Bethesda's asteroid mining was lackluster, as was the geology perk. I've changed that. Mining out in space is more challenging and more rewarding now. The asteroids will take special mining lasers you unlock with the geology perk, which deals good damage to asteroids, but not to anything else. They can also be used for salvaging.
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TN's Space Mining and Salvage - Simplified Chinese Translation
I hope that brief description set the tone. Essentially, this mod aims to add a small gameplay loop into the game that makes it worthwhile to go out and blast through asteroids and floating space debris for raw materials and manufactured parts. The idea is to give you a legitimate alternative to gathering all of your materials at an outpost, and to make it worthwhile to invest in your ship and travel around looking for your next big score. This mod achieves this outcome in a number of ways.
Asteroids now have significantly more health, making it quite time consuming to destroy them, but the mod also adds in special Mining Lasers which do significant damage to asteroids without doing very much damage to other ships.
Asteroids will also give a significant amount more in materials compared to the base game, making the extra effort worth it.
Floating space debris can also be harvested with a mining laser now, and is destructible. When you destroy space debris, you will get a good amount of manufactured materials for your efforts.
The Geology perk has been overhauled so that the first level of the perk also gives access to the aforementioned mining lasers, and additional ranks in it gives your ship's mining lasers additional "damage" to asteroids and debris.
The loot inside the old Shipping Containers is also buffed, making going and checking out those Sensor Readings worthwhile. The names of the crates also change a little bit depending on the type of material inside.
Loot from enemy ships will contain more 'salvage' materials when you destroy them.
Many junk items can be taken to the Industrial Workbench and Salvaged into usable items. They will show up on the recipe list when they are in your inventory (Not your ship's).
Change drop rates from asteroids and salvage in the Gameplay Options menu.
All in all, this creates a much more enjoyable space mining experience that is a little more akin to other popular space games like Elite Dangerous... at least as much as is possible within Starfield.
Now requires the Ship Builder Categories community resource as a way to improve compatibility with other mods that edit the ship builder categories.
All screenshots are shown with StarUI installed.
Installation:
Unzip the archive and put TNSpaceMining.esm into your Starfield/Data folder (most likely under Documents/My Games/Starfield/Data), or let your mod manager install the file.
Join my joint Discord The Stuff of Legends. For myself and my "allies in modding".
Special Notes:
I want to keep developing this mod further and see what is possible for this gameplay loop within Starfield's limitations. I will be actively looking for feedback and any idea that are feasible within Starfield.
I am not satisfied with the visual effects of the mining lasers yet, and I will likely keep working on them, but that was the only thing holding the release back, so I went ahead.
Based on feedback, I may adjust things like the health of asteroids and salvage, and how much loot you get.
Right now, Mining Lasers do a significant amount of damage to Asteroids (and your normal weapons will find it tough to break through them), however against ships the damage is almost entirely negated.
