Starfield has a really simple “kill the last witness” mechanism that will clear the bounty for your most recent crime if you kill the last witness within 30 seconds. This mod removes the 30-second time limit and tracks all crimes you commit against ships, so that it is now possible to commit piracy or outright murder against ships in space and suffer no bounty – as long as you leave no witnesses.
This makes piracy much more viable as a career, since you can avoid the massive bounties from destroying ships and killing their crews. It also makes bounty hunting Crimson Fleet ships possible if you are a member of the Crimson Fleet yourself.
What this mod does
When you commit a crime against a ship, the mod begins tracking your bounty with that ship’s faction. Any ships in the area that belong to the victim’s shared crime faction, including the victim ship itself, become witnesses.
Destroying any withess ship, or boarding a witness ship and killing its crew, removes the ship from the witness list.
Once you have eliminated all witnesses, the bounty for the original crime and any additional bounties incurred while eliminating witnesses are removed.
The 30-second time limit is removed. The mod continues to track crimes until either all witnesses are dead or you leave the area, e.g. by landing on a planet or grav jumping away. If you leave before killing the last witness, they will have time to report your crimes and killing them will no longer remove that bounty.
What this mod does not do
Pre-existing bounties are not affected. If you start out with 15,000 bounty against the UC, then attack and destroy some UC ships, your bounty won’t increase, but it won’t be cleared either.
Crimes committed on planets or in cities are not affected. This only affects bounties in space.
Companion and follower reactions are not affected, so your goody-two-shoes crew will still hate you for murdering civilians and Mathis will still become angry if you attack Crimson Fleet ships.
Requirements
Cassiopeia Papyrus Extender version 1.9 or higher is optional but recommended. If this is installed, faction names will be displayed in bounty notifications. Otherwise notifications will simply say “Bounty removed” but not from which faction.
Installation
Use your favorite mod manager to install.
Technical
Everything was built with the Creation Kit. The mod plugin is a full master ESM file. Source for the script is included.
Credits:
EgoBallistic