Starfield Survival Sandwich V1.0

Survival mode in Starfield, although a welcome addition is somewhat flawed as every item buff lasts 30-minutes. This mod aims to fix and restore some elements of survival that for whatever reason were not fully implemented with the update.

Mod Story

Finally taking the plunge into Starfield, I was struggling to enjoy many aspects of the planet exploration when running and gunning through procedurally generated areas. To offset some of this frustration, I decided to jump into the options and slam everything to the highest difficulty, noticing there was also a survival mode. This helped with my enjoyment of these parts of the game until I came to realise that the food and drink was somewhat lacking in complexity.

Every food and drink item, regardless of the size of the meal, was only offering 30 minutes of buffs. This means there would be no difference between eating an onion versus a slab of meatloaf. Having thus far resisted the urge to mod the game and simply play the damn thing, I couldn’t help myself and loaded up xEdit only to discover that Bethesda had set the properties for three tiers of hydration and nourishment incorrectly to tier 2 for everything.

The framework for a slightly more complex survival system was already there but Bethesda had either messed something up, made the decision to keep it super simple, or just didn’t have the development time to fully implement the system. What I thought would be a simple hour job turned out to be a good couple of days modding work and the Starfield Survival Sandwich was born.

Features

Tiered Buffs

Different food now keeps you fed for a longer or shorter period depending on the food item being consumed. The same goes for drinks.

Improved Naming Conventions

Each effect is named based on the effectiveness of the food consumed. For example, an onion will keep you Nourished, a canned meal with keep you Fed and a full meal with make you Well Fed.

Effect Layering

Lower effects will not overwrite higher effects. For example, the Nourished effect will not take effect if you already have the Fed or Well Fed effect. However a higher effect such as Well Fed will replace Nourished and Fed.

Alcohol Effects

Alcoholic beverages no longer hydrate you but retain their other effects.

Fruit Hydration

A small number of fruits such as apples, pears and watermelons will also hydrate you alongside providing the nourishment buff.

Installation

Use your mod manager of choice to install the mod and ensure you have the following lines in your StarfieldCustom.ini located in Documents/My Games/Starfield.

[Archive]
bInvalidateOlderFiles=1
sResourceDataDirsFinal=

I also recommend you install the BAKA Achievement Enabler.

Ideal Solutions

Ideally, this system would not have been tied to magic effects as it means that waiting around or sleeping can have some odd side effects on the magic effects running on the player. It’s also tied to real world time as opposed to game time, which in my experience isn’t the best method for a needs system. I’ve experimented with both as seen in my Skyrim mods such as A Cat’s Life and A Dog’s Life.

Until the Creation Kit for Starfield is released, I’m fairly limited as to what I can change and I have a limited understanding of how the system works without seeing the script source. Yes, I could probably go through the hassle of decompiling them and trying to fix them, but it’s not worth the time investment when the CK will makes things far quicker and easier.

Credits:

Darkfox127