Load order in Starfield: October 2024 edition

Starfield’s 1.14.70.0 (September 2024) update introduced another change to how the official plugins are loaded. In my original post in June, I wrote that:

Starfield has no plugins that are hardcoded to always be active and in specific positions in the load order, but all of the official plugins are hardcoded to always be active (I refer to such plugins as being implicitly active): they are Starfield.esm, Constellation.esm, OldMars.esm, BlueprintShips-Starfield.esm, SFBGS003.esm, SFBGS006.esm, SFBGS007.esm and SFBGS008.esm.

That’s no longer the case. Rather than being implicitly active, most of the official plugins have hardcoded positions:

Plugin	Mod index
`Starfield.esm`	`00`
`ShatteredSpace.esm`	`01`
`Constellation.esm`	`FE000`
`OldMars.esm`	`FE001`
`SFBGS003.esm`	`FD00`
`SFBGS004.esm`	`FE002`
`SFBGS006.esm`	`FD01`
`SFBGS007.esm`	`FE003`
`SFBGS008.esm`	`FE004`

(ShatteredSpace.esm is from the recently-released Shattered Space DLC, and SFBGS004.esm was added in August’s patch.)

The exception is BlueprintShips-Starfield.esm: it’s still implicitly active, and it’s possible to load other blueprint masters before and/or after it.

I’ve released LOOT v0.24.0 with support for this change. The relevant GitHub issue is loot/loot#2032.