Immersive Ship Refueling

[AuronUmbra]

Fuel in vanilla Starfield magically refills after every jump; effectively, fuel capacity just adds loading screens to your course, in addition to the redundant "undiscovered route" limit. Thus, travel doesn't feel earned; it just feels pointlessly limited.

 

This mod concept proposes removing the "undiscovered route" check and deducting fuel as you jump, so fuel becomes the reason you can't just go anywhere - a real reason. You'll have to think carefully about your jumps, refueling stops, and ship fuel storage capacity.

 

How far you can travel will depend entirely on how much fuel you have and the total lightyears a route will cover; naturally, grav drive range determines how direct (short) or winding (long) the route will be.

 

Jumping costs a number of units of Helium-3 per light-year, which even in vanilla can be improved with perks. Also, it may be appropriate to increase the capacity of all fuel tanks to ensure this proposed mod adds more immersion than grind.

 

To refuel, you'll have a few options. At any ship services location where you can have your ship repaired, you will also have the option to refuel. The price is calculated based on the credits you'd pay for units of the resource Helium-3 from any vendor and the amount of units you'd need to fill the empty space in your tanks.

 

Alternatively, if you have Helium-3 in your cargo, there will be an option in the ship menu to "Refuel Ship". For instance, tapping the repair key or button could refuel the ship; holding it would consume a ship part to repair as usual. Refueling will use as many units of Helium-3 as necessary to fill your tanks, which could be up to all the Helium-3 in your cargo. Helium-3 stored in fuel tanks won't contribute to cargo mass.

 

To ensure you are never truly stranded, almost all asteroids will provide Helium-3 when mined, and almost all random ships you encounter will now have some Helium-3 for sale or drop some when destroyed. In the worst case, it seems every system has a planet or moon where you can extract or collect Helium-3 yourself.

[BlueBeard1983]

Love this idea, I was disappointed with how important they made Helium-3 seem right at the beginning of the game to just ignore it for the rest of the game.

 

Sure, they didn't fully ignore it, but close enough. You can increase the range of your grav jump if you have Outposts with Helium-3 extractors, but that outpost could literally be on the opposite side of the galaxy with no links to other outposts.

 

Adding an actual fuel requirement to grav jumps would make building outposts a necessity for saving credits when jumping around the galaxy.

 

I would propose the mod add a new container inside all the cockpit pieces that you can only add helium-3 to, and that the tank you install determines how much you can store in there. When you land on a landing pad at an outpost that has helium-3 it will fill that container, speaking to the ship service techs will have an option to fill the tanks, or you could manually add to the container, with a hotkey for doing it from the pilot seat.

 

Also, if you have crew, they can take helium-3 from the main cargo (but not the captains locker) to refuel on the go, thus increasing your jump range based on total helium-3 in the fuel tanks and cargo bays. Maybe make it so that the crew that can do this are the ones with the Astrodynamics skill since it increases "fuel capacity" and the higher the skill, the farther you can jump.

 

To explain what I mean by this let's take Sarah's (+30%) and the Astrodynamics Specialist's (+10%) skill. With Sarah, it doesn't increase the amount of fuel you can put in the tank, but she knows how to tweak the Grav Drive settings on the on-board computers to make them more fuel efficient, and more so than the unnamed crew member with the same skill, but these skills don't stack directly, if you have one crew with 10% and another with 20%, the total could be 25%, and not 30% since it could be argued that the one with the lower skill might not know all different methods to tweak the drive for further range, but might see a tweak that the higher skilled crew member didn't catch. Just change the skill description so this makes sense. Then have a script check the skills of each crew member and have it take into account any HE-3 that's in both the fuel tank and cargo hold when determining how far you can jump before running out.

 

To put it more simply:

 

-Fuel will matter

 

-Landing at an outpost with HE-3 will add HE-3 to the fuel tank *No credit cost, but limited by how much HE-3 has already been extracted and stored at the outpost so might not fill the tanks*

 

-Crew with the Astrodynamics Skill will increase the Grav Drive range by "tweaking" it through the onboard ship computer, and they can stack skills, but not add the % together:

*10%+30% gives 35% increase range while 10% and 10% would give 15%, where 30% and 20% would give 45% total (basically, take 5% points off the lower skill and add that to the higher skill for total range increase), and adjust the skill descriptions accordingly so it refers to increasing Grav Jump range and NOT fuel capacity.

 

-Crew with the Astrodynamics Skill will take HE-3 from the Cargo of the ship and put it in the fuel tanks as needed (this could be done with a script that checks for the skill and then adds the HE-3 in cargo to the available fuel for jumping)

 

-Landing at a location with ship service techs gives the option to buy fuel *cost depending on HE-3 prices as if you were buying it under the resource category*

 

-Player can add fuel directly to the fuel tanks using a new container added to each cockpit

 

-A new option after destroying pirates that the UC or FC were fighting asking for HE-3 as reward *No credit cost*

 

-When disabling ships and boarding them, have the option to take their HE-3 *No credit cost*

 

-Buy HE-3 from passing friendly ships, or use pirating to just take it from them if you are going the pirate route *Credit cost if asking to buy, no credit cost if being a pirate*

 

Ok, so not more simply put, but easier to read I hope...

[AuronUmbra]

These are all intriguing mechanics and features, especially having the separate inventory for fuel and crew help out with refueling. I was thinking that given the limitations of existing mod tools for Starfield, adding a refuel mechanic needs to be barebones for the time being.

 

To add to my OP, it looks like the base fuel economy (at least of the Frontier) is about 1.6 He-3 per LY; so instead of having to edit every tank for more capacity, perhaps revising base fuel consumption to say 1 He-3/LY would be more efficient and more compatible with other mods that affect fuel tanks.

[HeyYou]

Hhhmmm.... The astrodynamics skill does indeed reduce fuel needs for grav jumps, but, I think if you have more than one crew member with the skill, the lower skill shouldn't really contribute anything... as the higher skilled crew member will already know the tricks the lower skilled member does. Maybe adding a percentage of the lower percentage?? 10% of the secondary crew members contribution? If you have more than two.... a lower percentage for the third, and fourth?

Edited October 30, 2023 by HeyYou

[FALCmods4all]

Good fuel economy stats.

 

I know Ive posted travel thoughts elsewhere, but will be great to see some if these cone together as cohesive groups of mods:

 

Distress Beacons

Idle Onboard Travel Time

Maintenance & Hobbies

Narrative Delivery & Passenger Events

Sabotage & Leaks

 

FTL style stranding & distress beacons have also been mentioned a few times and would couple well fuel necessities.

 

I and a few others have also been interested in, to the extent possible, replacing ship loading screens with some sort of idle time on ship where one needs to wait, sleep, or do other on ship tasks during inter system or inter planetary travel occasionally interrupted by attacks or new mod encounters.

 

I really look forward to thinking about my ly per minute/hour and au per minute/hour dynamics as well as deciding whether to travel with min power to avoid detection vs with systems up and ready for the worst. I also hope we find a lot of great onboard activities and chores to mod into the game. Having little games, skill training, or maintenance tasks to buff ship weapons, shields etc while waiting to reach a destination would be nice and immersive. Add to this making delivery or passenger missions have unique onboard events to resolve and suddenly the logistics of getting from A to B feels complex and real at least and overtime logistics may become surprising and strange like Sunless Sea.

 

Id also like to a system danger level system where the number of outposts or ships in your fleet can impact how safe particular systems or routes become over time. Likelihood of distress beacon triggering merchants vs pirates, etc.

 

Oh, and last major space travel mechanics Id really like to see are manual hull breech etc repairs and occasional crew rarely developing ptsd or hidden agendas and sabotaging the ship. I guess heat leeches could also cause rare fuel leaks.

[AuronUmbra]

I and a few others have also been interested in, to the extent possible, replacing ship loading screens with some sort of idle time on ship where one needs to wait, sleep, or do other on ship tasks during inter system or inter planetary travel occasionally interrupted by attacks or new mod encounters.

 

 

Check out my other concept, More Immersive Space Travel (MIST).

[lvlnd]

Erick mentions the fear of ending up on a barren moon without enough fuel to leave. But somehow our character has a connection to a magical endless supply so no worries! I like this idea. Recently when collecting fuel from a facility I thought how it would be so much more immersive if I needed to use it to top off my fuel tanks.

[ghostfc3s]

I made this 

https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/7197?tab=description

 

Took the better part of 2 months to setup and code.