Royal Leveled Enemies

The #1 Leveled Enemies mod on Nexus - finally comes to Creations!

(1.1 update is non-essential. Avoid unnecessary mod updates unless the changes affect you. Creations users cannot easily roll back if there are issues. Do not update mods while completing UC8 "Hostile Intelligence" quest. Finish Londinium first. It is sensitive.)

Factions and individual enemies you come across in Starfield will feel unique and fun to fight even at high levels, without turning everything into bullet sponges. Enemies have different stats, body types, heights, and movement speeds. For aliens, size scaling is the most extreme, creating the appearance of Alien Herds and Families.

Enemies are leveled individually, like in past Bethesda games. A Starborn or Terrormorph might be 1.25x your level, while a Spacer might be only 0.8x. To balance out the difficulty, the following challenging enemies offer double XP: Starborn, Terrormorphs, Red Mile Maulers, and Apex Ashta.

Other than civilians, Spacers are generally the weakest human enemies. House Va'Ruun and Starborn are quite strong. In early game, you might want to focus on finding spacers to fight-- or, for an evil character, vulnerable civilian settlements. Immersive Enemies encourages you to play Starfield early game more like a traditional RPG.

Terrormorphs and Ashta will be far more lethal than your average predator.

Note that this WILL make the game significantly harder, and you may need to set the difficulty to "easy" during early game. You might need to run away from Terrormorphs or avoid House Va'Ruun until you have some powerful weapons. However, this mod ensures that level 50+ gameplay remains fun.

Beyond individual enemy tweaks, a few larger changes are made to balance out the leveled world and ensure no bullet sponges:

1. NPC HP gain per level reduced from 20 to 10. Specific powerful enemies like Terrormorphs receive bonus HP and resistances to balance out this change. This ensures that an enemy's base stats remain more important than their level. While enemies will have higher levels than in Vanilla, level itself matters half as much in terms of raw HP.

2. Damage multipliers tweaked. Headshots deal 2.5x damage against humans compared to Vanilla's 2.0x. This affects the player as well, so enemies are slightly more lethal. This keeps time to kill reasonable against most human enemies - if you land your shots.

3. In Vanilla, aliens take 1.0x damage regardless of where you shoot them, before perks. With this mod, aliens now take 1.5x headshot damage, varying based on type, and some, like Terrormorphs, resist damage on heavily armored appendages like legs.

4. Stats of specific enemies are tweaked by hand. For example, Bethesda did not plan for Spacer Myths to scale above level 75, so they have a very high damage resistance stat. I have decreased this so that their difficulty curves upward more gently. Without tweaks like this, some random Spacers, with leveling added, become tankier than Starborn or Terrormorphs.

I've worked on this mod since October 2023, releasing it piece by piece starting with "Royal Terror". This is a bundle of all Royal Leveled NPC mods originally released on Nexus: Royal Terror, Royal Aliens, Royal Unique Human and Robot NPCs and Factions. This is a lite version of the Nexus Bundle "Royal Arena", but I went for a simple, clear name for the Creations release. These are the same enemies included in the Royal Galaxy mod available on Nexus.

In addition to what's listed above, this bundle includes countless bug fixes and QoL tweaks.

For support, please visit the Royal Arena Nexus Page (for now). Specifically mention are you using Creations: https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/8588

I will be doing an Xbox playthrough and thoroughly testing my mods. Other Royal Mods will move slowly to Creations as I have time to carefully test them. For PC users, I encourage you to check them out on Nexus.

I am a teacher and writer living in a one-bedroom apartment with my wife and cats, and working hard on this in my spare time.

Any support appreciated. I do not use Creations myself, so all the time and effort I put into this platform is purely to make Starfield more enjoyable to others.

https://ko-fi.com/jaedl

Load Order: Load this late. There are very few cases where you will want this mod overwritten by others as it includes size scaling randomization, leveling, and aggression. The size scaling is better done and less buggy than other mods available on creations. Other mods that tweak NPC size scaling can be safely disabled to replace with this.

To be blunt, I doubt someone else is going to neurotically tweak every single NPC by hand any time soon. All enemies included in this mod have size variation.

This already includes the most popular feature of "Terrifying Terrormorphs": additional mind control, but you can load that mod before this to keep any other features that the mod author adds over time, while retaining this mods difficulty and leveling.

This mod tweaks NPC records, race data (to affect size and damage multipliers), and 'alien weapon' data (to increase some alien damage/reach, which).

Load this before: Star Wars replacers. Specific NPC overhauls. I did not include popular companions to avoid compatibility issues, but still install most NPC overhauls AFTER this to be safe.

Compatibility: Even if you make a mistake, this mod should be very sturdy. For example, if you load Terrifying Terrormorphs or Alien Size Scaling after this mod, most of this mods features will work.

This is safe to add mid-game and probably even to remove mid-game, though I do not recommend that.

Suggested: HDTP Alien Retextures available on Nexus Royal Weathers Lite Color Filter Remover Royal Weapon Balance or Combat Overhaul (Nexus for now)

Known Issues: None.

The .esm is named "RoyalArenaLite". Once I started tweaking it in CK, the overall difficulty came down, and it felt appropriate to give it a new name. Royal Arena on Nexus is higher difficulty and has more features.

Some people find the Terrormorphs too hard because they want to use a full auto-rifle against an enemy with the highest physical resistance in the game. Use fire damage, Starborn Powers, bleeds, energy, and particle weapons instead.

This mod does not fix balance issues with the Vanilla weapons, such as fully automatic rifles being weak. This balance issue will be more obvious against leveled and stronger enemies. Royal Weapon Balance, Combat Overhaul, or any other weapon overhaul will fix this.

(Max difficulty is intended to challenge players with optimized gear and skill. The Alien DNA perk provides some bonus HP to help with early game difficulty.)

I have put a truly insane amount of time into this. The size-scaling should have the maximum variety possible before clipping or NPC pathing issues result. Any NPC pathing issues you come across that appear to be due to size-scaling are almost definitely also present with vanilla NPC sizes. I even reduced the size of a few NPCs (Robot Model S) to improve their pathing.

Support: Royal Arena Nexus Page or Royal Mods Discord. https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/8588

Please do not seek support if you have 90+ mods (including official, paid, and .esl plugins) and disappearing assets. That is Bethesda's bug to fix.

How do I know it is working? Shoot at an alien creature and notice that it actually survives for a little bit.

You installed it. :) Alternatively, if you have trust issues: go to a system that is lower level than you. Notice the enemies are still scaling.

This does not reduce any "minimum levels" for any NPCs.

Credits: ermakysion for No Rescale on Interact Fix xEdit team for incredible tools Bethesda for a great game

Permissions: Closed by default. Reach out and ask if you have a genuine use.

You may not bundle my enemies with another mod that would make this obsolete. Obviously, I don't want my hard work erased by letting another modder copy it all. =)

As long as you credit, without asking, you may reference these NPCs when creating new, standalone NPCs or factions, even paid ones. I'd love to get a heads-up, so I can play it, if possible. No need to set this as a master.

As an example, let's say you want to make a new Starborn faction or a mod expanding The First NPCs. If you want them to be difficult and fun, feel free to use the same stats and settings as this mod, or use them as a starting point to tweak.

Example Credit: Stats and gameplay of new NPCs based on Immersive Leveled Enemies. But phrase it however you like.

Translations invited and patches, of course, welcome if they set this plugin as a master.

Further Notes: PC users should use Nexus for the best experience. I am only uploading to Creations with the intention of supporting Xbox players.