Combat is one of Starfield's stronger suits. Bethesda has done an excellent job at making Starfield's combat and gunplay feel good. However, this doesn't mean it's perfect, as there's always room for improvement. As someone who enjoyed the vanilla version's combat quite a lot, here are some immersive combat mods for Starfield to take gunfights to the next level. Whether you're a hardcore FPS lover or someone looking for QoL upgrades, we've got something for you on this list.
Best Combat Mods for Starfield
You can download all these mods over at the NexusMods website, alongside guides teaching how to set them up. If you need help, check our modding guide.
Deadly Difficulty
Bethesda game difficulty settings rely on modifiers to enemies that make them have larger health pools and better gear as you level up. This turns them into bullet sponges that take a long time to kill and makes combat tedious. The Deadly Difficulty mod removes the modifier and gives enemies much more damage. This makes combat much more tactical as you can kill enemies quickly, but so can they. It'll make you use the game's various systems and make combat both challenging and satisfying.
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Less Spongy Enemies
If you want the benefits of deadly difficulty where enemy HP is nerfed but don't want them instakilling you, you can use the Less Spongy Enemies mod and set the multiplier to a value that suits your preferred time to kill.
Improved Combat AI
Another gripe we've had with Starfield is the enemy combat AI being too stupid to pose any real threat. Sometimes, they'll stick in a single spot and forget they're in a firefight. Improved Combat AI makes enemies much more reactive to you; they'll use flanking tactics and cover better, and you'll have to watch out for enemy grenades and mines.
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No Enemies On Compass
If you want to immerse yourself into the combat scenario without having all the information spoonfed, no enemies on the compass will remove them from your compass on the bottom left. This means you'll have to keep a mental note and manually track enemies by the direction of gunfire and their sounds.
ADS FOV Removed
Exactly what it sounds like, the ADS FOV Removed mod removes that zoom-in effect when you aim down sights in first-person mode. This results in a much wider targeting range where aiming feels quick and snappy. It makes the overall combat feel much more fast-paced and fun.
Enemy Friendly Fire
Friendly Fire is not available for enemies in Starfield for some reason, even though we're free to bully the Adoring Fan as much as possible. Toggling it leads to a more immersive experience with enemy explosions and stray bullets, but most importantly, it leads to many funny moments.
Firearm Tweaks
This mod reduces the reload speed on most of your weapons, allowing you to reload quickly and get back into the heat of action much sooner. You can also increase aim stability, which lets you pace and aim your shots much better, as they won't feel random due to all the swaying. It's more immersive than lengthy reload animations, breaking the pace of combat and allowing Starfield to feel like a proper FPS title.
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True Aim
Starfield's camera ratios on PC are not 1:1. True Aim fixes this for regular and zoomed-in aiming. It also disables aim assist snap and makes aiming feel much more responsive. It's a good mod for those who care about their aim and want to feel like they're playing a modern, competitive FPS title.
Actually Functional Food and Chems
Food Items and a lot of chems are frankly quite useless. You can eat a truckload of food and be nowhere near full health. This mod makes food much more valuable and reliable as a source of healing. It also makes the buffs more valuable in combat scenarios, adding a whole new layer of resource management to your combat encounters.
That concludes our list of the best Starfield combat mods to enhance the combat and make it more immersive.
- READ MORE - Best Starfield QoL Mods
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