Minimum Enemy Level V1.0

Minimum Enemy Level (MEL) causes all ground enemies to have a level of at least 75% of the current player level. Low level regions stay interesting, no more outleveling of content. At the same time all enemies above 75% of player level remain untouched – you can eg still encounter a level 50 enemy with a level 10 character in a high level system.

With Minimum Enemy Level (MEL) you don’t have to worry about outleveling content anymore. This is relevant in the first universe already and even more so in all NG+ afterwards.

”No more encounters with LVL 2 Spacers while you are LVL 27.”

Enemies on foot (ie not Ships) below 75% of current player level are scaled upwards to reach 75% of current player level. They stay interesting that way, but still below the player’s current power level (so you can feel your character growth). In numbers or on high difficulties they remain a factor to reckon with – encountered alone, on normal difficulty you can bounce them around properly :-).

”It’s still not a good idea to explore a high level system as a noob.”

Enemies above 75% of the current player level remain untouched – there is especially no downscaling. So a level 20 player can eg encounter level 17, level 22 or level 98 enemies – just as rolled by the default spawn tables. Only when enemy levels drop below level 15 (for our level 20 player), MEL will kick in and scale them up to level 15.

This way MEL strongly differs from the great already existing enemy leveling mods, as far as I know at least (“pure scalers”): Instead of scaling all enemies – regardless of their own level – to player level multiplied with a factor, MEL only effects lower than player level enemies (75%). Additionally, pure scaler mods do inherently also downscale: When the spawn tables would roll a level 70 enemy for a level 20 player (in a high level system), a pure scaler mod with e.g. a factor of 1.5 for that enemy would make that enemy have level 30 (player level 20 * 1.5 scaling factor) instead of the intended level 70.

” No, no limits!”

MEL allows the spawning of enemy levels above the maxmimum of vanilla Starfield (around level 120 at max for a select few enemy types). This way even in NG+16 with your level 200 character you will still find challenging level 150 enemies (75%) that you might have sorely missed in vanilla Starfield.

”At player level 200 you maybe dont want enemies exactly your level.”

A last thing to consider is that the player level/real power ratio gets flatter and flatter on very high player levels. This is because there comes a point when you have all combat relevant skills and best equipment already. Beyond that point additional player levels do only little (HP). Enemies are not affected that much by these diminishing returns of higher levels as many of their stats just autoscale upward with level. So maybe encoutering a lvl 150 enemy with a lvl 200 player is much more of a challenge than you intuitevly think :-). Or maybe it isnt for your toon, who am I to say:-).

”Never will forget my first Terrormorph!”

As a little added flavor Starborn and Terrormorphs as most iconic enemies even scale up to the full player level. These will never be cannon fodder.

How it was done
MEL is a pure .esm mod, made with xEdit. It activates the PC Multiplier and Stat Autocalculate flags for all enemies. At the same time it scales them to 0.75 (PCMult), but sets a calculated minimum level of exactly the intended level of the enemy.

You can use the mod right away, midgame. It cannot hurt to make a manual save beforehand though to return to in case of problems anyway (should be good standard practice).

Installation
First make sure to enable Archive Invalidation
Then please install Plugins Enabler (and therewith also SFSE and Address Library for SFSE)
Download the mod, unzip it and place the .esm file into your game’s data folder
In your plugins.txt file please add the correct line: *Minimum Enemy Level.esm (preferably at the end, so the changes are not accidentally overwritten by other mods)

Credits:

youngneil1