Ship Builder Configurator

This mod exploits the Game Play Options feature that was introduced in the May 2024 Starfield update to expose a number of parameters that control the behavior of the Ship Builder UI.  This include altering overlap tolerances to allow construction of ships with overlapped modules (without the use of the traditional "glitch" techniques").  These parameters also allow one to customize the behavior of the Ship Builder UI to tailor it to your preferred ship building experience.

As of 2. 1. 0, text localization is supported for all nine languages supported by Starfield and voice localization for all five languages supported by Starfield.

As of 2. 1. 0 there is a hard-coded change to the Piloting Skill Level 4 to allow piloting of Class-M ships.

Load Order, Conflicts and Interaction with Other Plug-Ins

Unlike other plug-ins that provide predefined and immutable changes to the game's ship building experience, the Ship Builder Configurator allows one to customize the Ship Builder dynamically with the exact set of changes that the player desires.  This allows the player to choose their experience instead of having is defined by Bethesda or a third-part plug-in developer.

Other than the hard-coded change to the Piloting Skill Level 4, all the dynamic customization is done by using private forms and event handler hooks rather than overriding forms and scripts from the base game.  This means that the only mods that the Ship Builder Configurator could conflict with is another mod that also alters the association of ship classes to Piloting Skill levels.  If two mods make incompatible changes to the mapping of the Piloting Skill to ship classes, the last mod loaded will govern that mapping.  Other than this one issue, Ship Builder Configurator will not conflict with any other mod and its position in the load order is irrelevant.

Note that some other mod also tries to dynamically change the ship builder with Game Play Options, one will have a race condition with respect to which mod makes their changes last.  The author is unaware of any other plug-ins that operate in such a manner at this time.

One can see an error-of-omission if the base game should introduce new keywords for controlling availability of ship parts at ship services technicians.  In such a case the "Ship Services" options that alter ship part availability would not have any effect for ship parts controlled by the new keywords.

All of the Ship Services options, other than the Mantis Transponder, work by extending ship part availability beyond their default settings.  Ship Builder Configurator will not reduce ship part availability to something smaller than the default availability.  If one loads some additional plug-in that changes the default availability of ship parts, those altered defaults are the base that Ship Builder Configurator works f