Does it bother you that being inside a vehicle in Starfield, even the Deimog with its chunky plate glass and metal panels, doesn’t make you any safer from various planetary hazards? Then this is the mod for you! But keep your arms and legs inside at all times. Except you, Vasco.
It makes the following changes:
💪Vehicles confer a moderate amount of hazard resistance while you’re inside: +10 airborne, +10 corrosive, +20 radiation, +30 thermal
🌊Water is always safe to drive in, no matter what type it is
🌨 Random weather events don’t penetrate vehicles (but anywhere that can generate hazardous weather will still be a bad place to be)
What it doesn’t do:
Change anything about combat or other vehicle stats
Negate all hazards entirely – I wanted it to be helpful for exploring extreme planets, not a mobile weatherproof fortress
Regenerate suit protection – if you’re playing with the advanced settings where running out is a real concern, you probably already have a way to do that
Let you drive on lava… or does it? (Actually I forgot to test this but I’m pretty sure it won’t. Good luck though!)
No other mods or DLC needed – if your Starfield is updated enough to have vehicles, it’ll work. My screenshots are with the official Deimog Creation but it’ll work fine with the Rev-8 too. Or any other vehicle, I think.
However, If you’re using the advanced Environmental Damage & Afflictions gameplay option (which this mod is kind of meant for), there’s a few mods that make the experience better (and make the lack of protection in vehicles stand out more):
Environmental Hazards Overhaul by Aestherus42 (or Extreme Environment Resistance Fix by the same author, if those fixes haven’t already made it into some other patch roll-up)
A similar Nexus mod is Suit Protection Restoration Kit by PlatinumPoster, which has the benefit that you don’t have to rely on crafting for items
Improved Powers – Personal Atmosphere, also by Aestherus42, a “lore-friendly” improvement of the power that helps deal with hazards
Q & A
Q: Is there any performance impact?
A: I haven’t benchmarked but, no. The extra checks that the mod adds are super simple. If seeing a creature running around on a planet doesn’t slow the game down, this won’t.
Q: Does this work with my cool mod vehicle?
A: Probably! The original idea was to only make changes to the Deimog, but this is my first mod and it turned out it was a lot easier to make general changes. So it should apply to anything that the game lets you drive. The benefits might not make sense for some vehicles but this way I’m not forcing everyone to use the Deimog all the time.
Q: Why did you choose those resistance values?
A: A vehicle is just a big spacesuit, if you think about it. So it’s about the same scale of protection on top of your existing spacesuit…
Radiation could be partially blocked by the physical materials of the car (and planets with weak/no magnetospheres are pretty common in the game so it’s extra useful)
Whatever heat exchange system is on your regular spacesuit, the car has room for a much beefier version (and again, it’s a pretty common hazard)
Pedantically, corrosion should be mostly blocked but also directly damage the car’s health over time but that wouldn’t be fun, so it gets a small boost in protection (plus it’s rarer)
And without airlocks the vehicle’s going to do basically nothing against airborne hazards – particularly the Rev-8 – so it also just gets a small boost. It was +5 originally but that seemed so small that it wouldn’t even matter.
Q: Why is this version 0.9?
A: Because it’s my first mod and I assume I’ll discover a mistake immediately after uploading it.
Boring implementation details…
I treated this as a tutorial to the Creation Kit. It was interesting! I found at least two ways to check if the player is driving a vehicle. The first is an invisible `VehicleDriverPerk` that the game applies automatically when needed, which saves a lot of effort. By default all this does is reduce incoming damage (60% in the Deimog, 25% in the Rev-8) but I added the resistances to it, so the game toggles them on and off by itself.
Handling the other two changes was a bit different. The game checks whether it should care about damage from water sources with the condition `ENV_CND_Water_Apply_Common`. This is true if: you are in water (duh), the water on the planet is not safe, and you’re not in a “settlement”. I added another check, this time `CurrentFurnitureHasKeyword(VehicleKeyword) == 0`. (The vehicles are considered furniture by the game. Maybe someone should make a motorised couch mod…) These two solutions might be different, since the Perk implies it’s only for the driver and the other would apply to your companion or anyone else in a vehicle, but without AI chauffeurs it doesn’t matter.
The weather check is even simpler; `ENV_CND_Weather_Effect_ExposedToWeather_Common` only cares if you’re in a “sealed environment”. I added a similar not-in-vehicle check here. (Making vehicles themselves count as sealed environments felt too powerful.) There are more specific checks elsewhere – the condition for Rain checks your level of exposure – but this one catches all the random weather effects at once.
Interestingly, I came across another promising keyword while investigating: `VehicleIsOpenKeyword`. There’s two odd things about this and one problem. First, the problem: I can’t know for sure what Bethesda intended it to mean and what future plans (if any) they have for it. Does it mean the vehicle is open to the environment? Does it mean it’s unlocked? That the vehicle has doors that can open? As for the odd things…
It only applies to the Deimog, not the Rev-8, despite the latter being a lot more “open” in design
As far as I can tell it’s only checked by the game once, for a single line of dialogue by Sam Coe where it implies his clothes are getting wet because you drove the vehicle into water (but not any of his other entering-water lines or similar lines by any other characters). On the bright side, that’s where I figured out the CurrentFurniture… method. Thanks Sam! ðŸ¤
So it might be possible to make a future version of this mod that treats open and enclosed vehicles separately, but that can wait.
Credits:
bhurnie
Download mod
| File | File size |
|---|---|
Vehicle Hazard Protection-0-9
|
816 B |
