Been thinking of getting into Starsector, any mods you guys recommend for a new player? I'm looking to roleplay as an Indian captain/pirate, so Rapesector is a must.
Well, if you're just getting into it I always recommend no mods. Try the base game experience until you find yourself "completing the game." What I mean by that is, set a long term goal for yourself then end it there and start a new character (if you want). Then I'd tell you to play with mods. But if you decide "fuck it, we ball" and run mods anyway, I can't recommend
Speedup and Autosave (apparently autosaving is now a vanilla feature, I haven't updated yet so I didn't know) enough. Battle and travel is pretty slow, but sometimes it can be
too slow. Speedup does what it says on the tin, speeds the game up, and you can set the speed in the config of the mod.
Hostile Intercept makes it more clear if the ship moving towards you is simply heading your direction if they're actively chasing you. And it autopauses so you can make the appropriate move, which can be a bit cheesy but it's a single player game.
AI Tweaks makes AI piloted ships and even AI controlled autofire weapons function better. Too much shit to name, so check out the page for yourself.
Better Variants seeks to improve AI fleets to be more competent.
Console Commands does what it says on the tin. Either use the help command or read the page for commands, there's loads.
Logistic notifictations lets you know how many days of supplies and light-years of fuel you have before you run out, which should be vanilla honestly.
Scan Those Gates, because when you have insanely massive hyperstructures why
would I need to travel all the across the system just to scan it? Also scans for cryosleepers and hypershunts.
Combat Chatter makes the void battle a bit less empty and gives personality to your officers, even AI has new lines.
Now for some bigger yet not quite "deep end" mods:
Ship/weapon pack adds loads of balanced (because oh boy are most mods not balanced), vanilla friendly ships and variants of its and vanilla Starsector's ships. So you won't quite run out of new things to test out.
Grand Colonies increases building slots, not too useful by itself as the best colonies are specialized colonies rather than jack-of-all-trades colonies. Unless you use:
Industrial Evolution (Indevo) adds loads of industries and structures, some requiring you to explore the sector to find the mod's content, among other things. You can detach your ships into a AI separate fleet that follows you, with all the pros (I believe you can use this to artificially extend your fleet limit, could be wrong) and cons (you need to make sure it always has supplies and fuel or they'll get stranded so it's not really an early game ability) that come with it. Encounter and even build station-like structures that attack enemy fleets across the map, weakening then if hit, mass repair ships and remove their
D-mods, deconstruct ships to acquire their blueprints without needing to find them to build them yourself, silly late game shit like the rift generator to move
entire planets to different systems, and a fuck ton of shit. Seriously this can be a whole campaign by itself.
Ashes of the Domain (AotD) pairs nicely with Indevo and adds even more technology, from more early game (vanilla industries tend to have a prerequisite for example before you can build their normal counterpart) to "shit on the entire sector with one system" level end game tech, and branching paths for more specialized industries. But you do need to research it as well as find items to even start the research. It comes in 4 separate mods and has plenty of special compatibility with other mods listed on the site. It takes a while so it doesn't completely shit on the game's balance immediately and makes your colony actually feel more like a growing colony with lesser than vanilla game tech.
And that's all I care to name so far, there's plenty more but I encourage you to pick your own poison. Oh and I should mention the existence of portrait packs, in case you get tired of seeing the same faces after a while or you just see ones you like. There's like...one, maybe two, portrait packs that are "vanilla" styled in the sea of ANIMEEEEEEEEE. So if you care about that I recommend just using vanilla portraits as some mods I've listed here even add their own.
And for something that's not a mod, I recommend
TriOS which will save you a lot of time and headaches, especially with big mod lists. You can download and change the java version the game is using, change the amount of ram you want the game to use (which is a must have, normal ram limits are good only for the unmodded games), more easily manage your mods (search, update, etc.). My favorite feature is the vram checker, it lets you see how much vram (no shit) mods use as some mods can use quite a bit due to too many high resolution images (ships, planet surfaces, portraits) and might need to be reduced manually. Lastly you can check portraits added by mods and even weapons, but obviously spoilers ahead. Again, I recommend modless for a while first.
Last thing before I stop, I recommend checking out
Memtest86 to check if there's any issues with your ram, as that can cripple your enjoyment if you find your ram fucked up without your pc outright telling you like another user had happen.
