LOC – Life of Crime (Player Bounty Overhaul and Criminal Missions) v1.0
Remove your criminal bounty by stealing database access keys. Take on more dangerous criminal contracts for fun and profit.
Summary:
Life of Crime adds a new system for getting rid of player bounties by taking electronic data keys from faction NPCs, a toggle function for joining and unjoining the Crimson Fleet, and a way to take missions where you smuggle contraband to shady buyers inside major settlements.
The mod is voiced and lipsynched using vanilla voice files (not some garbage that I recorded on my PC mic), and shouldn’t have any edits to vanilla records.
Details:
To interact with the mod, you’ll need to build a Bounty Hacking Terminal on your ship or in one of your settlements (under the ‘misc’ tab). That terminal gives you access to the following functions:
Bounty Clearance
Some faction NPCs carry single use electronic keys that they use to update the crime registry for their faction. If you get one of these keys, by pickpocketing or killing the NPC, you can use it to delete your information from the relevant crime registry. At present, this works for bounties from the Crimson Fleet, Freestar Collective, United Colonies, and House Va’Ruun. You can also find universal keys from ecliptic leaders, but these are rarer and potentially illegal to possess.
This menu also lets you add yourself to the Crimson Fleet (in order to do fleet missions without being attacked), or remove yourself from the fleet, so that you can go back to fighting pirates when you aren’t working for them. Adding/removing yourself doesn’t have a cost or require any keys.
Bounty Key Locator
If you have an immediate need for a key, you can access a database that will give you intel on where to find one, for a small fee.
Contraband Smuggling Contracts
If you have contraband, there are buyers willing to pay top credits for it. Use this menu to set up a meeting. Just be warned that you may have second thoughts, and there is always a small possibilty something will go wrong. You are dealing with criminals after all.
Behind the scenes:
Bounty key system – I’ve used an injector script to add the keys to a couple of leveled lists. Some NPCs (like Freestar rangers) are pretty much guaranteed to have a key. Others (like rank and file UC security officers) are less likely. I added the key locator function as an alternative to just murdering your way through a city until you find a key (though you can do that too).
Smuggling missions – these will randomly select from potential buyers and potential locations, so you should get a good mix of buyers at different locations. All of the locations are inside civilized areas (that’s why they are paying more). Some of the buyers are more trigger happy than others.
Location finding system – this works on the location keywords attached to objects in the vanilla game, so I don’t have to make any edits or hard references to cells. There is also a function for canceling existing missions in case the game fails to get a location correctly (though this has not been a problem during QA testing).
Installation and Removal
The mod installs pretty much like you’d expect. I strongly recommend the BSA version for ease of installation and removal.
You can remove it by deleting the esm and bsa files (or all the loose files, if you went that road). Removing it shouldn’t cause any problems, but to be on the safe side I would remove the Bounty Hacking Terminal from any settlements before you uninstall the mod.
Bugs and compatibility issues:
There shouldn’t be any. The only three minor things are:
When you start a smuggling quest, the quest won’t load until you exit the terminal menu, and the terminal won’t take any action other than exiting the menu. I’ve tried remaking the quest from scratch several times, and this always happens, so I’m guessing it has to do with how the game engine handles things while the quest aliases are still populating. It isn’t a serious problem, it just means that after you start a smuggling quest you can’t mess around on the terminal until after you’ve exited it and let the quest load (after this, the terminal works just fine).
I added the bounty hacking terminal to the Misc workshop submenu, rather than make a totally new submenu for one item. On the off chance that another mod has an object in the Misc menu with the exact same priority (like a 1/10000 chance), it might cause the menu to behave oddly, but it should still work (in other mod testing, I’ve accidentally had two things with the same priority and the menu still worked).
If you use the ‘loose files’ version, the icon for the workshop menu probably won’t load and you’ll get the generic circle-! icon in the menu instead. You might be able to fix this by moving the /textures included in the mod to your Documents/My Games/Starfield/Data/Textures (rather than the normal data folder location). Or, you could just use the recommended BSA version of the mod, which doesn’t have this issue.
