v0.1.0 — first public build

First public build. This is a pre-release: the core works and has been played, but the mod is still under active development and some pieces are deliberately unfinished. Read the caveats below before installing it to actually play with.

Built and tested against Starfield v1.16.244.0. Requires SFSE.

Installing

Extract the archive over your Starfield folder so the files land in Data/SFSE/Plugins/. The archive already has that structure.

To remove it, delete StarfieldVATS.dll, .pdb and .ini from that folder. Nothing is written to your save.

What it does

• Real-time target lock. A hotkey locks whatever is under the crosshair while the hand scanner is open, and keeps tracking that actor afterwards no matter where you look. No time-slow, no menu, no dice roll.
• Shots are steered in flight. The weapon and camera never snap onto the target — only the round's own path bends. Ordinarily-hitscan weapons are flipped to real projectiles for the duration of a lock so there is a flight to steer at all.
• A HUD in the scanner's own language. A thin ring on the target with its live health as an arc, the distance beside it, and Starfield's hit/kill/crit markers held back while a lock is running.
• VATS costs a resource that scales with your character: maximum health sets the budget, maximum oxygen sets how fast it refills.
• Companion support. Aim the same key at a companion through the scanner: tap to heal them, get them back up when they are down, or — at full health — spend a buff item for a temporary damage-resistance shield on a timer. Aid items are consumed from your inventory. With the scanner raised, a line under the ring shows each companion's health and any remaining shield time.

Settings live in StarfieldVATS.ini, which is commented throughout.

Known limits

• There is no line-of-sight test. Nothing in this build can tell whether a wall stands between you and a target. Automatic advancing to the next enemy after a kill is therefore shipped switched off — it could not reliably avoid picking targets through walls or on other floors. A depth-buffer visibility check is the intended fix and the next thing being built.
• Neutral civilians can be targeted. Only your own companions are excluded. Starfield's faction and relationship answer sits behind an engine function this project cannot safely call.
• The crit indicator can still flash a few seconds after a kill. The game raises those events late, and suppressing them indefinitely would break the base game's HUD.
• The aim point comes from the target's bounding sphere, not its skeleton. It has been measured against humans, a mantid, a hopper and a flying alien and tracks pose and body shape on all of them, but roughly 20cm of per-character spread remains on humanoids, most likely from carried equipment shifting the sphere's centre.
• Struct offsets are tied to game version 1.16.244.0 and can drift when Starfield is patched.

The .pdb is included on purpose: with it, a crash logger can turn an otherwise unreadable report into one with real function names. If you hit a crash, that report plus Documents/My Games/Starfield/SFSE/Logs/StarfieldVATS.log (raise iLogLevel in the INI first) is what makes it fixable.

Credits

Built collaboratively with Claude (Anthropic) through Claude Code, working from Alexander Johnen's direction, design decisions and in-game testing. See docs/CONTRIBUTIONS.md for the honest breakdown.