Some stuff that should be ported/set up ASAP

[RaidersClamoring]

As we enter the Starfield age of modding, there will be stuff 'missing' out of the gate upon which a lot of other modding will depend.

The obvious one being a Script Extender. I'm hoping the SE team is still motivated to set that up. It'll be a lot of work and you should never take any free labor for granted. Perhaps a donation is in order.

Second, there might be technicalities and auxiliary functionality involving the console that need to be solved. The console is extremely important for debugging and such. It looks like they will still be using Scaleform, i.e. Flash and ActionScript, which is what the current consoles are made up of as well. If so then the swf-files will need to be investigated and perhaps edited. For this there is JPEXS.

https://github.com/jindrapetrik/jpexs-decompiler

Optimized textures, precombine utilities and FPS boosters will be necessary to even get people to bother playing this thing. The game is going to be like molasses for a lot of people. It looks like this time they are really determined to have very detailed geometry and textures, mega high res and perhaps they may even refuse to provide lower res settings judging by the 16 gb ram minimum requirements. This will be a problem for everyone, not just those with low ram, but also modders who will have to wait for all textures to load in before testing their work, and also on the production side where they will have to work with much larger and slower files. Hopefully not too big an issue.

Serialization, e.g. JSON and XML, never really took off for FO4 but has been great for Skyrim modders. It means you can store data to custom files to enable administrative utility, cross-save/cross-session carry over data and to store and share things like looksmenu data.

Looksmenu, as mentioned, this one will be critical unless vanilla expressiveness has been greatly improved.

And then stuff like Bodyslide which I don't really care about, but lots of people will crave it.

Will we see Nifs hanging on for another cycle as the 3D format? If not then there might not exist any free and available tools to analyze files and perform simple edits.

xEdit, e.g. TES5Edit and F4Edit, will not have an equivalent so there might not be any way to easily analyze the game forms.

The legacy maintainers of these tools can all use some encouragement, but of course NOT any nagging or encouragement that inadvertently takes the form of nagging. Maybe slip them a buck or two if they have some donation channel.

Did I forget anything?

[Pyroxian999]

waiting unnofficial patch for starfield xd, Todd leave the work to modders, always. :/