Modder brings something new to Starfield, including daily routines, schedules and the inner lives of NPCs.

NPCs in Bethesda games like Oblivion or Skyrim have their own lives. The merchants are there to buy the garbage you collected during your last quest. But they also go to a tavern to eat, chat with other characters and sleep at night.

These NPC routines aren't usually that deep, but they do a lot to give the world a feeling of not being there to serve your needs. Starfield doesn't feel as alive as Oblivion or Skyrim, in part because the minor NPCs don't have any schedules, routines, or hint of their inner lives.

Modders are expected to pick up the slack. FlippingEggs created a mod titled NPCs have Routines and stores have Schedules that gives 40 NPCs something to do other than simply waiting for you enter their shops. Now, they will actually close their shops at night and do other things like real people. You can even peek into the lives of these NPCs: you can find datapads in their homes or shops with information about them, including their new schedules.

You might not be able to see the upside of shopkeepers being away from their stores all the time, especially if you're visiting from space. No worries, the mod knows that this is a sci-fi future. If you want to buy and sell in the middle night, there will be robots at the front desk.

Here's an overview of what a mod does:

• 40 characters now have daily schedules
• Four unnamed characters have daily schedules
• Styx is one of the 12 new robots that work in different stores. You can buy things when the store owner's not there.
• 61 data slates have been added to the counters of various stores and NPCs. Some of these slates offer simple notifications about business hours while others give you a glimpse into the lives of characters.

FlippingEggs also takes care to not screw you over.

"I have taken great care not to interfere in the vanilla quest progression. I checked every dialogue scene that an NPC was involved in before adding a schedule. If someone had to be in a specific location for a particular scene, I either did not touch them or added conditions so that their custom packages would not run until the scene was complete."

You can find the mod at Nexus Mods. Hopefully, this is just the beginning of many NPC overhauls that will give minor characters more to do than ring up your order of Chunks.