Royal Weathers adds increased weather variety to all locations, along with improved transitions, increased weather change frequency, and many other small tweaks.
Some locations were set by Bethesda to only display 1 or 2 weathers. With this mod, Starfield weather should now feel like proper Bethesda Game weather.
Many planets and locations were set to only display one weather no matter what.
I believe Bethesda was most focused on a great first playthrough, where you would see the exact weather that most fit the theme of the location: Paradiso would always be sunny, Akila dry, New Atlantis clear (no rain, ever), Londinium set to 100% the same heavy snow.
But for me, when I land on a planet, I want to stay there for a while and explore. I like variety. One of my favorite parts of Bethesda games has always been weather.
With this mod, there is logical weather variety for all locations. There is a healthy mix of rain, fog, clear, cloudy. Basically, this should make Starfield’s worlds behave as you expect from a Bethesda game. Nothing more, nothing less. =)
Along those same lines, Starfield’s encounters are too few and far between compared to past games. As I see no good reason people should play without increased encounters, I bundled my increased encounters and proc gen tweak mods into the full version of SV Weather.
Since tweaking planet data included the option to tweak encounters, it made the most sense to include both here to reduce patching needs.
I can’t believe I’m releasing a major weather overhaul for a Bethesda game! I’ve been installing these since I was a literally teenager. I’m so excited. Thanks to the xEdit team, the astonishing mod makers who made this game fun enough for me to want to keep playing it, and everyone on the Starfield Modding Discord for help learning.
Weather Transitions:
Using my time spent in Skyrim with amazing weather mods as a guide, I tweaked settings like weather transitions. The weather will move more slowly between different weathers, letting you spend more time in the beautiful transitions that exist between two very different weathers.
Weather Change Frequency:
The weather changes much more frequently, but since there are now many weathers to choose from, these transitions will often be relatively gentle.
Going from a sunny day to a thunderstorm will be quite dramatic, but with the slower weather transitions, subtly changing weathers like cloudy to clear can be almost invisible.
Increased & Tweaked Vanilla Encounters:
This is included because some plans I have for weather involve tweaking the planet data, which also includes some encounter and keyword information. To avoid tons of patches, it makes sense to try to include a nice baseline most players should enjoy with the weather. Check out “more details” on the bottom for some more clarity on this.
Vanilla space and overland encounters increased. I wouldn’t be surprised if a Bethesda patch does the same in the future. This mod is my best effort to make the encounters happen at fun and appropriate rates, as well as trying to resolve some weird situations that felt buggy (like constant ship spawns very far away without any enemy patrols).
I carefully tested these values to offer a good experience. Spawns might seem a little higher at first for a few grav jumps, but then cooldowns will kick in, and it should be a balanced, gentle increase.
I feel like going into too much detail ruins the magic, but one example is that I increased the chance of ships spawning while you are on a planet– then I reduced the distance from the player where they will spawn. This reduces the # of places where proc gen can spawn them.
This reduces the frequency of ship landings to near-Vanilla or maybe even slightly reduces how often you’ll see it, but makes them less buggy and more fun when they do happen.
This specific tweak reduces the number of times I find a ship landing without NPC patrols to zero and makes ship encounters much more fun and less of a run-across-the-map chore.
Without my tweaks, often the patrols would leave the ship and wander too far away from the player and then appear to despawn completely by the time you reach them, especially for Starborn.
If you don’t want tweaked encounters, use the patch provided. Load before Desolation and other similar mods and this will be fully overwritten.
I will release a lite version of the weathers ASAP.
For now, please enjoy and provide feedback on the full experience that I worked had on.
Proc Gen Tweaks Similar to:
More populous space
I did what I consider to be a tasteful, modest version. You should not see TONS of PoI as I was very subtle with that setting, but the world will be a little bit more varied and look a little nicer. This is intended to perform and play well with the proc gen config tweak.
I am very open to feedback on these values. My goal was to provide an awesome baseline experience that can then be increased or decreased by optional plugins or overwritten by other mods.
Disable those CCR mods if you run them to better experience this mod’s values. I resolved a few things that annoyed me with previous implementations, such as WAY too many PoIs, specifically some like grav anomalies that should remain relatively rare.
If you prefer those implementations, leave them on and they will overwrite. CCR mods will load last. This mod will still include a few tweaks not on the CCR, but will remain compatible.
The plugin version is toned down significantly for our post-proc-gen config tweak discovery world where we don’t want things quite so close or dense, generally.
This density, while increased from Vanilla, has felt quite fun and performed very well with the newer proc gen config tweak.
Compatibility/Load Order:
As with all Royal mods, I tried to keep things very compatible and ensured that even when there is an issue, it will not cause crashes. Load this early if you have lots of mods that tweak planets etc.
Load before any planet replacers. Otherwise, Royal Weathers will overwrite some tweaks. Should still work fine and might even be cool.
Load before Desolation and other similar mods. You won’t lose the weather, but will gain that mods changes.
I will post more optional files and a lite version once my main plugin has matured a bit and gotten some feedback.
Fully compatible with GrindTerra. Load order doesn’t matter; these tweak different values.
Compatible with any customized planet. Just load them after to be safe, in case the mod author included custom weather.
I can and will make patches for specific overhauls ASAP.
Load after Planets.esm (Included) but in this version I restored the flag from vanilla to systems that originally had no human presence. Load that mod after if you want human presence on all systems, but you will lose the other tweaks I made to specific systems.
Everyone should have access to diverse weather. I will create optional patches to revert any changes you don’t like from this mod to vanilla.
Give it a shot; I’ll be actively monitoring the comments over the weekend and can quickly (if I’m awake) upload a patch to remove specific weathers that you come across that feel unimmersive, or you just liked Vanilla better.
Coolest Planets to Check Out:
Earth, Nira, Bondar (volcanic planet in Alpha Centauri system)… but really anywhere should be significantly enhanced.
Lighting Tweaks:
These are minimal for now.
Lighting transitions 2x faster than Vanilla when moving between indoor and outdoor locations. I haven’t seen a mod tweak this yet, and I can’t imagine anyone likes the blinding bloom effect that lasts so long. I’ll probably post this tweak as a standalone soon.
If you’ve already reduced this via config tweaks, this will be a further improvement.
There are a good deal of other lighting, mist, etc. tweaks that I have tried that I did not include in the initial release.
Basically, anything that seemed like it could create a crash on uninstall or that it would come down to a matter of taste, I removed from the initial release.
After I collect some feedback, I can start putting up more optional files with stuff like longer days, more distant mist– all the stuff I know from previous Bethesda games that some, but not all players, like.
Credits:
JaeDL – Starborn Royalty Knights
Download mod
| File | File size |
|---|---|
Concept Art Akila Enhancer-1-0
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366 B |
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Royal Weathers-0-94
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6 KB |
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Weather on Pluto-0-94
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324 B |
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Vanilla Encounter Rates-1-0
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747 B |
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Royal Weathers - Textures-1-0
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977 MB |
