There’s a lot of people in Starfield, and accidentally upsetting any one of them can spell a one-way trip to the load screen for most players. It’s perhaps one of the things I’ve struggled with most in my time with Bethesda’s latest space epic; perhaps I’m just a little too keen on my trigger finger, but I’ve found myself all too often reaching for the reload key as a stray shot catches an NPC or spaceship and clocks me with instant hostility and a severe bounty. Fortunately, that’s all about to change.
Making one giant leap into the annals of the best Starfield mods, the Simple Offense Suppression mod from creator ‘powerofthree’ resolves one of the Bethesda RPG game’s most frustrating woes. While your friends and allies won’t turn hostile unless you’re really giving them the beans for a while, neutral characters or ships have no such restriction, and that means it’s all too easy to accidentally make enemies with no recourse but to fight them to the death, potentially messing up any related Starfield missions, or reload your game altogether.
With the Simple Offense Suppression Starfield mod installed, neutral NPCs and ships will be set as ‘friends’ purely for the purposes of considering how they behave when struck by a stray shot. This means attacks out of combat will see them turn hostile (after all, even I might take umbrage with a stranger blasting me completely unprovoked during an otherwise peaceful situation), but they can take several hits during combat without any negative repercussions.
You can even go so far as to crank up the number of hits further, if you feel it’s still a little slight. Alternatively, there’s an option to instead tag them as ‘allies’ – this means they’ll withstand a few friendly taps outside of combat, and won’t react at all to you catching them during a firefight. Rather handy if you favor some of the less precise Starfield weapons, then.
As always, it’s typically the simplest mods that feel the most essential, and this is no exception. Starfield has, admittedly, quite a few aspects that take me out of the experience a bit, but none so egregiously as accidentally upsetting an entire town because of a single mistaken shot.
If you prefer the generous convenience of a little protective buffer as much as I do, you can get the Starfield Simple Offense Suppression mod here, where you’ll also find installation and configuration instructions. Note that you’ll need the Starfield Script Extender mod for this to work – but if you’re planning on doing any Starfield modding at all, you’ll almost certainly want that anyway, if you don’t already have it.
Now that you don’t need to worry about upsetting anyone you come across, learn how to build the best Starfield ships and make sure you’ve found all Starfield companions to build out your crew as much as possible.
Still looking for more? While a good Starfield wiki can be a handy source of information, our new Starfield Database goes further, offering you daily news, searchable databanks, and even interactive tools.