Plunder - Improved Piracy - Starfield Unity

Plunder - Improved Piracy (or simply Plunder) is an immersive gameplay overhaul for Starfield’s piracy system. Instead of settling for a quick cargo handoff through a trade screen, you’ll now be able to board enemy ships, confront their crew, and seize everything for yourself.

How It Works

In vanilla Starfield

When you select the piracy option, you can attempt to persuade an enemy captain to hand over their cargo. If successful, you’re presented with a trade screen to seize it.

Problems with the vanilla system:

Efficient, but not very engaging.
You never step foot on the ship itself, missing out on potential loot and immersion.

With Plunder - Improved Piracy

Piracy is now more hands on:

After a successful piracy attempt, the enemy ship can now be docked.
Choose between using the vanilla trade screen or disabling it entirely (default) with a new gameplay option.
Once docked, the crew will surrender—unless you provoke them, in which case they’ll fight back.
Explore and loot everything on board, not just the cargo hold.
If you loot the ship and do not attack the crew, they will grav jump away shortly after undocking.
The Intimidation skill gives a bonus towards Piracy dialogue success (added in v1.1).

To safely use the Piracy dialogue option in populated areas, make sure you’re within docking range of the target ship (500m in vanilla). This lets you board quickly, before local security forces have time to react to the piracy report.

Compatibility & Extensibility

Built-in, patchless compatibility with Non-Lethal Framework (not required). Designed with consideration for Vault Habs and Captains Matters. Edits 1 vanilla script, "DialogueGenericPiracyShipQScript". Anything else that changes this script would need to be patched to ensure compatibility or add scripted compatibility to handle Plunder's changes.

Troubleshooting

Having issues? A new built-in troubleshooting tool has been added to the pharmaceutical lab workbench: ".Debug Menu". To avoid overpopulating the crafting menu, this item is only available to craft when the player is naked (no outfit or spacesuit). You may have multiple, so look at the description to ensure you are crafting and using the one for Plunder. Once the aid item is used, a menu will pop up with debug options available. This list will grow with future updates as deemed necessary.