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About this mod
Overhauls Jemison with unique, all-new biomes and new flora and fauna using vanilla assets. Includes a detailed guide to show you how I did it
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
While poking around the CK trying to learn about planet editing I realised that based on the work someone did reverse-engineering biome files, you can actually edit a planet's biome map fairly easily using a bit of Python code, With a little experimentation I managed to get new biomes I added to appear in-game and decided to give myself a project to see how far I could get with modding a planet in a weekend. I ended up learning how to do basically everything I wanted and was kind of surprised that no one else seems to have figured any of this out, so decided to release my weekend project as a small standalone mod for others to enjoy and to act as a demonstration of what's possible. Also included is a detailed guide on how I did everything so you can follow along and overhaul any planet you like. If you use it to make your own mod, please leave a comment with a link – I want to see it! Let a thousand worlds bloom!
Meet the new Jemison
Despite Jemison being one of the most important planets in the game, it only has a single unique biome for New Atlantis, while everything else is completely random – the mountains look like a different planet to the forests near New Atlantis, and the same mountains can be found on several other planets. In fact most planets are like this, with a single unique biome for hand-placed locations and a random selection of generic ones everywhere else. I found this really frustrating when surveying habitable planets because they're just a chaotic mishmash of random assets – in many cases two biomes right next to one other look completely unrelated, and animals and plants found on the same planet have no clear evolutionary relationships. So when I stumbled onto a way to replace default biomes with custom-made ones, I knew I had to try to one-up Todd, and redesign Jemison with an eye for detail, using an ecological story to guide the choices of landscapes, plants and animals to give Jemison a sense of place.
This redesign of Jemison is meant to represent a kind of idyllic, alternate Earth, using existing assets that resemble real animals. Like Earth was, Jemison is emerging from a global ice age and native lifeforms are rapidly diversifying into the new ecological niches as they open up. Most of the planet is covered in treeless grassland prairies, while more temperate regions in the mid-latitudes and coasts are home to the enormous mesa tree forests, in which New Atlantis sits. In the mountains, temperatures are still cold year-round, with spotty snow cover and a few small, hardy trees that can survive the chill. The ice caps, while rapidly receding, are largely barren.
During the ice age, Jemisonian animals had to evolve to deal with the extreme cold and are now re-adapting to the milder climate. The giant pseudosloths, bipedal herbivores the size of elephants that superficially resemble Old Earth's sloths, used an adaptation called gigantothermy where they grew in size to reduce their surface area to weight ratio to retain heat better. Now moving into the mesa tree forests they have become prolific, their huge size makes them pre-adapted for browsing on the high tree canopies, and their hides are home to symbiotic antimicrobial funguses that help them fight infection when attacked by predators (which you can harvest if you're brave). The mesa forests are the most biodiverse environments on the planet, holding plants like Christina blooms, leafy morningstars, bitter orange nuts, and the infamous skull palm – so called because early settlers mistook its ripe nuts for upside-down human skulls. As the glaciers receded, the barren tundras transformed into rolling prairies and the false dodos, once huddled together with their thick feathers for warmth, now roam freely in herds feeding on small insects, seeds and berries, pursued by packs of foxwolves. Plant species that prefer sun unobstructed by the tree canopy like sweet canis vine and starpod vine thrive on the open plains, while the colder mountains favour hardier species like the cliff laurel and hibernating spinetree. In the air, the vampires, distantly related to the foxwolves, hunt false dodos on the wing and scavenge the carcasses of dead pseudosloths, while horned parrots sing from the trees of the mesa forests. In the coastal regions, little siltcrabs pick through the wet sand for morsels to eat and run when anything big approaches (especially humans who consider them a delicacy) while tadpole fish form great schools in the oceans. In most environments you can find the humble scarab, a vital detritovore that helps to break down decaying matter and recycle nutrients back into the ecosystem.
Installation, Compatibility and Uninstallation
Install with your preferred mod manager. If installing manually, make sure "JemisonBiomeOverhaul.esm" is in your Starfield Data folder and that "jemison.biom" is in "Starfield\Data\planetdata\biomemaps", creating that folder if necessary, ensuring your ini file is set to load loose files.
This mod is the first of its kind so we're in uncharted territory here. It will probably conflict with anything that edits Jemison's properties but edits to existing locations on Jemison's surface like New Atlantis should be fine. Mods that add new non-procedural locations on Jemison might be compatible if they inherit the biome from the planet rather than defining it explicitly, but I haven't done much work with worldspaces so I don't know if that's true. The worst that should happen in this case is that the POI will look like one of the original biomes rather than my new ones.
This mod should be safe to uninstall at any time but I recommend making a save not landed on Jemison before uninstalling.
Permissions and Acknowledgements
If you release a mod using my guide, make sure to link back to it so anyone who wants to make their own planet overhauls can learn how to do it. The more information we share, the more powerful we become, the better we can make Starfield.
Thanks to:
- PixelRick for decoding the game's biome map file format barely a month after the game released, without whose work this mod literally could not exist
- Allnarta for posting a link to PixelRick's Github repository in the Starfield Modding discord to convince someone else that biome editing couldn't be done, which I took as a challenge
- DJLegends for helping me figure out a workaround for the automatic name generation of creatures
- Battenburga for beta testing
- TheOGTennessee for advice on plugin cleaning and ESM types
And finally a big congratulations to all the workers at Bethesda Game Studios for forming an officially-recognised union! Unionise the whole damn game industry!
Meet the new Jemison
Despite Jemison being one of the most important planets in the game, it only has a single unique biome for New Atlantis, while everything else is completely random – the mountains look like a different planet to the forests near New Atlantis, and the same mountains can be found on several other planets. In fact most planets are like this, with a single unique biome for hand-placed locations and a random selection of generic ones everywhere else. I found this really frustrating when surveying habitable planets because they're just a chaotic mishmash of random assets – in many cases two biomes right next to one other look completely unrelated, and animals and plants found on the same planet have no clear evolutionary relationships. So when I stumbled onto a way to replace default biomes with custom-made ones, I knew I had to try to one-up Todd, and redesign Jemison with an eye for detail, using an ecological story to guide the choices of landscapes, plants and animals to give Jemison a sense of place.
This redesign of Jemison is meant to represent a kind of idyllic, alternate Earth, using existing assets that resemble real animals. Like Earth was, Jemison is emerging from a global ice age and native lifeforms are rapidly diversifying into the new ecological niches as they open up. Most of the planet is covered in treeless grassland prairies, while more temperate regions in the mid-latitudes and coasts are home to the enormous mesa tree forests, in which New Atlantis sits. In the mountains, temperatures are still cold year-round, with spotty snow cover and a few small, hardy trees that can survive the chill. The ice caps, while rapidly receding, are largely barren.
During the ice age, Jemisonian animals had to evolve to deal with the extreme cold and are now re-adapting to the milder climate. The giant pseudosloths, bipedal herbivores the size of elephants that superficially resemble Old Earth's sloths, used an adaptation called gigantothermy where they grew in size to reduce their surface area to weight ratio to retain heat better. Now moving into the mesa tree forests they have become prolific, their huge size makes them pre-adapted for browsing on the high tree canopies, and their hides are home to symbiotic antimicrobial funguses that help them fight infection when attacked by predators (which you can harvest if you're brave). The mesa forests are the most biodiverse environments on the planet, holding plants like Christina blooms, leafy morningstars, bitter orange nuts, and the infamous skull palm – so called because early settlers mistook its ripe nuts for upside-down human skulls. As the glaciers receded, the barren tundras transformed into rolling prairies and the false dodos, once huddled together with their thick feathers for warmth, now roam freely in herds feeding on small insects, seeds and berries, pursued by packs of foxwolves. Plant species that prefer sun unobstructed by the tree canopy like sweet canis vine and starpod vine thrive on the open plains, while the colder mountains favour hardier species like the cliff laurel and hibernating spinetree. In the air, the vampires, distantly related to the foxwolves, hunt false dodos on the wing and scavenge the carcasses of dead pseudosloths, while horned parrots sing from the trees of the mesa forests. In the coastal regions, little siltcrabs pick through the wet sand for morsels to eat and run when anything big approaches (especially humans who consider them a delicacy) while tadpole fish form great schools in the oceans. In most environments you can find the humble scarab, a vital detritovore that helps to break down decaying matter and recycle nutrients back into the ecosystem.
Installation, Compatibility and Uninstallation
Install with your preferred mod manager. If installing manually, make sure "JemisonBiomeOverhaul.esm" is in your Starfield Data folder and that "jemison.biom" is in "Starfield\Data\planetdata\biomemaps", creating that folder if necessary, ensuring your ini file is set to load loose files.
This mod is the first of its kind so we're in uncharted territory here. It will probably conflict with anything that edits Jemison's properties but edits to existing locations on Jemison's surface like New Atlantis should be fine. Mods that add new non-procedural locations on Jemison might be compatible if they inherit the biome from the planet rather than defining it explicitly, but I haven't done much work with worldspaces so I don't know if that's true. The worst that should happen in this case is that the POI will look like one of the original biomes rather than my new ones.
This mod should be safe to uninstall at any time but I recommend making a save not landed on Jemison before uninstalling.
Permissions and Acknowledgements
If you release a mod using my guide, make sure to link back to it so anyone who wants to make their own planet overhauls can learn how to do it. The more information we share, the more powerful we become, the better we can make Starfield.
Thanks to:
- PixelRick for decoding the game's biome map file format barely a month after the game released, without whose work this mod literally could not exist
- Allnarta for posting a link to PixelRick's Github repository in the Starfield Modding discord to convince someone else that biome editing couldn't be done, which I took as a challenge
- DJLegends for helping me figure out a workaround for the automatic name generation of creatures
- Battenburga for beta testing
- TheOGTennessee for advice on plugin cleaning and ESM types
And finally a big congratulations to all the workers at Bethesda Game Studios for forming an officially-recognised union! Unionise the whole damn game industry!