Stellar Needs

📝 DESCRIPTION

Stellar Needs offers a straightforward yet effective system for managing essential survival needs, including Hunger, Thirst, and Fatigue. These needs progress through five stages, each affecting your character with unique buffs and debuffs as they deteriorate. To maintain your strength, you must eat, drink, and ensure you get adequate rest.

I created Starfield Survival Sandwich to improve the vanilla survival system, but I found it overly simplistic and flawed in several key areas. Persistent bugs that I couldn’t track down ultimately soured the experience for me. Additionally, tying survival mechanics to magic effects caused unpredictable behaviours, making the systems difficult to plan around.

❗This REPLACES the vanilla Sustenance system, so be sure to disable it, unless you're roll playing having two stomachs.

⚙️ HOW IT WORK

Stellar Needs introduces three separate survival mechanics, Hunger, Thirst, and Fatigue, each managed independently. These needs start at a value of 100 and range between 0 and 100. As universal time passes in-game, each need gradually decreases, triggering debuffs at various stages based on the specific need.

To manage these needs, you’ll need to eat to reduce Hunger, drink to quench Thirst, and rest to manage Fatigue. Sleeping will pause Fatigue loss and gradually restore it, while certain drinks, like coffee, can temporarily stave off Fatigue.

Allowing your needs to drop too low will result in more severe debuffs but there is no major penalty such as passing out or dying as this proved to be too dramatic for what this system aims to achieve.

📥 OTHER MODS

Are there more complex and feature-rich Needs mods out there? Absolutely, with Starvival arguably being the best of the bunch. However, my mod isn’t designed to compete with it. Instead, it offers a different approach, focusing on enhancing the simpler vanilla systems rather than overhauling them completely. It aims to provide a more familiar experience, rather than throwing you into something entirely new.

First and foremost, I created this mod for myself, to help fill the void left by some of Starfield’s repetitive combat scenarios and vast, empty spaces. That said, anyone looking for a similar, straightforward experience without too many bells and whistles is welcome to download and enjoy the mod. It was a fun project to work on, and it challenged me to adapt to the many differences between modding Starfield and Skyrim.

💽 INSTALLATION

Simply install the mod using your mod via Bethesda.net or the in-game Creations menu and load your save. The mod should kick straight in and then you will need to head into the gameplay options to enable the parts of the mod you want.

If you wish to uninstall the mod, you can simply toggle the Uninstall option in the game settings. This will unregister for key updates and stop any running scripts, ensuring there should be no save bloat post-uninstallation.

⚠️ Be warned however that there is no turning once you select the toggle and save your game.

You should receive a confirmation message the mod has been prepared for uninstallation and you should be safe to remove Stellar Needs from your load order.

💥 COMPATIBILITY

This mod will have compatibility issues with any other mod that attempts to make changes to the various food and drink items in the game as the magic effects for Stellar Needs have to be added to the forms of those items. I wouldn't recommend running it alongside other needs mods but it should work nicely alongside some of the other survival features in the base game.

Your mileage will vary depending on the mods you have installed and just because this mod doesn't functionas expected, it doesn't mean the mod is at fault, it could be a compatibility issue.

🎮 TESTING

Zero testing has been carried out to confirm that this works on console as I do not own any of those systems. The esm and b2a files that include the required resources have been uploaded via Creation Kit, so in theory everything should be fine. 🤞