Planetary Habitability Tweaks

Link To The List of Habitable Planets and Moons

In Bethesda's attempts to create a hard sci-fi game, they added many parameters of planets and moons in-game and in-engine. When deciding what characteristics of a planet would be good enough to allow a human to breathe unassisted, they made some mistakes.

In game, you can breathe on planets with Thin O2, High O2, and Extreme O2 atmospheres, while needing suit protection from the sun during the day on planets with magnetospheres weaker than Average.

Realistically, the O2 percentages shown on these planets, ranging from 18% to 24%, would be much to low for a thin atmosphere, or much too high for a high or extreme atmosphere for a person to breathe. This mod changes the conditions so that planets with these non-standard atmospheres require a suit for breathing. The canonically inhabited planets with non-standard atmospheres (Gagarin, Akila, Volii Alpha, Porrima II, and Va'ruun'kai) are changed to standard atmospheres to keep these planets inhabitable.

Additional changes were made so that the magnetosphere does not impact habitability on planets, as it does little to protect life directly. While it does protect the atmosphere from being blown away by solar winds, the atmosphere of a planet does the vast majority of protection from solar rays.