Starfield: Top 10 Best Mods for Beginners + Mod Installation Guide!

hey folks this is Riker and if you're playing Star field there are a few simple mods that can dramatically improve your experience in this video I'm going to recommend 10 beginner friendly mods that don't really change the game but provide some basic enhancements and should serve as a basis to any other mods you want to install as well if you're just dipping your toe into the world of modding this is going to be a little bit of an introduction to modding we'll give some basic explanation on how to install these mods and address some frequently asked questions or some frequent troubleshooting issues now all 10 mods on this list will be from Nexus mods.com in the future probably 2024 we're going to get official modding support for Star field at that point we're going to have mods from the Steam Workshop but for now Nexus mods is where I get my mods and Nexus mods have the vortex mod manager this makes installing mods a lot easier now you don't need to use a mod manager back in my day we didn't have mod managers we had to install mods manually and most mods do come with manual install instructions if that's what you'd rather do if you don't want to use Vortex but the instructions that we go through here will involve Vortex so you'll have to make a Nexus mod account then just download and install the latest version of The Vortex mod manager as you can see here the manager is an interface that lets you select games it'll either Auto detect the games that you have or you can manually make it find what game you want to manage you can download your mods straight through the mod manager if you want or from the website Nexus mods.com and then in the mods section you can easily enable disable install uninstall or just see all the mods that you have without having to go in and manually delete files most of the time so the first one I'm going to recommend here which I'm going to say is almost mandatory to play the game is star UI now Bethesda is pretty notorious for being bad with user interfaces I remember Skyrim way back in the day playing that on PC goodness the UI was horrible we had to install sky UI the Skyrim uh user interface overhaul mod to really make it playable in the case of star UI now we have basically that UI mod now coming to Starfield which dramatically improves the inventory experience this mod gives you a more compact view it gives you better ability to sort in columns it enables you to display so much more information on screen at the same time so much more control over being able to sort your gear tons of quality of life features the little sidebar the little scroll bar is now wide enough that you can actually click on it to move it it's always been impossible to hit the little singular pixel needed to move that scroll bar with the mouse you can choose to add extra columns to sort additional things you can remove things if you want it's pretty customizable it's even more customizable if you want to dive into the configuration files seriously I I cannot ever do another playthrough without this mod now before you can install this mod there's one step that you have to do beforehand you need to enable something called archive invalidation which is a very simple dot ini configuration setting so to install that all you got to do you go to your star field folder under documents my games Star field in the video description there's gonna be something you can just copy paste it's going to be user profile documents my game Star field you just copy paste this into your Explorer address bar and it's going to take you right there in there you should find a DOT ini file called star field prefs dot ini if you don't see file extensions then at the top of Explorer click View show file name extensions now you're going to copy Starfield preps dot ini and then paste it then you're going to right click it you're going to rename it to Starfield custom.ini you'll then open that file you're going to delete what's in there and you're just going to copy paste this right here again in the description below nice and easy hit save and that's it step one is done on to step two now you can actually install star UI I'm going to recommend doing that straight through the vortex mod manager makes it nice and easy now in my case after I installed it the mod wasn't working in game until I actually reloaded Vortex as administrator and reinstall the mod with Vortex as administrator so if the mod doesn't load for you in-game right away you can try doing that otherwise the mod author on The Mod page has a list of troubleshooting steps that might help you out alright the number two mod we're going to recommend downloading is the star field script extender what does this do absolutely nothing as far as you can tell it actually does quite a lot it's just that it's oh it's a mod that other mods will use to do more things it doesn't do anything for you in and of itself other than be a prerequisite for some other mods so if you want to get into any more advanced modding including the number three mod on this list you're gonna need to First install the Starfield script extender Bethesda games are built with a certain scripting language and there's certain limitations and what the script extender does is give modders new functions to work with within the scripts extending the possibilities of these scripts so if you happen to try to run a mod that requires some of these scripts and you don't have this installed your game's just gonna crash now again I had the same issue that if I was not running Vortex as admin the mod wouldn't actually install it would download it would say it's installed but I'd have to reload Vortex as admin and then hit reinstall and then all the files would go in the correct place and the mod works now while running vortex in admin mode I'd actually have trouble downloading the mods straight from the mod website so what I would do is actually take the URL and paste it into a Vortex I'd have to be logged in there and that would enable me to easily download the mod otherwise installing the mod manually and without Vortex is just a simple matter of popping a couple files into your star field folder just follow the written instructions on the mod description alright now the number three mod that we're going to recommend which In fairness doesn't have to be for everyone but it is the Baka achievement enabler if you care about achievements or if you just care to not have a warning pop-up telling you that achievements are disabled you'll want to install this because if you're going to play around with mods by default that will disable achievements with back achievement enabler mods will no longer disable achievements and also using the console will not disable achievements and you're not going to get a warning every time you open up your console that's for for me personally that's the big one you won't get a warning every time you open the console saying that achievements will be disabled all right the next mod I'll recommend is a matter of preference but I think you might prefer it now it's called neutral Luts no color filters a Lut is a lookup table you know how you have photo filters with different apps that you can like adjust colors maybe you put like a sepia tone adjust contrast yeah for video These are called lookup tables or Luts and what this mod does is apply just a sort of neutral filter because the game does a lot of post-processing effects to I mean In fairness try to be artistic and give the game a certain visual feel but this could make it a little difficult at least I find in my case to see what's going on exactly I prefer a more neutral look where the darks are dark and colors are just what they are as opposed to like there's a sort of like beige color or a blue color and the everything gets kind of gray and muddled so you can see the before and after here in this interior Zone this is my own footage that I recorded in a cave you can see the the DraStic change like I feel I can see so much better the darks the the contrast is increased so much the mod author himself has plenty of examples that he's done side by side compare comparisons again matter of preference if you want to appreciate the Artistry of what the the devs intended maybe do your first play through or play a bit with the regular graphics and then try this out if you really have some visibility issues now I had some trouble getting this mod to work and this is what did it for me I had to go into my documents folder I had to go back into that Starfield custom.ini file and add these lines here again copy paste from the description below then I went and I copied over the contents from the folder in my games Star field data and move that over into the installation folder so in my case it's steam so that'll be steam Library steam apps common star field then you delete the data folder in my documents because what's happening is that there's a conflict there's a data folder in my documents and there's a data folder in the installation of where the game is installed itself and as long as these two exist it causes conflicts in certain mods uh this mod hit it for me so I went and I deleted the one in my documents and then this mod worked all right number five on our list is undelayed menus opening and closing the inventory has like a fraction of a second little cute animation that plays work ain't nobody got time for that undelayed menus removes that animation making opening and closing your inventory instantaneous you can see my before that slight delay because it plays out the animation and then after now instant open close open close you can even just grab it double tap it in my opinion a great quality of life change now this one conflicts with star UI however you could get both of these to work so what you're going to do is install undelayed menus then you're going to reinstall star UI over top of it and then your Vortex launcher is going to tell you oh there's a conflict here you need to create a rule and establish what mod loads first and which overrides the others so you're going to have star UI load after undelayed menu then you're gonna have to find this dot ini file you're going to go into your folder data interface star UI inventory.ini now you might not have that yet you might just see Star UI inventory default in Brackets dot ini take that copy paste leave the default one untouched then rename the copy and just call it starui inventory.ini so just remove the default you're going to then go into that ini file and you're going to look for the line instant open close animation you're going to modify that so after equals it says one you hit save and you're done both mods are gonna work you're gonna have your nice star UI and you're gonna have your instant open close menus alright the number six mod on our list is called clean field this basically quality life thing just gets you into the game faster skips all the startup menus the Bethesda logo the epilepsy and seizure warnings message of the day you can even customize exactly what it's going to skip uh it skips loading the Starfield logo if you want really like if you just want to be instantly in the game as fast as possible clean field does it for you now for me to get this to work after I installed it I had to go back into my Starfield custom.ini file and I had to add this line here General s intro sequence equals UMaine menu delay before allow skip equals zero hit save and then the mod was working alright this next mod is another matter of preference it's better HUD immersive and dynamic user configurable so I know a lot of us like to dive into these games and immersion 10 to be a big part of it for a lot of us not everyone sure but with this you can sort of configure the degree of immersion that you want at Baseline even just the minimum stuff that it does is move some of the pop-ups like when you get XP moves them a little lower so they're less obtrusive right so at the very least this is a mod that makes UI elements less obtrusive sorry HUD elements less obtrusive and you can go the full range of super immersive hunt that really removes the as many elements off your screen as possible to make the experience as immersive as possible while still giving you information that you need for instance when you need your ammo to pop up on screen it'll pop up but you can see the before and after here uh there's a lot of visual clutter removed from the HUD but again I have it set here pretty aggressively you can configure and dial it back to whatever you want and installing this was pretty straightforward just be aware that if you download the regular file all it's doing is some very basic things where the XP indicator and the location text is going to be moved made smaller and moved into a less obtrusive place I'd recommend that at minimum but if you want the more advanced features you gotta check out what's currently the sneak peek 0.2.2 version of The Mod if you're checking this out in the future it might be a full release I don't know but you want to go to files and that's where you can select if you scroll down the sneak peek version 0.22 and or any other version that you might want all right this next mod undoes a little bit of what we just did in fact and it's called enhanced player health bar basically what this mod does is color your health bar as you take more damage it becomes more alarming if you want to be focused on the action having at the corner of your eye the color changing can help you stay focused in combat and know when you need to heal as opposed to it just staying as a white indicator now this mod is kind of compatible with the last one it will bring back some UI elements so it's technically incompatible it's going to override some of the settings of the immersive UI in that it will have your your health and your weapon ammo on screen at all times again but the rest of the immersive HUD experience will still apply just make sure that when you install the mod it's going to tell you there's some compatibility issues please set up some rules make sure that this mod loads last so that it is overriding specifically just the little health bar indicator from the previous mods also in the optional files you can choose to download a version of this mod that has the original color green instead of white if that's your preference you can do that so go from green to Yellow to Orange to red as you take increasing amounts of damage onto mod number nine on our list it's going to be compact Mission UI this is another UI mod it is fully compatible with star UI and it just adds some quality of life adjustments to the mission UI menu the missions will take up less space so you don't have to scroll as much and it also makes complete admissions or completed steps and missions faded which also helps with visibility super easy install on this one just download and install it nothing more to add alright and number 10 on our list star field Performance optimizations Real Simple everyone can benefit from this squeeze out a few extra frames whether you're running the game on high graphics or low Graphics when you download this make sure you install the file that is specifically for what graphic settings you want to use whether that's Ultra whether that's medium you're going to squeeze out some extra frames I gained an average of about 10 to 15 frames I jumped from about let's say 80 to I was fluctuating 75 85 and then I was like pretty consistently above 90. 1995 sometimes dropping down to 85. so a noticeable increase all this does is make a few tweaks to squeeze out a bit more performance in the past this mod had some issues being downloaded through Vortex now it does not easy peasy download done you might have to when you're in Game Swap from your current graphic settings to low or just some other random setting and then back to the setting that you want um you used to have to do that I don't think you have to do it anymore but just do it just in case doesn't hurt and that's going to wrap up this list of mods these are the mods that I'm currently running I'm gonna be looking to get into some more exploratory mods in the future things that change the game in a more significant way but I think this is a baseline amount of mods that pretty much everyone should be playing with but I turn the question to you folks are there any must-have mods on your list sound off in the comments and also let me know do you want to see another mod video from me where I pick some other kinds of mods if so what kind of mods would you like to see again sound off in the comments personally I just love modding it's one of my favorite things about PC gaming always has been and I'm just thrilled to have another massively modable game thanks for watching Social Links to my twitch patreon and YouTube supporters for making these videos possible if you enjoyed this video please share it 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Channel: Rhykker

Views: 20,400

Keywords: Starfield, Starfield mods, beginners guide, mod installation, Bethesda, Starfield gameplay, essential mods, best Starfield mods, Rhykker, modding tutorial, Starfield 2023, Starfield beginners, RPG mods, game guides, Starfield graphics, Starfield improvements, modding Starfield, top 10 mods, Starfield tips, gaming guide, nexus mods, nexus vortex, vortex mod manager, how to install starfield mods

Id: GGRZyhO8ntk

Length: 18min 22sec (1102 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2023