Mod Concept: GalBank+

[ag12]

After having played Starfield for a fair amount (60h+), one thing is clear: credits are way too easy to get and the economy is just way too forgiving. Now, that just sounds like a great way to build a mod around not just to rebalance but also include some of the functionality from known mods such as SexLab Survival and others as well as to take a big step towards making Starfield's universe feel a little more dystopian overall. So here's a mod concept to extend the functionality of GalBank and the way money works. I fully intend to make this mod when the CK releases, but I can't promise anything due to life reasons - so I'd rather put the idea out first in case I don't end up making it but somebody else likes the idea and feels inspired to make it... also, we got at least half a year to kill before the CK actually drops. Might as well spitball!

 

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Mod Concept:
GalBank+ / GB+

I. Introduction / Lore

In the year 2330 humanity has long settled the furthest stars of the Galaxy and many cities have sprung up across the various systems. Fueled by various staryards and corporations, humans establish ever new outposts, colonies and factories across the known universe - many factions and groups have risen to prominence, further spreading their own style of life, yet all sharing one common denominator: credits. Despite all differences and tensions, the one thing everybody agrees on is that credits are good. From New Atlantis' bankers, Freestar farmers and Neon's cartels to the Crimson Fleet itself, credits are accepted everywhere. Some megacorporations claim the title of biggest, strongest, most influential and pride themselves in their staryards and factories, but behind all of them stands another: GalBank - the Galaxy's pumping heart. Whether you're a miner on Cydonia, planning to open a small shop in New Homestead or are freelancing in Paradiso, you need an account with GalBank, because are you even a person if you don't have a bank account in 2330?

 

II. Features / Ideas

Bank Account

The central part of this mod would be having a bank account with GalBank and mechanics (some of which I'll outline below) that push the player to utilize the bank account. As a concept, it'll make Starfield much deeper on the "corpo" level, really make it feel like those megacorporations and their billions have a strong hold over the galaxy. There could be different tiers of account that are required by various services, such as...

 

GalBank+

Basic account, designed to exploit the working class.

c5000 signup fee

Weekly fee: c500 + 15% of account

10% Withdrawal Fee | 10% Deposit Fee

No discounts | c5000 allowance

c2500 overdraft | 20% interest/d

Daily withdrawal limit: c1500

 

GalBank+ Premium

Premium account, used by most Captains and the middle class.

c15000 signup fee

Weekly fee: c1500 + 10% of account

5% Withdrawal Fee | 5% Deposit Fee

20% discount to many tariffs | c10000 credit allowance

c5000 overdraft | 15% interest/d

Daily withdrawal limit: c5000

 

GalBank+ Gold

Premium account, used by the wealthy and influential.

c50000 signup fee

Weekly fee: c5000 + 5% of account

5% Withdrawal Fee | 5% Deposit Fee

50% discounts to many tariffs | c25000 credit allowance

c10000 overdraft | 10% interest/d

Daily withdrawal limit: c10000

 

and lastly

 

GalBank Basic

Basic account, essentially indentured servitude.

No signup fee.

No weekly fee.

100% Withdrawal Fee | 50% Deposit Fee

No discounts | No credit allowance

Unlimited overdraft | 0% interest/d

Daily withdrawal limit: c250

 

Obviously the values are kind of just made up with no regard to balancing - but the idea is there, essentially the whole system would be designed to significantly reduce credit income and make new characters feel like they're struggling for money. Suddenly those c500 per week you send to your parents in New Atlantis seem like a much bigger deal. On top of that, going bankrupt could mean that GalBank enforces the contract by forcing the player into any other modded scenario or job as an outcome. Spaceports might refuse to repair your ship if you don't at least have a GB+ Premium account to give them some certainty that you're not defaulting on that payment, Staryards only sell ships to people with GB+ Gold accounts - afterall there are limited production capabilities and the rich favor the rich. If you only have a GalBank+ or, even worse, a GalBank Basic (aka are indentured) many respected businesses won't let you trade, especially in faction capitals.

 

Also, if people like the idea and we get prostitution and so forth, there could be a GalBank+ Pink account that essentially taxes everything except income from sex work and has it's own set of rules attached to it.

 

Licensing and Tariffs

There are a lot of opportunities to levy additional fees and expenses from the player throughout Starfield that both make sense and also further nerf the player money income to something more reasonable. Some examples could be:

 

Spaceport Landing Tariffs

Any ports that offer Spaceship Services would levy a tariff from the PC for occupying one of their precious landing pads or docking bays, with faction standing and bank account type reducing the price by certain percent points. So if you've completed the UC:V questline, you might get cheaper or free landing rights in New Atlantis. This could mean that you normally have to pay c5000 per landing in New Atlantis, but if you hold a GB+ Gold account, it'd be reduced by 50% to c2500, but if you have citizenship with the UC, your basline could be c2500 and your account reduction puts it down to c1250. It would probably even be possible to base the exact amount needed of the size of the PC's ship.

These tariffs could either have to be paid before landing via the contraband mechanic (I think it'll be pretty easy to force it to open dialogue with you and make you pay the fee before clearing you for landing since that's already a mechanic) or you need to go pay it before lifting off, which could cause extra trouble if you somehow manage to lose all your money while out and about the city.

 

Trade & Service Licensing

Due to local regulations, you need to have a license to get services from some of the higher level vendors, e.g. a galaxy wide Trade Authority subscription could be required to do business with all of the Trade Authority outposts, or the same concept for UC Surplus and so forth. It could also take the shape of a city wide trading tax that gets levied by the respective faction from your GB account. Obviously, if you were to engage in some more lewd behaviors and offered services of that kind, you'd need a license to do so.

 

Credit Allowances & Limits

Crime and corruption have been rampant throughout the Galaxy, so local authorities have established laws regarding the interplanetary unregulated transfer of credits - in other words, when you're in a city, and try to leave, the game would check how many credits you have on you and you're either not allowed to leave if above your GB allowance or have to pay additional taxes.

This would be one of the main mechanics that pushes the player to put their money in the bank.

Also, in order to just be a pain in the ass, there could be limits on how many credits the PC can withdraw from their account. A lot of this could be framed under anti-crime legislation, with the government wanting citizens of their cities to keep money in the bank rather than carrying it around in credsticks, so that it's easier to track.

 

Consequences & "Survival"

So all of it serves primarily to make the game be a little harder on the money side of things, introduce expenses and make it so that there's a point to roleplaying and planning your trips a bit more careful than just fast travelling to the map marker currently highlighted by your active quest. Try to plan making a profit each trip out of the big cities. Granted, some of this is assuming that, especially on the lewd side, the cities become more interesting once mods hit - so if you pay that landing fee for New Atlantis, make sure you don't do so just to sell of some stuff (you could go to a smaller, cheaper outpost instead), but instead have a couple things you want to do in town.

 

And if you run out of money, things get fun. At first, you'd overdraft your account and that would let you recover, if you've got some stuff to sell. But if you exceed your overdraft, the bank is going to send a team of enforcers to track you down and deal with your debt.

 

Search & Seizure
The obvious one is that the enforcers will seize property from the PC to settle the debt - no point pretending that you're broke if you've got a fancy spaceship full of stuff. They'd start by seizing items from the PC (and any companions) themselves, potentially leaving you with very little left on your person, but also might foreclose any properties you own, appropriate your cargo hold, and even seize outposts or ships from your control.

 

Account Downgrade

If GalBank determines that even seizing items isn't enough to settle your debts, they might go a step further and downgrade your account and count half the initial signup fee of your account towards your debt - so if you're a GalBank+ Premium account holder, they'd downgrade you to standard GalBank+ and count c7500 towards your debt. This obviously loses you a lot of privileges voids a substantial amount of credits - and reduces your overdraft allowance, so if you accrue a massive amount of debt, chances are you're getting kicked down the ladder until you hit rock bottom: GalBank Basic.

 

Indentured Servitude & Other

Once you defaulted down to GalBank Basic, they won't let you upgrade from that level until you've settled all your debts, which is going to be tricky. This is, essentially, legal slavery. GalBank could send you to various places to do various work for them, and I think with the right mods we all know what kind of work it is. Furthermore, if you're indentured and your debt is still too high, or you accrue more debt, maybe GalBank cuts their losses and decides to employ some of their shady accomplices over at the Trade Authority to ship you off-world and sell you to the highest bidder. Of course once you only have a GalBank Basic account a lot of services are no longer available to you, so even if you get sold off, somehow escape and your debt has been settled, until you work up enough money to purchase a GalBank+ account again, you'd be very much stuck at the bottom.

 

Backgrounds & Perks

In line with the new systems, there could be new backgrounds, perks and so forth. Maybe you can start your character with a GalBank+ Premium account, but get some downside for it.

Same with perks, The "Bartering" perks could reduce the cost of licensing and so forth. There's a lot of detail to be had here, but of course it's not clear how moddable the perk system really is right now. I forsee it to be easy to add new backgrounds, but whether you can add new perks to perk trees or are limited to the existing ones, I don't know. It'd be nice if they went with a dynamic highly moddable perk tree that generates based on the existing perks in the savegame (we wouldn't really know if that's the case, because everybody has the same set of perks), or if you'd actually need to edit the perk UI for new perks to show up, which would make it a compatibility nightmare... who knows!

 

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That's what I got thus far, Obviously some of the features are super easy to do, while others require large amounts of work or tie-ins with other mods, once they exist.
I've got another couple ideas for mods floating around that would mostly be able to tie into this system, but overall I think it'll be able to tie in as a starting point with almost any scenario mod, a bit in the spirit of Simple Slavery from Skyrim, but that's all future talk. Really, just making the game more economically challenging, even without any lewd stuff, would already be a win in my books. I'd love to hear your ideas and maybe I'll put together more mod concepts over the coming months as we wait for the stupid CK to release. Take all of this as inspiration, not promise. I'll try to make this mod, but if somebody else gets to it before me or so, I don't mind at all. I'm just enjoying writing these ideas out!

[Baltasarr80]

Basically an upgraded vision of "loansharks of Skyrim 2.0" I like it

[thefabulousfink]

This is a really neat idea.  I like the idea of essentially a "Credit Score" for the player.  Since the idea is to keep the player from having lots of cash on hand a good loan system is important for when a player needs to make a big purchase like buying a new ship. Along with the basic GalBank loans it would be cool to see other loan companies.  The loan terms and penalties could be tied to your account rank.  The lower your rank, the more degrading the task if you fail to pay back your loan.

 

I was thinking have one major loanshark based on each of the major planets, but have kiosks so that you can interact with them in most cities.  Each loanshark company could be involved in a different shady industry and that would determine the type of task that you have to complete.  For example: maybe the company on Mars is a drug cartel.  Higher rank tasks could involve smuggling drugs, taking out competitors, or completing drug deals.  Lower rank task could involve working in the drug lab, testing experimental drugs, or prostitution (I think most of the low rank tasks would involve some form of prostitution).

 

With different cartels dealing in Drugs, Escorts, Smuggling, or even Human Trafficking, the player could weigh the risks (and punishments) associated with each loan offer.

[SBASHER]

There are debt collections quest in the stock game, though I think there are 3 in the stock version.

Now if your mod makes that a radiant quest, there is an indentured servitude quest option. Maybe after stock quests, send the player to collect a debt from targets connected to "hazardous" mods (E.G. go collect the bounty from the leader of this orgy, in a level 55 system) or if no mods are integrated, go to this Crimson Fleet Captain, go to this Spacer, ect.

Another option is a skip to black "prison" equivalent and the player loses exp for the soul grinding paperwork, unless there is a prison mod.

[Miauzi]

Zitat

In the year 2330, humanity has long since colonised the galaxy's most distant stars and many cities have sprung up in the various systems.

 

 

But that can't have anything to do with the actual game ... because if the galaxy is our Milky Way ... then it has a diameter of 100,000 light years and seen from our solar system, "Beagle Point" is the most distant star at 65,000 light years!

In Starfield, the most distant star is just 100-200 light years away.

However, the basic story of your mod idea has a considerably large story flaw

 

Zitat

Driven by various star courts and corporations, humans keep building new outposts, colonies and factories throughout the known universe

 

Um - we don't even know where the current residence of the "snake" worshippers and their fanatic secessionists is.

And what we find on the approx. 1,000 moons and planets in approx. 100 systems ... are (allegedly) leftovers from the wars between the "UC" and the "FS".

Even though I find your mod idea really original and very good ... a little less "gushing" (aka exaggeration) would be good in my eyes

because according to current estimates -> the Milky Way has about 400,000,000,000 star systems and not 100 as in "StrarField".