Always Play Landing Animations (APLA) - Shattered Space

This is the optional creations of Always Play Landing Animations (APLA) for Shattered Space DLC. You need to install the base Always Play Landing Animations (APLA) mod alongside the Shattered Space DLC as a requirement.

In vanilla behaviour, you only see landing animation when you attempt to land to spaceports or landing spots only for the first time. Then the game will mark those spots as "Discovered/Explored". This allows you to Fast Travel to those spots for ease of use. Unfortunately, this fast travel will always happen as soon as you mark those places as discovered/explored, preventing you from seeing the landing animation again even when you visit those same places from orbit around the planet. This takes away the immersion aspect of the game when you want to always see the scene where your ship lands.

In order for you to be able to see the landing animation play all the time consistently, the game needs to think that it's your first time visiting those places by preventing those landing spots from being discovered/explored in the first place.

I've went through all the map markers in the base vanilla game and Shattered Space DLC for all the map markers that are visible from space and the star map which is used for you to land your ship on and changed their properties into 0.01 radius and flag them to suppress discovery. Any other markers that have been flagged as pre-discovered/explored have been marked as undiscovered as well as preventing them from being flagged as explored. You'll still see all those markers from your star map and from space using the scanners. It's just that they'll be "black" in colour and will never turn into the "white" variant because they will never be marked as explored.

Features:

• It modifies all 128 map markers from the base game, and 1 map marker from Shattered Space DLC as a separate optional mod in case you don't have the DLC. The full list of all the map markers modified by this mod are included in the separate article page for your reference.
• Custom landing sites that you have when you land your ships will also never be flagged as explored, allowing you to revisit them and see the landing animation plays again.
• POIs that you can see from space also will never be flagged as explored so you can revisit them and see the landing animation play again all the time.

Limitations:

• Ideally this mod should be used in a completely brand new game. This is because map marker states are saved in your save file. Enabling this mod in your current playthrough will not removed the explored flag from your save file so the landing animation will not play for them. But any unexplored sites that you haven't visit yet will have this mod applied. But it's best to use this mod enabled on a brand new game.
• I have tested this mod on an existing unity save before going into NG+ and it works just as well with all the map markers fully modded to prevent them from being explored. But my testers have reported some experience with CTD when doing so, but not on a brand new game. And I couldn't replicate the same problem on my end so just be aware on your end if this happens to you.
• If you happen to need to use it in an existing save file you can use the following console command if you're on PC [ShowAllMapMarkers 1 0 0]. This console command will unmark all previously explored map markers to be unexplored so you can visit them again and this mod will kick in to prevent them from being explored again. But this may not be a consistent experience. If you're on XBOX, I'm afraid you can only use this mod on a brand new game or New Game+.
• This mod is only compatible with the base Starfield.esm game, and the ShatteredSpace.esm DLC. If you use any other mods that adds new POI or new areas to explore, this mod will not affect them. If that's the case, you might need to reach out to the author to make a compatibility patch to have their map markers to apply the same treatment as this mod. I'm including my .ESP file as well for modders resource in case they want to make a patch.

Disclaimer:

• I am aware of other mods that allows you to play Landing Animations all the time like Landing Animation Reloaded (LAR) by 7StarC. While that mod would definitely be more consistent and compatible with any future content, I personally dislike how the script behaves on my game where the game basically still Fast Traveling you to the destination with your companions making a comment for a fraction of a second, only for you to visibly teleport you back to your ship for another split second and then the landing animation plays again. It's personally janky for me and no matter how much I change the gameplay options to have more black screen to "hide" it, it doesn't really solve the problem. No offense to 7StarC, the author of LAR, but I prefer the approach of preventing the map marker from being explored in the first place so the game "natively" plays the landing animations naturally rather than injecting a script in the middle of a process.
• The original approach to this mod was already made before by another author azvampyre1973 through the Vanilla Landing Animations (VLA) mod which is what I've been using playing the game and I've enjoyed it so far. But suddenly the author disappears from both Nexus and Creations and the mod disappears alongside them. Which made me (and anyone else) unable to play Starfield again without the mod as it's no longer available anywhere. Hence why I have decided to take the same approach and rebuild the mod from scratch. So, credits to azvampyre1973 for the original idea and the approach which makes this mod possible.
• Continuing on azvampyre1973's original approach, this mod actually takes a slightly different approach instead. VLA originally disables existing map markers and replaces them with the modded markers where the markers are not discoverable. While it can work on an existing save, removing the mod mid-playthrough actually made all your existing markers disappear because the missing markers are already baked into your save. APLA takes a different approach as it doesn't disable or replacing any markers. It just uses the existing game's markers and modified its values to become undiscoverable, but it's still essentially the same marker's from the game's perspective. That way APLA can be safely removed at anytime without affecting your save file. Just that once the mod is removed, the markers can now be flagged as explored, and when it does, reinstalling the mod will keep them as explored and you can't get the landing animation back, unless you use the console command to clear the explored flag again as written above. If you also would like an alternate to this mod, xtcrefugee's miscellaneous small mods has a Landing Map Markers that is using a slightly different approach. If you haven't done so, feel free to check that one out.

Credits:

• azvampyre1973: For the original idea on their Vanilla Landing Animations mod.
• xtcrefugee: For the assistance in sanity health checking the mod for quality control and helping out with the testing.
• DaveHedgehog54: For the assistance in testing the mod and the feedback.
• Image credit: Dexerto/Bethesda