Ok

Excellent Video. Good coverage with the benefits of each Mod and the hows at the end is superb. Like others, I have played it extensively, but have been waiting for the modding community to work their magic and now is a good time to work on getting back into Starfield.

I thought I told you to stay gone

Really solid video. Very detailed and carefully curated. Also, love that you included the full mod list with links in the description. Thanks for the push I needed to get back into the game. Put 100 hours or so in on launch week, then just stopped. Gonna change that now.

This man is a GOD. getting back into starfield and modding it currently and so many of the recommended mods here are godsends and fix so many of the burdening mechanics and lack of. best starview mod video ive seen.

Plugin txt Enabler is no longer required… Since the release of the Creation Kit, that has been built into Starfield directly. I’m pretty sure it even says it on Nexus Mods.

Can you make a video on best modded companions for Starfield?

Could you make a console version?

the art of merging mod is also good if you cant get ship builder tolerance tweaks to work
https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/11095

Quick modding guide is right here! Perhaps give it a full read before starting, but don’t let it intimidate you. It’s a bunch of steps, but no single step is particularly daunting, and most of this stuff you’ll only have to do once.

This is for a Steam install of Starfield. You’ll have to set Window Explorer to show file suffixes.

1. Install Starfield. Fire it up once. This will create a couple necessary files in your documents folder. If you’ve already played it since you last installed it, you’re good.

2. In your documents/mygames/starfield folder, find Starfieldcustom.ini. If there isn’t one, open a basic text editor, and create a .txt file, and call it that (overwriting the .txt with .ini). In that, paste:

[Archive]
bInvalidateOlderFiles=1
sResourceDataDirsFinal=

Starfield treats this file as an ‘override’, and the file has final say over any modifications. It’s a separate file so you don’t have to worry about overwriting anything important, you can always just remove the custom file if something goes wrong. Pretty clever, I’d say. This little bit of jibberish tells Starfield to look for mods on startup.

3. Get an account at http://www.nexusmods.com. Yes, there are other mod sites, but this one’s the big one. You’ll need to cough up an email to fire up the account.

4. Search for Starfield Script Extender on the Nexus (or use the link in the description) and follow the instructions on the page for the install. Use the ‘Manual’ download button for this one, choose the latest version. You’ll just have to unzip a couple files and drop them in the Starfield root directory. Create a shortcut for the file ‘SFSE_Loader’ and put it wherever you want to boot Starfield from (desktop for now, probably), because this is how you’ll be launching Starfield from now on, as opposed to Steam directly. You will, however, have to make sure Steam is running before booting the game.

5. We’re going to fire up the game once here, but before you do, a bit of advice. Generally speaking, you’ll not want any modded game to receive any updates in the middle of a playthrough. You’ll want to use the same version of the game the entire time, because sometimes a game update will break mods, or worse, save files with mods. It’s best to put Steam in Offline mode whenever you fire up the game. Opening the game with the SFSE Loader while Steam is Offline will allow you to skip any updates. Fire it up now using this method to make sure it’s working. When you’re done playing Starfield, you can put Steam to Online again, just make sure any updates aren’t queued to start, and put it back to offline before you fire Starfield up again.

If you do accidentally install a game update, well, we’ve all done it. USUALLY the bulk of your mods will be fine, but a game update will almost always need a new version of SFSE. The team is usually pretty on the ball with it and will have an update out in a day or two.

The rest of the mods we’ll install with a mod manager.

6. Get a mod manager. In this video, I use Nexus’s own manager, Vortex (they have a link to it on pretty much every page). It’s pretty good. I don’t use it for everything, but it seems to have no trouble with Starfield. Note that you have to install Vortex on the same hard drive as the game you’ll be modding with it. It’s pretty intuitive, and it’ll start by asking you what you’d like it to manage, and where you want it to save your mods. It’s usually a good idea for the mod folder to NOT be in your documents folder, or any other Windows folder (such as programs). Tell it to manage Starfield.

If you’d like to use a different mod manager, go for it! If you’re inclined to do that, it’s probably a pretty good assumption that you know what you’re doing with it, so I’ll leave the rest of the mod installs to you.

7. Let’s install the first mod with Vortex. Find the Starfield Community Patch on the Nexus or use the link above. Use the ‘Vortex’ link to install with Vortex this time. You’ll be asked if you want to associate the mod link with Vortex, and you’ll want to do that, because it means you’ll not have to do any further file management, and Vortex will also take care of the unzipping. You’ll only have to do this the once. It’ll ask you if you want to download slow or fast. One of those is free. Guess which one.

8. Open Vortex (I’m guessing you didn’t close it). Starfield should show in the top left. On the bottom left, if Vortex is downloading something, it’ll show there. If you don’t see any downloady-looking bits, it’s done already, and given how small a file the patch is, this will almost certainly be the case. On the left, find the mods button. You’ll see the patch you downloaded in the body. It’ll say uninstalled. Usually you’ll just download all of the mods you’re going to be using first, but let’s get this one running now. Click the pull-down menu where it says uninstalled, and bring it to installed. It’s now good to go. Set it to enabled. Tah-dah! Mod installed.

9. Now that you know the basics, it’s time to go nuts. Download all of the mods above that you want, definitely the utility ones, EXCEPT for Spongecop (there’s an extra step there, we’ll circle back to it last). You don’t have do the uninstalled-installed-enabled thing each time, you can just download ’em all and do it after. If you’re doing the slow install, don’t forget to wait for the 5 seconds to time out before downloading the next one. Beyond that, go ahead and let them queue up. Vortex will take care of the downloads.

10. Once they’re all downloaded, you’ll want to enable them all. The RIGHT way to do this is to enable a few at a time only, and then launch Starfield to make sure it’s working. Ideally, you will want to have a game saved (can be in the first three minutes, anywhere you can walk, really) and take a couple steps around. Using this approach, if something goes wrong, you can narrow the issue down to the last couple of mods you enabled.

But that’ll take hours. Let’s be realistic and just turn them all on now. Put them all to Enabled, and in the orange bar above the mod list, hit deploy. Cross your fingers, fire up the game (using the SFSE Loader, offline, remember!) and If it works, guess what? You’re DONE!

If it doesn’t, well, turn off all but the utility mods (you don’t have to uninstall them, just turn off enabled) and give it a try. Then turn on a few more, repeat until you narrow down the culprit. It’s always a possibility when you’re modding that you’ll have to do a bit of digging to sort out issues. Sometimes it’s just easier to not bother with the troublesome mod. Of course, there are tons of forums for information on this, including on the mod pages themselves, and you can always ask here. I can’t guarantee I’ll have the answer, but I’ll take a crack at it, at least. I’d recommend a new comment instead of replying to this one, as others might be able to help.

11. Spongecop. Download it, install it, enable it. Now, on the left in Vortex, you’ll see ‘Load Order’. This determines what order mods are loaded in, and mods further down (thus later) will override stuff up top. For instance, let’s say you installed a mod that replaced 10 outfits, but you REALLY liked this other mod that replaced one outfit that was also one of the ten. Well, if you load the second mod AFTER, when the game fires up, it’ll first replace the 10 outfits, then it’ll replace the one. If you load the second one first, it’ll change the one, then change the ten, so you won’t get the one, just the ten. Hope that makes sense.

ANYWAY, if you scroll down the list, you should see FOUR instances of Spongecop for both Enemies and the Player. Deselect or select as necessary to make sure one only ONE of EACH (player and enemy) are selected. The number beside them denotes how much HP will be added per level. Hit deploy in the orange bar above. All done!

I did mention a hotkey for fists. Remember that StarfieldCustom.ini? Open it up again. Add the following, either above or below (but not in the middle of!) the lines you put in earlier:

[Menu]
bUseConsoleHotkeys=1
sConsoleINI=StarfieldConsole.ini

What this instruction does is tell Starfield to look in the file ‘StarfieldConsole.ini’ for hotkeys. You’ve probably noticed that file doesn’t exist, so make a new .txt file and rename it that. Add the following to that file:

[Hotkeys]
shift-f=player.cf “Actor.EquipItem” 1F4 0 1

Now shift-f is a hotkey for fists. Go ahead and change that bit to whatever you want. If you take a look at the lines you’ve pasted in there, you can probably see how all that is working, and if you want to make tweaks of your own, how you might go about it! It might take a bit of searching online for the specific terms, but don’t be surprised if you find yourself being the first to find a clever use of these files that no one else has thought of. That’s kindof how the whole modding scene works! If you do, be sure to share it!

Anyway, I hope I haven’t scared you away, and you give this all a try. Have a great time playing Starfield again for the first time!