zanity

A consequence of the dreadful lighting system used throughout the game. Everything looks bad (yet the shaders that do the rendering are some of the most complex in the industry). When the official tools release, and the new systems are documented, mods that do a complete lighting overhaul will start to appear, and transform the look of the game.

You are asking for a game that DOES NOT EXIST. Here's the thing. When Todd (the non-gamer) dreamed pointlessly of his space version of Fallout, all of his ideas game from TV shows/films. Everything was going to be in his game, far more than your suggestions. One little problem got in his way. There is no-one with talent left on the Beth dev team- the skilled people left years ago- all the visual quality in the original fallout 3 and skyrim came from a young concept artist who died shortly after Skyrim. The first phase of Starfield development was a total disaster. Nothing Todd imagined could be achieved- the engine wasn't up to it and Todd's crew certainly weren't. After wasting years and hundreds of millions of dollars, a new vision was created for starfield- a desperately simplified design that the entire dev team agreed would easily work with the engine and their existing tools. At that point, all decent space concepts were DEAD. And no, you cannot ever mod them back in, because the Creation Engine is far too primitive. There's a very good reason the released version of the game is a loading screen simulator. This was never Todd's original vision. No form of flight sim can be done in Starfield, so forget any idea of 'flying'- whether in space or landing etc. One can SCRIPT random events- and believe me the fully modded Starfield in 2-5 years time will very much have this kind of content, on land and in 'space'. But never thru a 'vehicle system' like a 'flying' spaceship under player control. Again that cannot be done in this engine. And just because you list any number of games that can do this will NOT change the limitations of the Creation Engine. Starfield ain't Elite, or star raiders or any game like that. Indeed the current 'arcade' shooty that represents space battles is just putrid. Better that modders replace it with RPG DnD like systems. What Starfield should have done was use TWO engines- Creation Engine as usual for land surface, and say Unreal 4 for space. But with Todd in charge, only the worst possibly technical decisions were ever going to happen. Every modder ever could have told Todd that using the Creation Engine for space was a recipe for disaster, but every modder has some level of technical awareness, and Todd literally has none. And look, what far too few people understand in these forums is that mods, for a given engine, CANNOT overcome the limitations of that engine. Please read this again and take a moment to let that fact sink in. You cannot mod away inherent limitations of an engine. Fix bugs- yes. Rewrite certain functions to make them faster, and maybe reduce data limits- sometimes. But the engine stays itself. And if the engine is aging and rotten, as the Creation Engine and its script system most certainly are, then any mod bashes its head against this limit.

We know the script code is the worst possible- recursive and bubble-sorts on data sets running at a snail's pace. Any current mod increasing the number of items a script has to process will have disastrous performance. Th UI stuff already lags like crazy. The synthetic pauses that slow down the UI were cynically added, so you just get used to the idea that the UI is supposed to be laggy by design. I've personally witnessed agenda hires who could not write code to process both lower and upper-case input. The excuse for hiring such people is that they 'know' the coding language. This is like claiming that because a person 'knows' English, they are fit to be hired as writers. Coding is the knowledge of (and the ability to create new) data structures and algorithms. The agenda pushes the lie that a programmer is someone aware of the 'rules' of a given coding language- useless rote learning that anyone with an IQ above 80 can be trained to pass. Beth hasn't recruited real programmers for years, and the skilled coders that gave us Fallout 3 and Skyrim have long since moved on. Starfield has some creative rendering code, but this came from the iD team, and work they'd done for the latest Doom engine. The script code that gives a Beth open world game life is totally broken in Starfield. When the official toolset is released, modders will completely recreate the script system and fix all the current issues, and create frameworks useful for future mods.

Yeah, just change it in the setting menu- wait you mean Starfield doesn't even have the "invert camera" setting that flight games have included as standard for more than TWO DECADES? Well that's one million and one in your face and perfectly obvious things that now need fixing. I just hope every player allows themselves to be fully disgusted at the state Starfield released in after, in Todd's own words, another 12 months used purely to polish the game. Todd told us everyone at Beth, especially all those agenda hires that clearly would rather shoot themselves than play a AAA PC game, spent hundreds of hours each exploring the 'wonder' of Starfield. Yet not one of these people bumped into the y-axis flight issue. A front-line, second one issue for anyone using a flight mode. So in truth, Starfield is SO ROTTEN, no-one at Beth wanted to play it even when paid for doing so. Nobody played the game in any true sense at Beth- no-one. They all had better things to do, and the agenda hires are people that (at most) only 'game' on their phones anyway. Beth employees simply pretended to play it- even the QA staff. This happens more than you think at devs whose managers are aging, and have given up gaming long ago, thinking it "childish". Todd is no gamer, but then neither are the people who control Ubisoft, Activision or EA. A gamer would scream blue murder at a missing front-line feature like axis inversion. A non-gamer like Todd wouldn't even understand why it was an issue. But again, Starfield will become the first true crowd-sourced from-the-ground-up fully modded and over-hauled game. In a few year time, everything good to great in Starfield will be from modders. Kinda like what people hoped from Star Citizen (as a result of giving a ---man all their money, like that was ever going to work out). And for Nexus, Starfield is a living dream- the best possible state a Beth game could have released in to justify this site.

Ah- another warning about using early mods. They are mostly made for clout by people who really don't have the faintest idea of the consequences of the things they hack and change. But in fairness EVERYONE using early mods should know this and live with this. Even texture mods are being released WITHOUT correct compression, or awareness of what all the layers do, and most would think (wrongly) that there's nothing you could get wrong with a texture change. Early texture mods for FO4 (including those that had hundreds of thousands of downloads) were all wrong. Only later did modders learn how to correctly prepare new texture data. So you can imaging the pitfalls for all the non-texture mods.

Ah- the solution is to wait until the current HACK mods (like just about all of them) are updated to properly respect the actual data formats used by Starfield. And this may not happen until the official tools release early 2024. At the moment, the hack mods simply hope what worked with FO4 will work with Starfield- and well that just isn't true. They partially work, but the new stuff in Starfield is ignored, so you have issues like the one you mention. The mod authors are not blind, so they'll notice the issue as well- but since they are currently posting for clout won't really care. And in fairness, what should the informed EARLY mod user expect but broken mods, faulty mods, and mods that break the game? Problem is, too many people bought Starfield thinking (wrongly) that its ability to be "immediately" modded was part of what they were paying for. Early mods are for fun and 'profit' but not for getting it right. Starfield has the most complex shader render system of any current game (even if it looks like ...). It is NOTHING like the tech of Fallout 4. Messing with the renderer today is GUARANTEED to produce visual issues. Even when the tools release, Beth may choose to keep their shader methods secret- and then they will need to be fully reverse engineered.

Sigh- two replies that utterly miss the point. NO-ONE needs someone to point out the NVMe interface is faster. No-one. Literally no-one. So you score ZERO clout points by a post saying this- this forum ain't Facebook or any other for clout social network swamp. Those with reading comprehension would have spotted the point of my post- namely different USB 3 ports on one's PC may have different abilities, despite in theory supposedly being part of the same standard. Actual USB standards, down to the involvement of Intel, are terrible. Many people may not know that simply switching the USB port used by their external SSD will radically change its read behaviour- because that fact is not obvious. Starfield doesn't need a high speed NVMe drive, but it does need a low latency device with fast continuous reads. The latency is actually the BIGGER issue, since the in-game delays will 'feel' the latency one-to-one. Indeed many people have an issue where Windows puts their flash drives to sleep if not used for a little while- and the wake-up latency can be 5 seconds or greater. Starfield uses DirectStorage without telling people (down to the PR disaster of DS in Forspoken). DS just doesn't play well with many systems, and Beth was too dumb to test the DS speed on a given install, and fall back to normal direct file access if the DS was reporting issues (like with my NVMe drive when using its correct drivers rather than the generic Windows ones). AMD systems in particular seem to have strange issues with some of their USB ports (which is what I experienced). Debugging issues in Windows can be a VERY complex problem. Beth should already be telling its customers with known issues to install default NVMe drivers, or try swapping an external device to another port. Actual correct solutions to actual known potential issues. "Get an NVMe", as a solution, is as lame as "get a bigger PSU" (which fools used to think, and some still do, fixed every PC problem) or "buy a 4090". Steam surveys prove that the majority of gamers game on very low end systems (largely thanks to Nvidia, and their terrible consumer practices). The SteamDeck proves that most games can be given adequate performance with sufficient knowledge- tho of course, like a console, that device has fixed hardware. Most Starfield gamers will NOT be using an NVMe. So they need advice on how to ensure they get the best possible experience on the hardware they do own.

Now now, can you imagine the impossible big-brained code required to detect that the player is in conversation, and prevent the random chatter of NPCs for the duration. I mean such a coder would need at least one day's worth of experience. How could Beth do its agenda based hiring, if it expected its code hires to have experience and/or talent? Employ people on that basis, and well we all know what the 'problem' would be. Another massive bunch of people just got laid off all across the industry. Directly down to these policies, and projects with hundreds of millions of dollars of budget, and years already in dev, producing nothing of salvageable value so it is cheaper to just can the project and swallow the loss. When people do not know what they are doing, they destroy industries and everyone's jobs, including their own. Starfield has literally the worst quality coding I've ever witnessed in a AAA title, and in-your-face issues like the NPC babble problem that should have been spotted and fixed within one hour of QA, let alone the ONE YEAR Beth itself admits was used just for "polish". Every gamer, within one hour of playing Starfield, could list one hundred things that obviously need fixing and/or improving- and I'm not referring to anything caused by limitations of the Creation Engine. Starfield is a symptom of something truly awful that has happened at almost every major publisher, and if you do happen to have talent and ability, you would not want to work for any of them- every one has a truly toxic environment for anyone who can actually get their job done well. But the truly talented now have more choices than ever when and how to work, so don't need the big publishers. A true vicious circle and a true race to the bottom for publishers like Beth, as witnessed by pretty everything they've released recently.

Mod will happen, but timing depends on how much trouble Beth went to to prevent the reversal of this AGENDA change to how their games previously worked. Beth does not care how much immersion is spoiled by their agenda policies, or how much sales are also damaged by same. This 18-rated game must be a 'safe space' for the people that are least likely to buy or play such a game- go figure. Personally I'd have zero issue with agenda content if the game gave an option to revert to a non-agenda mode, like with gore or swearing. But the agenda says the agenda must be forced on people against their wishes and desires. Everyone has noticed how the agenda has given Starfield a tame and dull world, yet a world where all you can do is essentially murder, murder, and more murder. But the self-same forces that ensure AAA games like Starfield have the agenda also designate the choice of war scenarios in COD- there is nothing innocent or good about this.

Many people tried running Starfield from their external USB SSD drives, and had terrible results. Well here's a possible answer. On AMD AM4 motherboards, some have long noticed strange issues with USB behaviour on occasion. Today I discovered that an external SSD drive completely malfunctions on some of the USB ports, but works fine on others. The malfunction is NOT in correct reading and writing, but the speed and consistency in which either happen. It is of great significance that CrystalDiskMark, the industry standard way of checking the performance of drives, found no issue with the 'bad' port. But the USB port is bad in ordinary file access. On the bad port, the SSD freezes for many seconds after a burst of reading- you can imagine what this would do to Starfield's performance. Now as it happens, I run the game fine from an NVMe device, which at first had serious issues down to starfield's unstated use of DirectStorage having problems with my NVMe driver- I had to regress to the generic MS driver to get Starfield to run properly. So I haven't run Starfield from any external SSD, BUT my experience would directly explain why certain people had issues when they tried to do so. Remember, Beth has issued ZERO guidance on the matter, and forums are full of fools who tell those with problems that they shouldn't have installed the game on an HDD (which they didn't and stated they didn't in their OP, which so many fools can't even be bothered to read before they reply). Anyhoo, if your USB SSD seems to be playing up, try switching it to another port, especially those ports on the backplane on the back of your case. And to make things STRANGER, my dodgy USB 3.0 ports work fine with other external SSD storage. It must be down to the driver chip in the SSD enclosure.

If you have to ask here to fix such 'issues' you probably should not be modding so early in the first place. Early modding does not belong in the nursery. And legally Starfield was not 'sold' on the basis of its moddability. Most early mods are terrible hacks, many done for clout by authors who are well aware they have no real idea what they are doing. Anything could go wrong, and most certainly will if you use enough of them. No-one is holding the hand of the early modder. Debugging- which is the computer term for exploring and solving such issues is HARD. You have to do work- read all available current info in forums etc- experiment with different combinations of installed mods- have an instinct for where a bug is likely to be found. I used a home mod from a well respected FO3 modder, and it broke all of a certain type of switch everywhere in the game. He had an unfortunate bug in one of the scripts. I had hundreds of mods, but the debug skills to track down the offending mod quite quickly. This was a recent mod for a prehistoric title from a highly experienced person. The current situation with Starfield mods is a million times worse- literally. Today they should only be used in fun, or to actually grief your own game. The exception are those 'essential' mods that simply fix FOV, the negative bias LOD issue or the like. A single safe point of change.

A good lesson why those that insist on using mods way too early should take the time to understand the manual install 'method'- which isn't a method but the simply understanding of your PC, and your game. Mods for starfield are NOT officially supported, and won't be until the official tools release. Between now and then, Beth actually has a duty NOT to care what updates do to mods. Now the sane Starfield modder would solve this issue by NOT updating their game until all their fav mods have also been updated. Rushing to update your game while using mods is plain stupid. And Beth updates, notoriously, tend to be the most useless in the gaming industry.

EVERYTHING UI is this game needs fixing, changing and re-coding. And in time everything will be. A total overhaul is the actual mod required. At the moment, Starfield is all bug, all fault, all incompetence. It is like buying an old well worn table, and point to one of a million scratches and asking "can we buff that out?". Yes, but it wouldn't really change a thing. Early mods are mostly cheap hacks. The real modders are playing the game with a notepad, making a note about everything that is wrong, and prepping the revamped systems that will start over but correctly this time. Then they wait for the official tools to release, and the reverse engineering of file formats to complete. Starfield can be fixed- will be fixed. And will be the first AAA game whose later quality wholly belongs to modders, with nothing useful from the original dev team. I would argue that modders will even change the definition of what actually constitutes a mission in the revamped world. The existing game is simply what Todd's hopeless team could actually throw together in desperation when the original plans collapsed with their inability to create any of the systems that were part of the initial game design specs. Worse, most of the visual ambition went into the bin in the desperate need to make the game run well on the Xbox-S. People will continue to ask for this, that or the other to be fixed here- items chosen from a list tens of thousands long. The true answer stays the same- patience. The good modders already KNOW what needs to be fixed. The fixes are coming, en masse, but two years hence at the earliest will be when the entire game has been bashed into some form of acceptable state for normal play.

I'd try to find any Starfield Wiki and post your discovery there. OR make an official Nexus mod (do they allow mods that don't need downloads, but are information only?). Posts here soon get lost, and there seems little traffic. On Reddit, ensure your post can be found with a general search. Google your own post with something like "site:reddit.com starfield change player appearance to any NPC". If the search doesn't find your post, think about making another post with carefully chosen keywords for the seach spider to note. PS addition. 'site' must be used with a lowercase 's'? WT-eff Google? Anyhoo tried out my own suggestion search string- discovered a million billion other people have already posted this 'knowledge' to the point where there are more posts begging people not to post it any more, hoho.

Best current solution- check the released mods- find any mod that seems to be doing something similar to your request- then contact the mod author and ask directly if they'd consider adding your change to that mod as well. Otherwise use a decent search engine to discover if that variable has been documented somewhere. A search engine asks your question simultaneously to every online resource. Well it does if it is not Google. Google used to do this kind of task brilliantly, but now the agenda has totally ruined every service Alphabet provides, and I'd suggest using Bing or Yandex instead.

Starfield is a whole lot less demanding than tech influencers claimed, providing you are using AMD GPUs and CPUs. It runs great at 1440P at high settings (on a freesync monitor- a tech feature essential for ensuring sub-60 FPS appear perfectly smooth) on a 5700XT or 6600M/6600/6600XT, and any modern Zen processor. A 5700 GPU today can be found for much less than 150 dollars, and the newer 6600 cards around 150 dollars. In 2023 terms, this is far from an expensive gaming PC setup. The Nvidia/Intel propaganda push (both companies spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year pushing expensive inferior solutions into the mainstream) makes ordinary gamers think PC gaming needs a LOT of money. Starfield has but one redeeming quality- it is a perfect sandbox for modders. And a decent gaming PC allows one to also enjoy all the earlier Beth games modded to the max while waiting for Starfield modding to reach critical. PS here's a secret to the easiest cheap gaming PC. Find a very cheap good enough second-hand base station from the likes of Dell and put a 6600M card from that Chinese equivalent to that American store named after a type of female warrior. The base station needs a to contain a decent CPU (it will be Intel, sadly, but ensure it's at least a decent 4-core), but more importantly a GPU expansion slot and a PSU that can handle the 130 Watt load of the 6600M. 150 dollars for the computer, 150 dollars for the GPU. Personally I'd home build with cheap new components, but I know that some are still too scared to do this.

You already answered yourself. Is it anyone's fault but YOURS that you could not simply finish the vanilla game first BEFORE considering mods? But you are of the ENTITLED generation, where everything has to be done to serve YOUR needs, else something is wrong with the world. Now don't get me wrong, I think common courtesy is a very desirable Human characteristic (and thus political censorship of certain mods that only change the user's own experience is morally indefensible). But places like this are 'hard' places, where a large section of users and contributors wouldn't recognise courtesy if it hit them on the head. They like clout, fighting, taking sides, and power. To a lesser person, it is an act of 'power' to spoil the fun of another person. Trolling, griefing, swatting, etc. It is all part of 'cancel culture'- censorship taken to the next level. Orwellian in every respect, and dominant in the West today. Anyway you made some ludicrous comment about mods being unneeded after the vanilla game is finished. Which tells me that in your case, you really are doing it wrong. Spoilers are always irritating, but matter less as the cultural and quality value of the media declines. Beth bumps rock bottom in both metrics. If you care about the 'story' in a Beth game, may I respectably suggest it's time to start reading great literature so you can finally appreciate how far removed from worthwhile Beth storytelling actually is. I've enjoyed Beth games for the world-building, but story- yuk. You cannot spoil what the author has already made rotten. Here's the generic spoiler for all Beth games- there is no true role playing, and the missions make you the big boss of every faction and organisation you come across. Todd loves Mary Sue in the worst way. And back to the main point. Starfield is in a pitiful state. Mods will reverse this- moreso than with any previous Beth game. People should learn self-control and patience- put away their copy of Starfield for at least TWO years, and then experience it in all its modded glory. Four years would be better.

Why are so many people who make Youtube videos 'sensitive' about the NATURAL sound of their voice? I promise any such sensitive person, maybe because English is not your first language, no one that matters cares about how you sound, and anyway almost certainly think you sound just fine. But synthetic voices and voice changers are a pointless Youtube curse. They speak of low-rent social media, where everything recorded has to be altered somehow for the sake of it. However, if voice changing must be done, there are AI tools that do it pretty much flawlessly, with a certain amount of manual work and experience.

If you want to mod now, you need the 'easy' type of mods, and those are things that mess with settings in control files, or alter simple data files (like textures or audio files). Otherwise (and far more logical) research as much info as possible into how the type of mods that interest you have been made for fallout or Skyrim. Pay attention to the mods that proved to be easy, vs the mods that proved to be harder (or perhaps impossible). You obviously need to match your skill level and how much work you expect to put into your project. All coding is effort and experience. All art design is effort and experience. The authors of some existing mods give access to all the workings, allowing you to experiment with their mods- in other words you can mod a mod - perhaps a good place to start. If it's art design mods that interest you, the third party tools used to create the datasets for earlier games will surely end up having the same use in Starfield. Modders begin either top down or bottom up. Top down means the idea first. Bottom up means the skills, experience and practice first. Bottom up is the right way, but top down is what most inexperienced modders desire. In which case take your idea and seek the closest existing mods for any game. Then look to the forms of work involved in those mods. Remember to use Internet searches- and to find online sites that you can explicitly reference in your searches for better results. When the official tools for Starfield appear, there are a LOT of needed skills to start using these tools effectively. Anything you study and learn about Beth game modding in the meantime will help you.

Well, if the prior games did not exist with official modding tools, you might have a point- I mean no-one could then usefully anticipate what form those tools might take. HOWEVER the prior games do exist, use essentially the same engine, and therefore their official modding tools tell people a lot about Starfield's yet to be released modding tools. Even more so now the game's been released, and people have insight via the game files, and the experience of the game itself. And Starfield represents PEAK MODDING- a Beth game literally of interest because it can be modded, and for no other reason (given that the vanilla game is awful in every respect, and a massive disappointment). Everyone with a serious interest in Starfield imagines what the game could now become after everything is improved, and decent content added in. Modders want to hit the ground running. I think many ambitious modders want to do mods that only the official tools will allow, but want to prep as much work as possible before they release. I think such early pre-emptive effort can be said to still fall under the title of this forum.

For a game with a budget vastly higher than even the recent Indiana Jones movie (one of the greatest money losing flops in Hollywood history), we get a game that offers us about the same level of quality and entertainment- just about none. The Agenda destroyed the once successful business and artistic models of both, and both released in hacked and reworked states vs the original design vision/shooting script. Indy 5 suffered from a script that failed with test audiences again and again and again, causing the budget to more than double with reshoots. Starfield, on the other hand, suffered from agenda hiring practices that meant no-one on the team was competent enough to implement the original design ideas. For heaven's sake, the Beth script coders couldn't even handle the vector and state issues of the follower code, leading to followers that don't follow, and followers who, in the vicinity of the player, stand stock still facing a blank wall. And, let me remind everyone, these script coders only had to port the mostly working follower code from FO4. They couldn't even do that- couldn't get such simple code right when an earlier Beth implementation was available to study. Take Valheim (for heaven's sake, play this wonder if you haven't yet- it works great in single-player). I think the (original) dev team was 3 people (that's around ONE THOUSAND times smaller than peak Starfield). It generates a random spherical (sort of) continuous world of astonishing procedural quality. Fantastic gameplay. Brilliant coding. Interesting, fun, and awe-inspiring. What does Starfield bring to the table. At first it at least seems better than FO4 (a very very very low bar), but then the lack of meaningful exploration or decent lore hits one in the face. The rubbish identical artifact caves that are literally bolted, last minute, randomly to the side of dungeons clearly crafted for other purposes. I don't know what the original plan was, but it certainly wasn't something as conceptually rubbish as this. This is what you get when the original idea goes wrong, just as the story in the cinema version of Indy 5 bares little resemblance to the movie they originally shot. Technical incompetence meant one Starfield was worked on the the majority of the dev period, and then another vastly 'simplified' Starfield plan was switched to when it became apparent no-one on the team could code to save their lives. What we get is the simplest and most trivial use of the existing Creation Engine, and its existing tools. But what about 'imagination'- there are obviously forms of imaginative content that don't need clever (or even basic) coding. I'd suggest that if Team Todd knew just how primitive and basic Starfield would end up being, they might have tried to lessen the disappointment with more emphasis on world building. Worked harder on the story and SF concepts. Included some of the things mentioned on your list. But when you are a lousy dev, all you have time for is the desperate need to get any old rubbish onto the shelves (so to speak). And let's face it, MS wouldn't know quality if it hit them in the face. Any old rubbish is MS's highest standard- witness the recent Halo fiasco. What Starfield has going for it is PEAK MODDING. The game might have mostly flopped as a gaming event of 2023, but the interest in modding has never been higher. And it is so apparent that the only thing that can 'save' Starfield (or actually rebuild it from the game up as the game it always should have been) is modding. For The Nexus, this is a dream made reality. After FO76 (no meaningful modding allowed) and Todd's love of whale hunting (hitting the vulnerable with methods designed by rogue industrial psychologists to get them to keep spending on a game after the initial purchase), it seemed for a time that Starfield might only have monetised mods. If Todd could have delivered the game that existed in his imagination, that would certainly have been the case. Instead, all Todd could tell his MS bosses is "the modders will love it". You say you'll wait for a serious rework, and I think that should be the same response of everyone, after their fill of the underwhelming vanilla experience. The Sim Settlements Team will be one of the early major players, but 'early' still means at least TWO YEARS out. The 'overhauls' come first, but they'll still sit mostly on the vanilla game, merely making it a whole less amateur and irritating. New frameworks need to be developed for just about every mechanism. The one good thing about 'space' is that new planets, spacestations etc can be their own thing without worrying about how to integrate them in the base game, or base map. Being their own instance, they don't even have the performance issues of complex assets inserted into older Beth games. I know such ambitious separate world mods for Skyrim or Fallout never seem to leave 'alpha' despite endless years of promotion by the mod teams, but I feel it is going to be very different with Starfield. The only fly in the ointment will be if the same kind of culture war that destroyed Fallout: The Frontier mod rages against anyone who attempts to 'spice up' Starfield in the 'wrong' way, or mods while holding the 'wrong' types of 'political position'. We would never have had the genre of SF in the first place if 'wrong-think' rules had been allowed to cancel the authors. And believe me, with each new generation of authors, there were forces that would have loved to have them silenced- and tried. SF is the ultimate imaginative "what if?" form of writing. Yet Starfield is the po-faced actual representation of today's society from the POV of one side.

You CANNOT strip a body because the runs counter to the AGENDA. AAA devs have strict agenda codes - they follow these codes for a number of reasons. The lowest is they get massive governmental grants and tax breaks if they provably do so. So CDPR went from nude girly content in the first Witcher game to the elimination of all normal adult sexuality in Cyberpunk (with the exception of one cut-scene). Yet during Cyberpunk's dev period, CDPR promised IP appropriate hyper sexualised content- as witnessed later in the cartoon. The polish government gave CDPR many millions of dollars in free tax-payer money to develop the most life like living world mechanisms in Cyberpunk (hilarious- have any of your witnessed the game world?) but really to ensure Cyberpunk followed agenda content rules. MS and Apple are agenda companies, so work done by their divisions must automatically follow the code. Many gamers will already be aware of all the things the German government banned in computer games, and how many titles had to have special German versions with massive changes to gameplay and visuals. The agenda is the same thing on a vastly great and more Orwellian scale. The consequence of this is the massive proliferation of 'adult' 'anime' c-divison (but now moving into b-division) games on Steam- the so-called anti-agenda games. This is a terrible situation, and "team agenda" always scream, when the agenda is pointed out, "if you want 'adult' content, go watch 'adult' movies". Was Midnight Cowboy an "adult movie". It was for adults, but it was not an "adult movie" in the true meaning of that phrase. The intention of the agenda is to drive all normal adult content (with the exception of murder- think about this) out of games with an adult rating. Team Agenda will scream blue murder if the remake of The Witcher game still has the collectible cheesecake pictures. MS's PR trick is to play on the line "although our games have an 18-rating, we all know 12-year-olds play them, so they MUST be censored" but MS actually wants them agenda censored for adults, as an essential part of its "Brave New World" policy. Nexus exists largely because of the success of certain mods, yet Nexus is an agenda site and this comment will hence-wise not be welcome. Nexus has banned anti-agenda mods (and ensured mainstream pro-agenda news-sites crowed loudly about the fact) yet what will happen when the first mods that allow stripping of bodies in Starfield appear? The clue appears in the Novel 1984. The great unwashed masses were allowed their 'bread and circuses' - only the middle-classes and above were subject to strict overt agenda control methods. So Nexus will pretend body stripping mods are 'different' in nature from the mods that get banned. To make my point clearer, if as a German you create and distribute any mod that reverses the German agenda censorship of any German version of a game, you go to prison - the same applies in Australia, that has its own explicit set of governmental and state censorship rules for games. Bad and getting worse. To be free means being able to do and think whatever you like so long as it doesn't directly hurt someone else by intent or direct negligence. One can operate to this philosophy, or against it. Team agenda is against it. And as a result our AAA games suffer.

The gameplay of Starfield is wretched- absolute rock bottom. And is also easy peasy. Yet a few days after release, people clamour for easy access to 'legendary' gear- in order to grief their own game. Now there is nothing wrong with people wanting to choose their own way to play their own version of a game (Nexus, of course, disagrees, banning for political reason certain mods that do precisely this). However, my point is that nothing more clearly proves what a failure Starfield is when this seems to be a sensible option for extracting 'fun' from the game. In a good game, the challenge is everything. Every choice made by the game devs is worth experiencing. Within hours of playing Starfield, all hope is lost. Everything is bad. Everything is wrong. And everything is bugged and badly designed. Some reviewers moaned about the easy of obtaining 'legendary' gear loot drops at the very beginning. And since when were open world Beth games LOOTER-SHOOTERS? Answer- never. Looter shooters, and the colour coded loot system, were designed by the worst people in the industry- expert psychologists skilled in the art of subliminal manipulation of the vulnerable. Now since the collapse of loot boxes and pay-to-win mechanisms in the AAA PC gaming industry (with the exception of licensed sports games that sell to less intelligent gamers on average, with low impulse control, and who hence respond well to the paid 'casino' mechanisms those games almost always contain), looter shooters like the Borderlands series are morally harmless. However, Beth open world games are a successful genre to themselves, and didn't need to cheaply jump on another gaming genre's core feature. It proves a total lack of imagination on Todd's part. And this with a SF/Space setting with a billion relevant things that Starfield could (but did not) have used for inspiration. If I'm playing a looter shooter with colour coded gun loot, then there's all sorts of other game elements I require. Challenging combat. Excellent and varied enemy AI. Mini-bosses and full bosses. Multiple attack and defend animation and combat sequences for the bigger enemies. Skill, skill and more skill required to progress. Large amounts of gore and dismemberment. And then there's Starfield- possible the worst AAA release ever from a major publisher, given its budget, dev period (at least 8 years), dev team size, and prior experience. If the game could not be modded, it would already have been forgotten and dismissed. If you have never played a GOOD modern first person shooter, you maybe won't appreciate just how rotten the shooty is in Starfield. Starfield pretends weapon variety, but in truth all weapons are essentially the same mechanism. Point in an exactly straight line, press the mouse button, and then its just the DPS state vs the armour/life stat. Todd boasted that he took NO advice from the iD team on how to do the shooty, and boy does it show. Remnant 2 was a recent brilliant shooter with brilliant procedural level/map generation and brilliant varied atmospheric locations. Beth games in earlier times were never really proper shooters, but they had strong personality in their RPG availability of scenario specific weapons. The combat in those games worked better than it should (given the code implementation) precisely because they were NOT looter shooters or Doom shooters. They were cold-blooded deadly worlds where you felt the threat, and fought to survive or make a difference or to ramp up the chaos. Then there's Starfield the murder simulator. You kill because killing is good apparently. People, animals, it's all the same. This is no abstract 'space invaders' like Remnant 2 or Doom where shooting is just the form of the sport. No, Starfield is a Clockwork Orange nightmare, and by intent. Oh, I'm not saying we the gamers are dumb enough to fall for the agenda, and get off on the constant killing in a 'real' environment. No- we merely try to get some fun from the lame looter-shooter mechanism, hence this thread. Starfield was never going to have the agenda success of COD. But I am saying Todd ruined whatever Starfield could have been out of the gate by pursuing goals diametrically opposed to those we wanted and expected.

I suggest asking about GENERAL Xbox Starfield modding, not some specific example. You'd be likely to get a helpful response then. Or Google (though Google is trash these days). You know- find out if currently changing Starfield on the console is possible at all. Mind you, there is ZERO clarity in your message. QUOTE "playing through XboX pc". What on Earth does that even mean. Xbox is the CONSOLE. The PC gamepass version should NEVER be referred to as 'Xbox'. If you mean the gamepass PC version, then someone has already provided comprehensive instructions on how to get PC mods working with the non-Steam version in the general forum- I suggest you check his post out, it is clearly marked.

Have the official modding tools been released? No. So what was your question again? Why can't I magically mess with the Starfield files with no effort? Now that's a difficult question. Could it be because the official modding tools haven't been released yet, do you think? The modders getting stuff done are skilled, and patient, and methodical, and understand NOTHING is being handed to them on a plate. No, there isn't a secret club hiding stuff from you. Without official support from Beth, a ton of stuff must be done the HARD way. And because so many early modders work for clout, sadly not every one of them is going to want you to benefit from their hard work. They will often think "If I had to do it the hard way, why should another get away with being lazy?" I don't approve of that attitude, but having been banned by one modder from accessing his files simply for suggesting he mention other similar mods in his notes, I know some modders literally hate competition, the downside of the Nexus clout system. But no doubt in the discord you'll find out whether the sound files are currently being documented by any friendly modder, and maybe make some useful contacts. However good computer work IS hard work, and files need to be altered or replaced with a level of expertise. Too many early mods, like the texture replacers, actual make a ton of mistakes down to not properly understanding the file requirements, thus missing compression, lighting layers, correct normals etc. Slowly carefully progressing on a mod project, building up documentation for your discoveries and learning as you go is the best way. Why rush for clout?