From the maker of Real.AI, DECAY, PLUNDER, Statesec, New Vegas Essentials, Pandemic and Unnatural Selection... 



After almost 200 hours of playing, ODYSSEY is the result of my general pet-peeves and critical thoughts on how Starfield could be improved. And after BethSoft dropped the latest edition of their patented virginity protection software I was obviously going to start modding right away. Featuring a lot of fun things meant to add more content and twists and turns and interesting things to the game.

Because Starfield, and Bethesda's games in general are generally about the journey. About the worlds. About the details and scenery. People say Bethsoft games have bad storylines... yeah, well, those people are idiots. It's not about the story. It's about the journey. Forget the story. YOU make the story. The characters and the writing is just there to push you into the world. 

As such, get ready to embark on an ODYSSEY! 

Now you can feel like you're part of a real sci-fi story, as if you're stepping into a riveting tale like when Jean-Luc Skywalker found out that Sauron was his mother!

NOTICE: THIS MOD IS A WORK IN PROGRESS, PLEASE CLICK LOGS > CHANGELOGS
TO SEE ANY CHANGES TO THE FEATURES

A NEW WORLD:
One big problem with the game is the lack of content. It's very scientifically accurate that most planets are just boring lifeless rocks. But it's also very sciencefictionally inaccurate! Now the planets are TEEMING with stuff. No real estate goes to waste. Many of the arbitrary restrictions for world generation has been removed. The environmental restrictions have been kept intact however. So you won't see wind farms of planets without wind and what have you. But most planets now have outposts, army bases, listening posts, abandoned factories, science stations and whatever else you might expect. If YOU could reach a planet, then why wouldn't the military or a bunch of space corporations? You don't need a full blown civilisation to extract resources from a planet. So expect a lot of fun stuff out there. On lifeless planets they'll probably be abandoned or infested by something scary. On more living planets you'll might find some friendly faces. The Procedural Generation is actually pretty cool when you give it a chance to do its thing. 

DANGER AND EXCITEMENT: 
So combat in the base game is kind of boring and predictable. Enemies are spongy, the environment is very toothless and life in general feels very humdrum, even in moments of excitement. So now things have changed. First off: Bullet physics. This makes a huge difference. It means enemies are free to hit targets besides the player. On top of that, aim correction is removed. So they can shoot at stuff behind you too, like that big red explosive barrel you didn't notice until it was too late. 

Speaking of, environmental hazards and explosions are now DEADLY. It's extremely satisfying now to set off a pipe full of helium and watch the burning enemies fly. But watch out: Unless you know what you're doing, those tactics can easily backfire. 

Damage has been rebalanced greatly. No more spongy enemies, and the player can easily take a few dents too. The player's HP levelling is still the same as vanilla because of how you're constantly outnumbered. Making you 1:1 with NPC stats would probably make the game pacing frustratingly slow. But headshots are deadly, centre of mass does a bit more damage, and boostpacks are now a total wildcard. 

Because you can in fact instantly kill enemies both with headshots and boostpack shots. BUT, the boost packs let off a devastating explosion that's just as likely to kill you as any nearby enemies. Fighting indoors and in tight quarters can prove a challenge. Boostpacks can wipe out an entire enemy squad from the right distance, but at the wrong place they can just as easily be a danger to you as well. Boostpacks are a spanner in the works intended to add an element of unpredictability and challenge, but with a little bit of strategic thinking they can prove extremely useful. 

I also changed up turrets to work as, well, turrets. They're super accurate, they can shred you in a matter of seconds, and they work like actual machine gun nests. You're not supposed to attack them head on. Move in their blind spots, use grenades to attack them without exposing yourself, maybe snipe them from afar. But yeah, turrets are designed to murder stuff that gets too close, and now they actually do that. So keep this in mind. 

COMBAT SHOWCASE:


SPACE ECONOMICS: 
One problem I had with starfield is how stupidly easy the economics of the game is. How to get rich? Simple: Reach level 50 and suddenly you're netting between 2000-6000 credits worth of loot for every spacer you kill. As you're suddenly trapped in a frankly annoying cycle of looting stuff and then having nowhere to sell it because all the shops are out of money. 

It's kind of boring, and I can see why so many people lost interest when they were trapped in this cycle of just killing people, selling their loot and then looking for more places to sell loot while their ship cargo gets more and more bloated with various guns and armour. 

So, the boring way to fix this would simply be to make sell prices more punishing, or maybe adding more money to vendors, or even reducing the value of loot. But, these are not FUN CHANGES, all you do is speed up the BORING. We need more twists and turns. More intrigue. More rewarding experiences. 

So there was really only one choice... I had to overhaul pretty much all the loot in the game. BUT IT WAS WORTH IT! I also fixed up a few things Bethesda seemed to have missed. So here goes: 

For starters, I made a whole new distribution system for guns. This was needed not just for economic changes, but also for more fun. Now guns are entirely distributed based on rarity. Not enemy type or even level. As a result, you'll find some extremely fun and challenging encounters. Even boring enemies can now show up with a rocket launcher or a microgun to ruin your day. 

And now you might think "Oh, so your idea of fixing the saturated economy is by adding the most expensive guns to generic loot lists huh?" to which my retort is: YES! 

Because first off, I've added a value malus to all factory standard gun mods. So most generic run of the mill guns that nobody cares about are now kind of worthless. They're no longer full of magical money that reflect zero use value in terms of the product itself. Crappy guns now have crappy prices. You can still make money as a gun dealer, but you need to look for rare and interesting guns that still have the same value. Or, alternatively, upgrade the guns yourself like a gunsmith. 

As for the microguns and the rocket launchers, as well as the gauss weaponry, that stuff is now marked as contraband. All the 10000+ guns are now illegal. Which makes a ton of sense. In fact. Most stuff related to the military, enemy organisations or criminal activity is now contraband. Including certain homemade chems and non-regulation healing items. You can still make lots of cash, but you need to be Han Solo in order to do so. 

Suddenly outposts have a useful purpose in how you should probably stash your illegal items there if you're planning on visiting settled systems. 

Moreover, meds, chems and food are now significantly rarer. Not so much as to make them impossible to find, but enough so that you might actually run out of them once in a while and feel some degree of tension in having to deal with limited resources. Which, at least in my opinion, should be literally the whole point of food and healing items? I don't know why Bethsoft keeps making that stuff functionally infinite. 

And I also made it so that a lot of the generic equipped armours that NPCs drop are no longer lootable. Only legendary/coloured armours are lootable now. So we've gone from stupidly overvalued loot to occasional treasure, and that's a lot more fun I think.

Obviously you can still get armours from vendors/armour displays/containers. This only affects loot dropped by dead NPCs. But it goes a long way to balance the economy.

And, last but not least: Vendors. Vendors now have more roleplaying friendly credits. No longer can you sell your latest shipment of totally legal microguns to a fancy restaurant. Instead they will go "Monsieur, zhis is a fancy restaurant, pleazhe ordeur zome zhnails or get out!" Before they spit on you and throw a screaming cat in your face.

So convenience stores and fancy restaurants are no longer interested in bartering random guns. Instead corporations will do that. That's what corporations do. It's one of the big reasons why they suck. So corporations get lots and lots more money to trade with, meaning that once you do sneak it past the border checkpoints and it's time to cash in, you won't need to visit a million shops in order to do so. 

Oh and I also upped both the price and capacity for ship cargo holds. Meaning you don't need as many of them when you start, leaving you some flexibility in ship building. With the added bonus that at late games you have a fun money sink as you can make ridiculously huge hauling ships for all your hoarder needs. This should hopefully make outpost building and crafting a bit less annoying. 

TRAVEL: 
So this was an uphill battle. But I tried my best to alter the numbers on boostpacks to actually make them feasible for travelling faster. Is it perfect? No. Turns out there's some hardcoded limits I couldn't surpass. But I did remove most of the invisible syrup that slows the player down whenever you try to boost someplace, meaning that you should be able to fly at a better pace as long as you get a running start. Sprinting from a downhill position seems to be the best way to get momentum when you boost. 

AI: 
Started to add some Real.AI maths into the NPCs subroutines and algorithm. Big work in progress but you should hopefully see some difference in behaviour. Particularly their ability to actually notice stuff in their surroundings. 

HEALING AND FOOD: 
And last but not least. I've remade the healing system to be more roleplayer friendly. You can tell this game was made by Americans when their idea of healthcare is to eat 600 wheels of cheese in a single sitting. But for those of us who were born in uhh... less remedial places, this seems bizarre and arguably unhealthy. So here's how food works: You get an awesome 1%/s regeneration buff that lasts for 5 minutes outside of combat. Eating a reasonable portion between combat encounters will now help you heal. Meaning that you can keep your now quite scarce medical items for actual emergencies. 

And I think that's everything for now. I will continue to add cool stuff to this mod as I play with it and come up with fun ideas. But to summarise: 

- Bullet physics
- Damage rebalance
- Bigger and deadlier explosions
- More contraband
- Rebalanced loot
- New healing/food
- Boostpacks explode
- Cheaper standard weapons
- Vendor credits rebalance
- Better boostpacks 
- Cool new loadouts for everyone
- New and improved world generation 
- AI Overhaul

COMPATIBILITY: 
See the summary I just made and use some detective work. My magical database that keeps track of literally every single mod other people made is currently non-existent so you'll have to do that footwork yourself. 

I tested this mod on a mid-game save and it seems to work perfectly fine. New game is recommended for balancing reasons though since it can't do much about all the random expensive crap you've stuffed into every crevice of your spaceship.

And as always, my attitude towards customer service remains the same: 
The customer is always wrong, so be polite or leave me alone.