[spoilers] Latest Playthrough in Feb/Mar for me

While I had done the Crimson Fleet quest line (completing for both sides), I had never started as a true pirate before. In fact, I had never liked finishing it on the pirate side. If you want conflict in your universe, becoming friendly with one of the biggest antagonists in the game is not great. Fortunately, there are mods coming out to help address that issue. Some are already here like Less Fleet More Heat by cyberpsyche. The same author is working on another that constructs radiant missions against POIs with hostile UC groups for pirates to raid which will truly be awesome for the pirate players.

The Pirate Life

So, with Pike, I installed most of the mods on my Best Mods for a Pirate Character collection. It was fun for a time. I hate stealth missions, so I never liked siding with Sysdef and having to sneak around to avoid casaulties. The Crimson Fleet Ranks mod was helping provide more incentive to doing CF missions - though some of my other mods were already undermining the rewards you get from its tiers.

One of my favorite characters you run into on the Crimson Fleet quest line was always Estelle Vincent, so I had been eager to try the mod that helps make her recruitable and a romance option. I liked the mod author's clever use of her available lines and trying to reuse the voice actor's lines even from other characters in the game, but many start to paint her with a personality that I don't think fits her quite right. To be frank, she seems more the angry drunk pirate than I envisioned her being. In fact, it would have been an awesome story arc to have the player character help bring her out of that state - though I know the mod author is just working with what they have for recorded lines. Once on your crew, she also yells a lot during space battles. It becomes a bit obnoxious, so I ended up unassigning her - set her free back to the Key. 😃

It was also interesting flipping my use of NPC Spawner Dangerzone. For so long, I had been using it to spawn extra hostiles which were often times Crimson Fleet and spawning friendlies as UC Marines. Thankfully, the same mod can do the reverse, so I began spawning CF friendlies to take on hostile UC Marines. It was a bit weird at first, but it helped immerse myself in the pirate character.

Combining that with Crimson Fleet Outfitted + Enemy Face Variety (both by the same mod author) gave my spawned allies much more personality - if only in their look. Instead of wearing their CF space suits all the time, they began wearing regular CF-themed clothing on breathable worlds. This helped so much in immersion, but we need them to say more than the constant lines of "Do they think Sysdef scares us?" or "Good thing you're in the fleet. Otherwise, I would have killed you by now."

I use Swiftly Order Squad + SKK Stalkers and Followers to build squads with multiple unnamed NPCs + a few named companions at once. Eventually, I wanted to start a story arc for Pike where he became a Freestar Ranger. As part of that, I wanted my pirate squad to eventually disband, but I had experimented with one of my unnamed NPC followers being set as unkillable. I learned that this made that NPC impossible to dismiss. This female pirate boss kept following me everywhere. I couldn't get rid of her and I couldn't kill her. I finally settled on NG+ being my only option to fix it. I go into the Unity and talk to myself. I look around to see what impact I made on that universe and who do I see? This female pirate walking behind me in the Unity reminding me that Sysdef doesn't scare her! 🤣

NG+

Now I'm in a new universe. I was able to redeem a $25 Xbox gift card from reward points, so I immediately dropped that on the 2700 creation credit bundle for Starfield and started buying up the ones I was most interested next:

• Rabbits Real Lights AIO
• Cliffside Estate (which is on sale right now)
• Robin Locke - UC Flygirl (which now has updates and fixes that had held me back from it before)

I'll eventually hit up the Freestar Ranger quest line again in this universe, but I'll see what quests Robin has me go on first. I'm also eyeing other larger paid mods like Vigilance.

Any others I should consider?