DOE Research

The new difficulty options menu from Ver. 1. 11. 36 covers many bases already. Still, certain tweakworthy aspects of the gameplay remain untouched - the amount of resources needed to complete research projects (eg  for Weapons, Suit, Helmet, Pack, Food, Chems, Cooking, Outpost...) is one of them.

DOE Research makes all research projects require a significantly higher amount of resources than in vanilla (the required resource type itself does not change). The mod groups the resources into two categories: farmable and non-farmable. The number of required farmable resources is increased in much higher steps (depending on difficulty level: 5x, 25x or 50x) than for non-farmable reources (depending on difficulty level: 2x, 5x or 10x).

The following resources/pre-products/special items are considered as non-farmable (and the rest farmable), partly because their own crafting would require non-farmable ingredients:

All food items, Genetic Material, Caelumite, Aurora, Chambass Oil, Quark Degenerate Tissue, Emergency Kits, Trauma Packs, Heart+, CQBX, Battlestim,. Addichrome, Synaps Alpha, Hyppo, Reconstim, Infantry Alpha, Squall, Boudicca, Battle Up, Panopticum, Frostwolf, Whiteout, All special hearts, Paramour, Neurajack, Addijack, Red Trench and Panacea. 

This results in the following dificulty options availabe to choose from in DOE Research:

Hard           5x resource cost farmable   / 2x resource cost non-farmable  |  +0. 5 % suggested XP Modifier

Very Hard  25x resource cost farmable / 5x resource cost non-farmable  |  +2% suggested XP Modifier

Extreme     50x resource cost farmable /10x resource cost non-farmable | +3% suggested XP Modifier

Hard is still viable without outpost building (unelss you use eg DOE Resources to shut down or limit resource vendors at the same time) - Very Hard and Extreme make outpost building and industrial production a neccessity. Research becomes a long term goal now to work towards to. Something that makes it worthwile to go out there into the blackest sea, set up a connected outpost infrastructure and explore remote moons at the edge of settled Systems on the hunt for exotic resources, in the ground, in plants or in creatures ;-).

"I dislike this", FPI Agent Greystoke 

XP Modifiers can be realized via XP Unchained.

Please note that when using DOE Research with an existing savegame already started , ongoing research projects will show as not completed in the UI even if you finish them. To avoid this UI bug it's best to start a fresh game on level 1 with DOE Research installed right from the start.

How it was done

DOE Research is an .esm mod, made with xEdit. No scripting involved.

Installation