Lethality
Lethality changes the difficulty settings in Starfield to where players and enemies both deal increased damage to one another using the same multiplier. In order to not punish people for tweaking which version of the difficulty they wish to face at a time, legendary spawn rate has been set to 2x across the board, the default value for Very Hard difficulty. As an added bonus, Lethality does not disable achievements (at least not on my system) and should be compatible with all mods that don’t directly affect difficulty multipliers.
Vanilla:
– Very Easy: 2x damage dealt, 0.25x damage taken, 0.25x legendary spawn rate
– Easy: 1.5x damage dealt, 0.5x damage taken, x legendary spawn rate
– Normal: 1x damage dealt, 1x damage taken, x legendary spawn rate
– Hard: 0.75x damage dealt, 1.5x damage taken, x legendary spawn rate
– Very Hard: 0.5x damage dealt, 2x damage taken, x legendary spawn rate
Lethality
– Very Easy: 1x damage dealt, 1x damage taken, 2x legendary spawn rate
– Easy: 2x damage dealt, 2x damage taken, 2x legendary spawn rate
– Normal: 3x damage dealt, 3x damage taken, 2x legendary spawn rate
– Hard: 4x damage dealt, 4x damage taken, 2x legendary spawn rate
– Very Hard: 5x damage dealt, 5x damage taken, 2x legendary spawn rate
WHY IS LETHALITY?
One of my first experiences with Starfield was walking into a room and realizing that even on normal difficulty, the enemy can’t deal enough damage to kill me — I could just walk into a roomful of enemies and shoot them in the face and walk out alive. Later, I realized, upon emptying a third mag into a legendary enemy, that I wasn’t the only one who was absurdly tanky, and it legitimately stopped my suspension of disbelief — I cannot believe an arms race would reach a point where weapons designed to kill humans in their armored space suits would be this bad at the job.
So I created Lethality.
v0.1
The first version of the mod scaled from 1x for Very Easy to 2x for Very Hard. However, I was still able to wade out into the open and walk away with half my health.
v0.2
Second version of the mod scaled from 2x to 3x. This time, when I walked out into the open, my health vanished before I realized I was being shot at, and I knew I was in the right spot.
v0.3
Then I ran into a problem with space battles. I was level 6 and I kept winding up in space fights against 3-4 ships of level 12-14 and they smeared me across the galaxy because spacefights are more balanced by default than their small-arms counterparts. In order to address that, I tweaked Very Easy difficulty to go back to the 1x/1x multipliers of vanilla normal difficulty. So, if you find yourself in trouble in space as I did, try pulling back the difficulty a little bit.
v1.0
Everyone using the mod prior to launch played on 3x/Very Hard, only switching in the case of stilted space battles, as aforementioned. I figured that there are people out here who are bigger difficulty junkies than I am, and I have all these other difficulty bands that I’m not even using, so this is where I made the final changes, compressing the v0.3 scale into Very Easy -> Normal and adding a 4x and 5x difficulty. No guarantees they’re reasonably playable, but I know some of ya’ll will play it anyway.
v1.1
I originally had lethality in the same batch file as another of my personal mods, and when I broke it out into its own mod to upload it, I thought I should make it a batch file (.bat) since that’s what the console code was calling, anyway. Turns out the console code doesn’t actually like .bat files, so in v1.1, lethality.bat has been replaced by lethality.txt. Should’ve given that one last test before posting, I know, but I tested it this time.
HOW TO LETHALITY?
I’m not currently using Vortex for my mods, so I don’t know how Vortex will handle this or not. Thankfully, the install method is very straightforward, and it varies slightly depending on if you have any other mods installed or not. If these instructions are confusing, I’ve uploaded images that might help in the “Images” tab above.
If Lethality is your first/only mod
– Download “Lethality Standalone” from the Files section.
– Navigate to {USER}\Documents\My Games\Starfield\
– Unzip lethalityStandalone.zip and place both files in that folder (it should already contain StarfieldPrefs.ini and probably ControlMap_Custom.txt)
– You’re done!
If you have other mods installed
– Download “Lethality Tagalong” from the Files section.
– Navigate to {USER}\Documents\My Games\Starfield\
– Unzip lethalityTagalong.zip and place lethality.txt in that folder (it should already contain StarfieldPrefs.ini and your other mods)
– Open StarfieldCustom.ini (use notepad if you’re not sure what program to use)
– Add the header [General] if it doesn’t exist already
– Add the line sStartingConsoleCommand\= if it doesn’t exist already
– Add “bat lethality” to the end of the list
This should look like
[General]
; possible other lines here
sStartingConsoleCommand\=bat othermod; bat lethality
NOTE: there shouldn’t be a backslash before the equal sign, but for some reason the BBCode used here isn’t showing the equal sign unless I do something like that.
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