Starfield Community Patch

Version 1.0 of the Starfield Community Patch now includes this fix. You do not require this plug-in if you are using an up-to-date version of the Starfield Community Patch.

Description

The Deception Skill is supposed to increase both one's chance to get an enemy ship to surrender and the chance to evade a contraband scan. Currently there is a data entry bug in Starfield such that levels 3 and 4 both provide the same improvement in evading a contraband scan, which is contrary to the description of the skill.

This mod overrides the SQ_Parent quest form to provide the correct table of scan evasion factors to use for the Deception Skill. The bug was due to a data-entry mistake where this table is actually missing a value for the Level 4 Deception Skill which also resulted in shifting the values that were supposed to be used for levels 1, 2 and 3. After applying this fix, the scan evasion chances for levels 1, 2 and 3 will be slightly lower than they were before, and level 4 will now provide the benefit that one used to see at level 3.

Example

If one builds a ship with 320 Shielded Cargo and no Scan Jammer, and then fills the shielded cargo with contraband, the following table shows the scan evasion chances that one will see at Neon before and after applying the bug fix:

Deception Level Evasion without Fix Evasion with Fix 1 54% 48% 2 69% 54% 3 86% 62% 4 86% 86%

How Scan Evasion is Computed

Without going into all the gory details, the logic, as of v1.13.61, is to compute a base chance to evade, which depends on the Perception of the scanning vehicle and the ratio of (TotalContrabandMass ^ 1.5) / TotalShieldedCargoCapacity.

That base chance is then multiplied by the scaling factor for whichever Scan Jammer one has installed and the DeceptionFactor. The DeceptionFactor is computed as 1 / ScanEffectiveness. So if one has Deception Level 1, which decreases scan effectiveness by 10%, the DeceptionFactor is 1 / (100% - 10%) -> 1 / 90% -> 1.11.

Note that installing multiple Scan Jammers does not help with scan evasion. In fact, in testing it appears that the last Scan Jammer installed on a ship is the one that determines one's ability to evade a scan.

Upper Limit for Scan Evasion Chance

No matter how little contraband one is carrying, nor how much Shielded cargo one has, nor which Scan Jammer one has equipped, nor how many levels one has put into Deception, the chance to evade a contraband scan can never be more than 90%. This is due to a hard-coded cap coded into the logic for computing one's chance to evade a contraband scan.

Note that because of this 90% limit on scan evasion, unless one was running with nearly full shielded cargo, anyone who had installed a Multi-Frequency Scan Jammer would never see this bug because they would hit that 90% limit at Deception 1.