Spaceship Self-Destruct

Spaceship Self-Destruct is a new gameplay feature and quality-of-life add-on for Starfield. It adds a dramatic third option when boarding enemy ships: instead of just leaving or capturing, you can sabotage the spaceship’s flight systems using the pilot seat and trigger a full self-destruct sequence.

This mechanic is designed to make post-boarding encounters more immersive and give players a satisfying way to finish the job without tedious cleanup or dealing with re-engaged hostiles.

How It Works

In vanilla Starfield

When you board a hostile ship, you normally have two choices:

Leave.
Eliminate the crew. Once the crew is gone, you can either capture the ship for your fleet or abandon it.

Problems with the vanilla system:

If you undock from a boarded ship, its shields will have had time to restore. Additionally, if crew are still onboard it can attack you again. It can be tedious to deplete the shields again to destroy the ship for the XP.
Blowing up a ship does not give you experience for the crew you encountered onboard; XP farming is limited unless you grind through crew elimination.

With Spaceship Self-Destruct

Now you have a third option:

If you reach the helm, you can tamper with the flight controls to activate the self-destruct protocol.
This option requires at least Rank 1 in Demolitions and Rank 1 in Starship Design.

Once activated:

The pilot seat becomes inoperable.
Displays will show that the self-destruct has been triggered.
After you undock, the ship will self-destruct, granting you XP for both the ship and its crew.

Compatibility & Extensibility

Turns a number of vanilla PackIns (ClutterPI_ShpGen_DisplayTableOverheadMonitors01, ClutterPI_ShpGen_DisplayTableOverheadMonitors02, ClutterPI_ShpGen_ConsoleFore01, ClutterPI_ShpGen_ConsoleFore02, and ClutterPI_ShpGen_ConsoleFore03) from Instanced Static to Instanced, so that their screens can be found via script dynamically. These are unlikely to be edited by other creations, but you can always put Spaceship Self-Destruct higher on your load order to ensure it does not win/override another creation/mod. Those that don't win will simply not receive the self-destruct screen FX. Detection and override of screen materials rely on objects being in FormLists (SSD_FLST_*) and having strings of the models in those lists (viewable in the .nif file), which can be seen in the associated effect sequences (SSD_ESFQ_*). That means that screens added by other mods/creations will not be detected unless they are added to a FormList from a mesh they are based on and use the same string as that they are based on, with the appropriate mesh size/UV.