Starfield Crime Overhaul

Starfield Crime Overhaul expands Starfield’s crime mechanics with a fully reworked witness system and new configurable crime types, giving crimes clearer cause-and-effect and allowing individual incidents to be resolved independently.

How does the witness system work?

Whether on foot or piloting your ship in space, each time a crime is committed, any NPC who can directly see the player is added as a witness to that specific incident. Each crime is tracked separately, along with its own associated witnesses, rather than being combined into a single running total.

Witnesses are carefully filtered. Potential witnesses will be excluded if they are under the effects of social skills, in bleedout, incapacitated by EM damage, part of the player’s faction, an active crew member, or an active follower.

This means each crime stands on its own; witnesses only affect the specific incident they observed.

How are witnesses removed?

Witnesses can be neutralized in several ways:

Persuade them to stay quiet using social skills such as Diplomacy, Intimidation, or Manipulation
Incapacitate them (knockout or bleedout state)
Kill them

Each witness only affects the incident(s) they observed.

What happens when witnesses are removed?

When all witnesses to a specific incident are removed, the bounty associated with that incident is cleared.

This allows you to resolve individual crimes independently, rather than being forced to clear all witnesses from every crime committed in the same session.

For example, if you steal an item and are seen, then later assault someone else with a different witness, each bounty can be cleared separately by dealing with the witnesses to each specific crime.

How can I tell if someone is a witness?

Witnesses in direct line of sight are highlighted in yellow when viewed through the hand scanner, making it easy to identify who can report your crimes.

What new crimes does SCO add?

All new crime types are configurable through Gameplay Options, allowing you to enable or disable them individually.

If witnessed, the following actions are considered crimes and are enabled by default:

Indecent exposure
Aiming your weapon at a nearby NPC
Firing your weapon near a nearby NPC

Compatibility & Extensibility

Starfield Crime Overhaul is not compatible with Leave No Witnesses. Additionally, Starfield Crime Overhaul edits the HumanCrowdRace, reducing their HP to 1 to avoid a vanilla bug/unexpected behavior where non-hostile NPCs add assault bounties per hit.