solar flare beams, but the changes were designed to accentuate their niche performance, thus rewarding skillful use.
Since this is a weapon focused mod, no other changes were made to their ships.
All Starborn Torpedoes were given a 50% boost in initially stored shots, from 4 to 6. Since the total recharge time is unchanged, they now recharge all 6 shots in the same time it used to take to recharge 4 shots. This gives them a DPS boost as well. This boost is even larger than the DPS boost given to standard human missiles, and there is also the advantage of better initial burst damage due to more stored shots. This helps Starborn torpedoes catch up to human missiles.
All Starborn Solar Flare Beams were given a 33.333% boost to shield damage and hull damage. They were also given a 40% range boost. Human particle beams are also good at damaging both hull and shields, but they were not improved at all, so this improvement helps the Starborn weapons catch up.
All Starborn Supernova weapons were given a 20% boost to shield damage and a 50% boost to hull damage (these weapons don't seem to be obtainable, but I wanted to keep the balance between Starborn weapons in case a DLC/Mod uses them). This rebalance amplifies the hull advantage that they already had, making them better overall, but especially better at their niche. They were also given a 20% range boost. This is a similarly large improvement as was made to solar flare beams, but the changes were designed to accentuate their niche performance, thus rewarding skillful use.
Since this is a weapon focused mod, no other changes were made to their ships.
Compatibility:
Only Weapon Forms (WEAP) were modified in this mod. No perks, or Generic Base Forms (GBFM) were modified. This will be incompatible with most ship weapon mods, unless those mods ONLY modify the weapons by modifying Generic Base Forms (GBFM) or if they only modify weapon related perks. If that doesn't make any sense to you, just avoid using this with other mods that modify ship weapons in any way. Alternatively, you can check for conflicts using your preferred tool.
This mod was made with xEdit, which is a community favorite tool for modding Bethesda games. It is our best option for creating plugins until the official creation kit is released. Note that plugins aren't yet officially supported for Starfield, so you take additional risk in modding your game at this early point in time. It is recommended that you make a save before installing any mods in case you need to revert to that save. Official updates may break mod compatibility at any time, and could potentially break your save as well. This mod is rather simple; it only overrides some records, it does not add any new records. This may make it less risky than some of the more complicated mods, but all mods carry some risk - especially at this early stage in Starfield modding.
For this mod to work, you need to enable .esm plugins. The community seems to favor using Plugins.txt Enabler by nukem, found here:
https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/4157
This is considered less risky than using the sTestFile method, but it is still rather experimental. Please read the details on that mod page to learn more about installing plugins. Note that you will also need to install Starfield Script Extender for Steam editions of Starfield, or an ASI Loader for GamePass editions of Starfield - the description page for the Plugins.txt Enabler has all the information you need as well as the links to the other required files, so I am not going to include that information here.
Note that this mod is an .esm as opposed to an .esl or .esp due to the way that Starfield loads plugins. xEdit only supports creating .esm plugins at this time, and while this may limit the number of installed mods, they are doing this to help prevent issues with load orders breaking... though plugins aren't officially supported, so issues could still arise. Mod at your own risk.
If you aren't ready to deal with issues such as saves that might break when the game is updated, best to stick to modding older Bethesda games for now, as they at least officially support modding and thus mods are less likely to break with updates. I made a pretty cool new lands mod for Skyrim with an Orc vs. Thalmor questline that can help keep you entertained as we wait for official mod support for Starfield. The Skyrim SE version is here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/99557 and the Oldrim version is here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/116382 so go ahead and check those out if you enjoy Skyrim.
Special Thanks:
Thanks to Bethesda and all of the IP holders for supporting the modding community... yes, it's true that mods aren't officially supported as of this release, but releasing tools takes time and when the official tools are out we will see even more exciting mods.
Many thanks to ElminsterAU and the xEdit team. xEdit is a great tool, which I have used for modding Skyrim, and as of now it is the only tool that can create plugins for Starfield. The Starfield version of xEdit is available here: https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/239
Also, thank you to nukem for creating Plugins.txt Enabler, and thanks to the Starfield Script Extender Team and the ASI Loader team - this mod is easier to install and less likely to break things thanks to their hard work.
If you want to support future mods made by myself, please consider looking at my Skyrim/Skyrim SE mod, which I provided links for earlier in this description. While I am not trying to solicit additional donations for this simple mod, this mod is opted in to DP, and 10% of those have been allocated to ElminsterAU, the original creator of xEdit.