In this week's official Starfield update, Bethesda made some questionable decisions about stealth, in the name of "making it more forgiving". Basically they took what was already a bad combat system and made it worse, because God forbid some Reddit gamer out there has a moment when they feel slightly less godlike in their bizarre digital power fantasy.

This update reverts most of those changes. I say "most" because some appear to be changes made directly in the engine, and so we have to compensate for them rather than directly revert them. Bethesda greatly reduced the weight impact in sneaking (which was already laughably small), reduced the shit out of running impact, and other things meant to make the enemies even more oblivious than they already are in the vanilla game.

The only Beth change that I didn't outright revert was the Sneak + Running multiplier, which was 2.0 in launch Starfield and got taken down to 1.25 on the update. I set it to 1.85, because I already felt it was a bit high at 2.0 but sweet jesus 1.25 NO BAD BETHESDA BAD.

Beth's take on the AI seems to be a combination of pathological nonaggression and bizarre psychic detection powers, and that continued this week. The changes they made seem to further extend detection once detection happens, setting off the whole POI again. I reduced overall detection range in my patch from 32 to 28 (it's 60 in vanilla) to compensate and that seems to help.

I'd like some overall input on where we are on the stealth system now, so if you see anything particularly weird, please let me know in the PAST Discuss channel, thanks.

I'm still testing various game settings to see which of them actually do anything or make a difference in gameplay, and the answer is, not a whole lot of them do. A lot of common Skyrim/Fallout GMST carryovers don't seem to do what people think they do.

I have found a few that make a difference. This release tweaks the stealth system a bit, making it slightly easier to stay hidden in darkness but also slightly adding stealth penalties to movement and running.

All companion updates have been transferred to companion-ai-updated.

The aim model for turrets has been tightened up, because good lord those things can't shoot. I've reduced the cone size by about half and extended their ranges, so expect turrets in general to be more dangerous.

Otherwise I've mainly fixed a few oversights in combat styles and made a handful of adjustments, nothing too major.

All enemies made Aggressive instead of Unaggressive
Updated game settings: better search, better reactions
Combat styles updated for better cover use and manuever
Everyone has better aim
Model S and A bots updated to be more effective in combat
Companions given actual combat AI (which they didn't have in vanilla)

A few more GMST additions from testing: sandbox vertical bounds tripled above and below, better NPC detection for incoming projectiles. In general, expect enemies to spread out further to look for you.

I've added dueling circle/fallback data to the combat styles, since the enemies are all defined as Dueling but Bethesda didn't actually include any dueling data for them. This means enemies are more likely to circle and dodge in close combat. (Since many of them aren't close combat enemies, I may switch some of them to Flanking in the future.) At any rate, better combat movement variation.

Starborn got some love this time around, making them slightly more conservative but more aggressive with ranged weapons.

This time around I took a look at companions. They turned out to not have any combat styles defined, at all, which is highly weird because the best I can tell, that means that they're using the game AI at its absolute most basic default state (which isn't good). I've given them each combat styles that associate with the assault variants of their own factions (Sarah = UC, Andreja = Varuun, etc.). They each have somewhat different offense/defense and maneuver balances and so should each play a little differently. The non-companion hired shipmates should also be fighting better, using the UC Assault style.

In testing with Sarah, she's now a lot better at using cover, planting when firing and not jumping around like an idiot during combat. I expect the other companions have similar improvements.

I also did some analysis on the Model A bot, giving it a better mix of unarmed and ranged attack patterns and generally tweaking its maneuver. Again, probably as good as it gets without scripting.

Finally, I tested and added more of 4estGimp's FO4 game setting tweaks, this time bringing visual detection cones down from 190 to 170 degrees (actual human peripheral vision range), and slightly reducing cover switching but slightly increasing cover advancing.

Some adjustments to the Model S bot config, based on more careful testing. It still melees, but should no longer rush across the map in order to do it. Instead, if it's at distance it will generally pace and snipe the target.

I also did a bit more work on the S turret range. All in all it should be a more effective ranged fighter. This is probably as good as the S is going to get until I can throw some Papyrus code at it.

Made a bunch of additions and changes. First, I've adding game setting adjustments for combat detection times, using 4estGimp's numbers for FO4. This basically doubles all of the combat and search timeout periods, meaning it'll take twice as long for enemies to forget about you and give up searching. (The Starfield vanilla numbers are pretty short.)

I've also gone through the combat style templates and made some adjustments. Expect everyone to have somewhat better aim now and to be more likely to seek cover and maneuver (including the melee chargers). Basically, I'm taking the handcuffs off the bad guys and giving them a real fighting chance.

I've extended the max detection range to 32m, up from 24m in the last version. (Vanilla: 60m) 24m just felt a bit too short to me.

Finally, the Model S bot got an upgrade. In vanilla SF, the Model S has a turret that it's coded to almost never use, instead relying on close range melee/unarmed over 99% of the time. I've changed that, making the Mod-S a true ranged gun platform and extending the max range on their turret from 30m to 40m. That should make the UC training missions a bit more interesting.

We're going to do this one GMST at a time, testing, making sure that we know what actually works and why.

This adds fDetectionMaxDistance. In the vanilla game, this is set to 60m. At the new SF worldspace scale (about 1:68), that's a bit over 4000u in Fallout 4 terms - basically the entire area of a cell. This is why lifting the Unaggressive flags sets off every enemy in the general area.

This update knocks that down to 24m, or about 1600u in FO4 terms. In my own tests, it seems to make everything a lot more reasonable. Please feel free to play with the value to see if you can improve it.