XP for EM Knockouts

As of December 3rd, 2024, I no longer have plans to actively mod Starfield.

This mod is unlikely to receive further updates.

Bethesda has recently allowed paid mods to be tagged as Achievement Friendly on the Creations platform, with no plans to make accommodations for free mods. They are also allowing mod authors to re-upload free mods as paid mods to get the Achievement Friendly tag, at the request of console mod users.

This effectively disincentivizes free mods from being published, as it will push console users to stick with purely paid load orders in order to continue earning achievements. This was the final nail in the coffin for my interest in Starfield, and I no longer wish to support the money-first modding ecosystem that Bethesda is attempting to create.

Thank you to everyone who has used my work. I am happy to have been able to share things which have improved the game for so many people.

For some reason, EM weapons and Neurostrike fists do not give you XP for successfully knocking someone out. This mod rectifies that issue, making a pacifist playstyle a little more viable and rewarding.

How It Works

EM damage works differently than health damage. It takes just as many hits to stun a level 200 enemy as it takes to stun a level 2 enemy. Because of this, I scale the XP reward against how much Electromagnetic Health an enemy has, rather than by their level. That is the main factor in how difficult an enemy is to stun.

This means that most (but not all) enemies will grant a baseline of 50 XP when stunned. For lower level targets, this is more XP than killing them. For higher level targets, it’s less. This feels fair to me, given the relative difficulty of stunning vs killing in both cases.

This XP reward does scale with any active modifiers to XP gain you may have. Including gameplay settings, sleep, certain food items, etc. Just like any other XP reward.

If you do stun an enemy, you will NOT be able to get any additional combat XP from him. This means you can’t farm XP by repeatedly knocking someone out, or double-dip by stunning and killing the same person. No other form of XP gain is affected.

Lastly, this mod only works on living enemies. It does NOT affect robots or turrets. EM weapons directly damage these types of enemies, so you will only get XP once they are fully destroyed.

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Can be installed mid-save and should work immediately. No special steps required. Either use your favorite mod manager to install automatically, or manually install it by extracting the ESM and BA2 into your Data folder, then updating your plugins.txt file.