Perspectives on Mods
...especially for players new to mods
It's probably best to avoid adding mods unless they solve a problem you
encounter during gameplay. So this is typical, especially for your first game:
- Play Vanilla until
- You lose your mind trying to sell ALL your trash items to vendor
- Add the StarUI Inventory mod (and the 2026 patch for it) or equivalent
- Encounter bugs in Skills, etc, Bethesda really should have fixed
- Add mods: Starfield Community Patch, maybe Skill Fixes
- 2026-24: I'm currently testing the FL/TA update without either mod
- In 2026, the Starfield Community Patch is less important than it was,
- For the Skill Fixes mod, it's likely still relevant, just for fewer
issues. It's mostly blatant bug fixes missed by the Community patch,
However, a few go further and may seem too advantageous to some players:
Env Cond +15 (not +10), Nutrition x2, Commerce increases vendor credits
- Try to make it to the Unity without adding much more
After that, there are various player specific needs you might discover.
The list below is biased by my general desire to avoid making the game
easier (I'm playing on Extreme most of the time), or to avoid truncating
game loops like gear finding, credit acquisition, building ships, and so
on...
- Lost mind trying to capture ship and return to first ship (while docked)
- Sit to Add Ship to Fleet
- Lost mind trying to get doors to go where you want them in ships
- Place Doors Yourself, (and probably TN Class M, and Better Ship Part Flips)
- For nudists and/or better immersion
- No Bras In Space and Better Vanilla Nudes? StarQueen?
People like different ones.
Some modders paint shadows directly onto the skins
with no respect for the lighting engine
- If you want a hot key to switch to fists
- Unarmed Weapon
- Gravity being 1 g in caves/buildings on moons with 1/10 g drives you mad
- Gravity is Real
- Binoculars don't work
- Binoculars restored to working condition
- Lost patience with environment effect bugs
- Ambient Environment Fix
- Can't believe your enclosed Rover variant doesn't protect you
- Vehicle Hazard Protection
- Why have brigs and infirmaries that do nothing
- Useful Brigs, Useful Infirmaries
- Don't feel evil enough
- Chop Shop Organ Harvesting
- You can Far Travel on Foot but not by Rover? Madness. Try
- Summon Rover
(doesn't fix it directly, but summoning is even better)
(note that you can almost always Fast Travel to your ship in the Rover,
even overloaded)
- You want a resource "push" mode for connected outposts instead of the "pull" model the game supports?
- Magnus The Magnate Outpost Production Shenanigans
(4 parts per resource + some overhead to keep a chest of it
and autosell the rest, no matter how much gets sent to your outpost)
- You want the body armor off the guy you just headshot (etc...)?
- Shades Immersive Looting
(warning: this will shorten the game loop around
credits unless you use it sparingly, making you rich too soon and
looting for credits feel meaningless - depending on the player)
- You try to rage quit during the puzzle in temple 60 or so?
- Autosolve Temple Puzzles
Gracefully skips the puzzle .
Even better with a mod like Less Annoying Temples that lets you pick
up the next temple location without visiting Vlad every time.
(On any planet with a Power From Beyond quest,
always go to the temple first, or you'll lose the location)
There are lots of other mods I like, but the point I'm making is to wait
until something bugs you before looking for a mod for it. If you don't
play vanilla first, you won't even know what the difference from the mods
is, or whether they're potentially hurting play for you rather than
helping.
Warnings
It's highly recommended to first play the game without mods until you
faceplant into the big pretty orb.
Otherwise when anything quirky happens, you won't be able to tell whether
it's a normal game quirk, a game bug, a mod effect, or a bug in a mod.
Also, simply having a large number of mods tends to cause bizarre behavior,
like all your ship's cargo spontaneously ceasing to exist. The threshold
varies, typically 100±20. I had that issue around 80 active mods.
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