No more getting trolled by shitty high level ship parts! Adds skill requirements to most ship modules while removing level requirements, allowing the upgrading of ships to be tied to Starship Design level instead of player level. Everything stat based to provide a smooth and fun ship upgrading experience.
This mod instead changes all leveled ship modules to instead rely on Starship Design level rather than player level.
Main benefits:
Build the best ship possible without needing to wait until Level 60.
Starship Design skill made useful. Multiple new modules in every category every time you level, instead of just 1 or 2 total.
The skill is now also useful for Class A and B ship users, as you’ll need it for the best modules.
Upgrading classes now feels like a real upgrade. Most level 0 Class C modules are equal or better than level 2 B modules.
Consistent leveling. No need to wonder if you hit the level for better modules, you’ll know whenever you upgrade Starship Design.
Purchasing and stealing ships made useful. If you don’t level Starship Design, you will need to get the best ships another way.
Quest reward modules are the best or one of the best to use – but still require Starship Design depending on the module strength.
Quest reward ships are actually good long term – and may be the best you can get if you don’t level Starship Design.
Logical module tiers. No more being confused about which module is better, since the skill requirement is grouped off of stats.
No more getting tricked by high level modules being worse than lower level ones (why bethesda?)
Stat grouping also results in a lot of the useless modules being actually viable since you no longer have worse stats but high level req’s.
No level restriction means you can actually see what modules await you in the future as you upgrade your skills!
A note on cargo: Cargo is leveled in vanilla, even though all cargo modules have identical stats (cargo per weight). I’ve unleveled all cargo but require Starship Design 1 like in Vanilla for the large structural types (Hauler, Galleon, Polo). I also gave Starship Design 1 requirement to all shielded cargo.
A note on weapons: I made it so that all weapon variations (normal, auto and turret) have the same skill requirement since I figure the strength will be mostly dependent on your other skills (which most people will only have 1 set of ship weapon skills if any) hence the slight stat difference didn’t matter enough to warrant a skill number change. Let me know if this ends up being imbalanced so that I can split them up.
A note on balance: No edits have been made to the stats of any module. In general, each level of Starship Design = 10 player levels. That being said, this depends fully on both each module type and each ship class. All ship classes will always have the “worst” (lowest level) modules available at Starship Design Level 0. Base game conventions are followed so that each series of module (there are typically 3-5) rank up smoothly with Starship Design. This allows virtually every module to be viable at each level. The one exception are the few “experimental” modules which were typically lower level but rank 4 Starship Design modules. Since my new scaling makes some of them either really worthless or overpowered, they were made not purchasable. Of the few that were removed, a couple remain acquirable via some unique ships you can buy.
Unchanged: Anything that was not leveled in vanilla (dockers, habs, bays, structural) – No edits were made to the stats, availability, or anything related to M class modules or Starborn ships.
This mod only makes edits to COBJ records pertaining to the modules. Should be compatible with basically everything that doesn’t do a similar thing to this mod (like remove all module requirements).
Recommended:
All Ship Parts
Credits:
TaxEvasionMaster