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I was looking at the Pacifist ethic, which I've never taken before because I thought it would hurt me in the inevitable fights. This is what the wiki says about it:

Empire : −15% Empire size from pops
Planets :  +5 Stability

Policies Principles

    Edicts Can use the Peace Festivals edict
    X Cannot use Unrestricted Wars War Philosophy policy
    X Cannot use Aggressive Interference Pre-FTL Interference policy
    X Cannot engage in Indiscriminate Orbital Bombardment
    X Cannot use Aggressive First Contact Protocol policy

As a person who generally plays turtle and avoids wars because they screw with my technical ascendency sim, this looks like there are no downsides. Can that be right? Are there no hidden horrific events or war debuffs this doesn't cover? Does the Peace faction just kinda chill as long as I'm not starting any fights?

I'm not a fan of most of the current list of popular grass mods for a couple reasons. First, they are often just too tall. Second is that they often put what, to me, are unimmersive plants in the wrong biomes. In particular, I don't like waist-high oceans of wheat on the tundra of Whiterun.

I've been using just the grass meshes from the venerable Skyrim Flora Overhaul. I really like the low ground cover it provides for Whiterun. However, in an age of 3D\parallax meshes, a lot of these meshes don't look that great.

So I'm just curious if any of you are really happy with the grass mods you use and, if so, why.

I've been using a few mods to make ship building better in Starfield and none of them seem to be that popular. I figured I'd do my part to give them a few more eyeballs and give Lemmy a little more content.

• TN's Useful Ship Structure - Adds various buffs to structure components to make them more than just wastes of mass. At a bare minimum, everything gives a little hull bonus.
• TN's Hab Tweaks - Essential the same thing as the previous, but for habs. Mod author tries to tie the buff to the theme of the hab, but falls back on a little more cargo if nothing else fits.
• ComSpike and Conduction Grid - Allows you to buy the titular modules on starships beyond what you had during the Fleet questline. Available in various levels of cheatiness, including barely-cheaty-at-all.
• Enhanced Ship Builder Tolerance Plus - Allows you to fit starship modules together that look like they ought to fit but seem to be just a smidge too overlappy. Comes in various tolerances depending upon how obviously weird you want your ship to look. I prefer the lowest level of tolerance but you be you.
• Spaceship Manager - This actually has several features, but I mostly use it for hotkey power settings. One hotkey for lasers, one for ballistics, and a third for escape, for instance. Very configurable.

I consider all fo these to be essential for my load order, now. They deserve a little more love from the rest of the community.

Just saw some comments on the xEdit Discord this morning from ElminsterAU, the primary dev for the project. He's been backwards-engineering Starfield since it came out, tweaking his project to make it work for Starfield. This is important because, as soon as he does, (safe) plugin-based mods become possible, opening up the floodgates for a whole new class of Starfield mods. Only, in its current state, he's not sure he can make it work. Or, for that matter, that the CK due from BGS "early next year" can make it work, either.

The image I've posted is a collection of carefully selected snippets of a much larger discussion, with all the supporting info being excluded for brevity. This is "headline reporting" at its worst, so I encourage anyone tracking this topic to go to the Discord and dive deeper.

Maybe he's having a bad morning after spending all night attempting to decipher undocumented code that is, literally, legacy built upon legacy built upon even older legacy. But if it's really this bad, then the modding scene for Starfield is going to have a much harder time getting started than is currently being anticipated.

Starting my 3rd playthrough, I felt like it was time to do something completely different. Everyone has their own head cannon, but I was struggling to envision a life path that had me joining Constellation, doing assorted heroic and adventurous things, and then becoming a corporate spy. For that reason, I’ve yet to do the Ryujin faction quests. At least for me, the opposite path, from street rat, to spy, to adventurer, made a lot more sense. So anyway.

In order to make that happen, I decided I wanted to try a non-Constellation start. I’ll get there, eventually, but not immediately. I thought others might want to consider this path so I’ll share how it went for me.

I started the playthrough like normal, all the way up to the initial dialog with Sarah. She’ll invite you to join Constellation, but you have a “not ready for that” dialog option. She’ll understand and offer you a place to stay while you mull it over. At this point, I just left. I had returned their ship, handed them their weird alien doodad, and gotten paid. I did not see the need to join their fancy clubhouse. For RP purposes, from this point forward, I did not return to The Lodge or use the Frontier. Those choices have some costs associated with them. For starters, I no longer had an infinite storage box for my resources, so I sold pretty much all of those. I also didn’t have a place to sleep, so I used a sleeping bag I found in The Well, on the upper level across from Jake's. Most importantly, I had no way off the planet.

Job one, then, way to buy my own ride because, for me, The Frontier did not exist. A base model Rambler, the VW Bus of starships, costs around 57k credits. If that sounds like a lot for a starting character, it is, but it’s not unsurmountable. To get the money for that, you want to have hoarded as much as you could possibly carry from the first pirate attack and the Kreet excursion. I wish I had hoarded more.

Next you are going to want to do every single New Atlantis side quest you can. Some of them are off-planet, and some (like the UC guard contraband one) are locked behind inaccessible quests. This will get you tantalizingly close, but you’ll still be maybe 12k away.

Take two levels of Commerce to knock 10% off the price of the Rambler and now you’re within spittin’ distance. From here, you can try a little larceny, but there isn’t much to steal lying around New Atlantis. I made it up by jumping the walls and exploring the surrounding area. Sadly, while there are things to see and do, I didn’t find any pirate compounds or Spacer groups to take out and loot. And, while the planet is settled, the fauna are still deadly to a low-level character. Worse, they use up irreplaceable bullets to kill them. In one rather unexpected encounter, I ran into a freakin’ terrormorph fighting it out with some Va’ruun Heretics. I thought I’d wipe them all and loot their corpses, but it ended up costing almost all of my ammo to finish off the terrormorph, and the heretics had nowhere near enough to make up for the loss. Lesson learned: avoid the wildlife. The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

I was also accosted by a squad of Ecliptic looking for me due to my “Hunted” trait. They had a lot of good loot on them, and that really helped. Sadly, for whatever reason, I couldn’t steal their ship, which would have been a nice shortcut.

I finished off the last few credits just collecting resources outside the walls and getting that second level of Commerce. I was able to buy my Rambler in just under 5 hours of game time. I was 8th level and lifted off the planet with about 2500 credits and 200 rounds of assorted ammunition. If I had anything to do over again, I would have hoarded more on Kreet and I would have completely avoided the terrormorph (as most people would).

So now, I’m free to explore the galaxy on my own terms. I’ll have to keep my inventory low until I build an outpost or go back to Constellation. My selection of companions is also drastically gimped, but manageable. I’m looking forward to this. I think it’s going to be an interesting run.

You may or may not be aware that the perk for starship shields is currently bugged, and working in reverse. If it's supposed to add 20% to your shields, it is actually subtracting 20%. Kinda surprised this hasn't made the first wave of bug fixes.

The bug is (probably) applied when a modifier is added to you or ship. For some reason, the modifier makes a permanent change to your ship's base stats so that even if you remove your perk (via console), the permanently reduced base stat remains on the ship.

If you are on PC, there is a console fix for this. Well, more of as "workaround" than a "fix". This will probably blow your achievements, so be sure to have an achievements enabler installed.

First, go to space and make a save you can fall back on in case you make a mistake.

Next, remove the shield perk. This may not be absolutely necessary, but it makes it easier to keep the math straight. We'll be adding it back later:

player.removeperk 002C2C59

Because this is a leveled perk, you may have add\remove more than once to get the earned level.

While in space, go to 3rd person, hit "~" to activate console, select your ship, and type "getav ShieldMaxHealth". This will return the base value of your shields, to which your perks and your companion's perks are added. So, for my current ship, that number is 630. That is the amount of shields my ship should have with no perks at all.

Now, if you had the first level of the shields perk, and no companion perks, you could check your ship status and find that the shield value listed there is 504, 20% less than 630. (If not, you don't have a bug. Go back to your save.) What you can do is manually bump your base shield value up to some value where the system-applied debuff takes you back to where you need to be. So, again in my case, I took my base value and divided by .8 to get the amount to set as my new base:

630/.8 = @788

In the console, I enter:

setav ShieldMaxHealth 788

Now I check my ship status and the displayed shield strength should match the original base: @ 630.

Now, I add my perk back:

player.addperk 002C2C59

...and the value should bump up 20%.

Reassign my crew to the ship and it goes up even further. I think Vasco or Omari makes it go up another 20% or so (even though they theoretically have different skill levels).

You'll need to keep an eye on your shield status if you're going to use this perk, because while I'm not positive what the exact sequence of events is, further changes to your shields and\or your perk can cause the debuff to be re-applied, and you'll need to tweak your base again. You may also want to make a note of your original base or use an old save to make sure your math isn't getting out of whack

So, yeah, that's a long convoluted mess, but since I went through the effort to figure it out, I thought I might as well share it.

Back in 2018, DarkFox127 (Moskom Estate, Caranthir Tower, his YouTube series on how to use the Creation Kit) put out Shalidor's Migrant Portals. It's a pretty nifty mod that, after a short quest (tied to a longer quest), gives you 5 platforms you can use to instantaneously (but immersively) teleport between anchored locations. Since I tend to build bases around Skyrim, this has a permanent place in my load order.

But, in 5 years, this mod has garnered all of 171 endorsements, and that's just wrong. DarkFox probably doesn't care that much about this mod, but I'm throwing this out there in the hopes that someone who might enjoy something like this finds it and, maybe, passes the find on to someone else. It's too useful to fall off the map like this.

Is there a mod out right now that supports dodging by double-tapping the directional move keys that works in Skyrim AE? This is the behavior from the classic TK Dodge mod, but my understanding is that this doesn't work in AE. The replacement mod, TK Dodge RE, has not gotten around to re-instituting this option. I've got a lot of muscle memory tied to this key-binding and I really hope I can use it in my next play-through.

Title says it all. If you think Reddit's been trending down lately, just wait.