Changeling

Version 1.05

A new Starborn power (Changeling) allows you to be a true master of disguise or to alter the appearance of others. You can swap appearances with an NPC, apply your appearance to them or take their appearance. You can also open the Enhance menu on yourself or on a target NPC. The power also supports opening the inventory of an NPC and remove items or equip items as so you see fit as part of assuming their identity or finding something more suitable to their new look.

The power lets you store a number of custom appearances and retrieve them at any time. You can also load a number of appearances for those in Constellation, United Colonies, Freestar Collective, Crimson Fleet, and others.

The mod adds "Lifelike Mannequins" and "Action Figures" to the outpost builder and ship customization menus. These can be used to store and load any custom appearance using the Changeling power or just to show off your gear. Some Constellation action figures are also available (along with their outfits for your use). These action figures can be modified to override the default appearance of Constellation members when loading their appearances from the power menu.

Starting in version 1.05 the Enhance experience has been enhanced. Now the Enhance menu won't change your outfit regardless of your loadout and will perform vastly better in certain conditions.

Coming Soon I'm working on updates that allow you to optionally duplicate and equip clothing from NPCs in various ways.

Usage A new Starborn power "Changeling" replaces "Creator's Peace". Whatever power level Creator's Peace was at before installing the mod will apply to the new power. If you do not have this power already it can be acquired from Temple Nu. I may add an option to shortcut power acquisition for those that have never gone to temples.

The power has two modes, by default when cast the power displays a menu allowing you to alter your character's appearance in one of several ways (self-cast). If you want to change the appearance or inventory of an NPC then the self-cast menu has an option to switch to a mode where you fire an energy wave that lets you target specific NPCs (target-cast). To switch back to self-cast from target-cast you can fire the energy wave at an NPC and disable the target-cast mode.

Self-Cast lets you:

• Enhance your character
• Load a faction appearance
• Load a previously saved appearance
• Restore or override your default appearance.

Target-cast on an NPC lets you:

• Enhance them
• Swap appearances, take their appearance, or apply your appearance.
• Open and manage their inventory
• Combat Alter and Strip to change an enemy combatants appearance to yours while stealing their inventory.
• Go back to self-cast mode

When using the Enhance menu to alter the appearance of an NPC select your name in the menu.

On rare occasion after altering the appearance of a character and loading a save immediately after the characters hair will not appear correctly. quitting the game and reloading resolves this, or more easily you can swap appearances with them and then swap back and the hair renders. This seems to be a game engine issue of some kind.

Other Comments I suggest you also install "Other you Elite Crew Appearance Fix" so that any changes to your character's appearance do not automatically apply to You? should you be lucky enough to be in such a universe.

Compatibility This mod alters two objects:

• ArtifactPowerCreatorsPeace_Spell
• ArtifactPower_CreatorsPeace_Rank

These changes will not have an impact to AI usage of the Creator's Peace power. Any other mod that alters this power may have compatibility issues with this mod. You can place this mod later in the load order.

Limitations The power will only work on regular NPCs that are not marked as "ghost" and will not work on crowd NPCs. You can also cannot take or alter the appearance of your parents should you have the Kid Stuff trait. The power will not work on children. Some NPCs in the game have multiple different objects (Constellation members and their Unity appearance for example) and altering the appearance of an NPC applies only to the single character/object in front of you. You are allowed to swap genders of NPCs but the lip movement on that character will not work until you restore them to a gender compatible with their voice type.

The Enhance menu has some compatibility issues with some clothing mods. As with the regular Enhance menu you may wish to switch to only native clothing when changing body dimensions.

Some items in NPC inventory are marked as not wearable and those cannot be taken from NPCs. Some NPCs also have default non-wearable space suits and if you take their clothing they will equip the space suit. If an NPC is dead and you take their armor then they can appear transparent so inventory management on dead NPCs has been disabled.

Currently the preference for target-cast mode is not preserved when switching to other Starborn powers, I may add that soon. Since there are two different Spells involved the target-cast mode won't show Changeling as highlighted in the Powers menu. I had this working with a different implementation approach and some event handling but found it to have performance issues after using the Enhance menu in a large save game on XBOX.

The mod does not currently copy the clothing of an NPC you are taking an appearance from (see Coming Soon section above). Similarly, faction status and other items are unaffected by usage of this mod. Faction assignment and/or bounties could be fun to play around with in the future but may have some technical challenges.

Thanks zone79 for some of the armor and clothing that are worn in some screen shots and videos.

Version Updates:

• 1.00: Initial Release
• 1.01: Correcting the Changeling power description in the Powers menu.
• 1.02: Correcting issue with Lifelike Mannequin and Action figure placement and animation issues.
• 1.03: Correcting problem where storing your appearance for later restore or using one of the 5 slots for storing other appearances would not persist data across a save and reload. Expanding the Load Look menu to include some new NPCs and factions (this will be further expanded in future updates).
• 1.04: Fixing regression of issue with Lifelike Mannequins and Action figures resolved in 1.02 but reintroduced in 1.03. Some mistake was made when merging changes between two esps to pull in some newer features.
• 1.05: Enhancing the Enhance experience. Now the Enhance menu won't change your outfit regardless of your loadout and will perform vastly better in certain conditions.