As with many mechanics, Drifters takes a lot of design inspiration from starsector. However, hullmods are one of the things I really wanted to expand on, as I think it's one of the more influential things with regards to giving ships and factions unique personalities and there's a lot of potential with them.

Scarcity

The first order of business is introducing scarcity to hullmods. Scarcity is something I find really important to the feel of a fleet management game and a common recurring theme throughout my design methodology as it drives most other gameplay systems(exploration, combat, builds, trading), and hullmods fit perfectly into that. One of the more fun gameplay loops in early game starsector is going on a hunt for all the hullmod blueprints, as it feels like you're unlocking new playstyles with each one and encourages you to visit all the various factions. For a good while you'll be lacking various hullmods, forcing you have to get creative and experiment with "off meta" builds you might otherwise not do. And every time you get a new mod you get to try new theories and combos and rebuild your ships all over again, which as someone who's spent an ungodly amount of hours staring at the ship editor and combat simulator is part of the fun. Unfortunately once you find them all that loop just...ends, since you then have infinite copies of each mod essentially. I think simply requiring hullmods to be used as an inventory item like weapons would do wonders for gameplay. So that's what I'm doing!

Faction hullmods

Okay we got scarcity, but how do apply it in a way that's meaningful to gameplay? Faction hullmods, of course! Faction hullmods are one of the main ways I want to push the player towards interacting with various factions as it provides a meaningful tangible reason to being on good terms with a faction. Most hullmods will be produced solely by a single faction, with a handful of them that are common pool and sold by all factions. I also intend to make them rather rare and somewhat expensive, as going back to the scarcity thing it makes it feel more impactful when you do find them. Additionally, I intend for most factions to have a "rare" hullmod that either has a very small chance of appearing in markets, or requires special trade quests to obtain.

Rebalancing hullmods

I also wanted to address the issue of always building in the same hullmods. With the way building in hullmods works in starsector, it overly rewards building in the most expensive mods, which I find rather boring. I wanted to tackle that in a variety of ways, mainly by nerfing the larger "meta" mods through several mechanics.

• First is that hullmods are incompatible with other hullmods, and certain types of ships can't equip certain hullmods. If you have one equipped, you can't equip the ones it's exclusive to. So in starsector terms this would be like not being able to equip hardened shields and heavy armor on the same ship, or not being able to equip safety overrides on a hammerhead(blasphemy, I know). This allows me to fine tune certain ships and hullmods balance-wise, and also allows me to add a little bit of faction flavor where some ships will be entirely incompatible with mods from another faction.
• The second is that any hullmod that costs a large number of points won't be something you can build in, as a general rule.
• Third is I want ships to come with built in mods more often. It's such an easy thing to just add random built in mods to ships, but neither vanilla starsector nor nexerelin really do it that much. I'm aware of starship legends which I believe does random stats, though I've admittedly never tried it and adding random stats is a whole other thing. By adding built in mods to ships you can actually do some fun stuff, like having ships with "illegal" mods that would normally be incompatible with that ship/mods(it's a feature not a bug!), having more built in mods than is normally possible, or having hullmods that you as the player don't have in supply at the moment. Or my favorite, if the ship is particularly hard to come by, just telling the player to deal with it and work around the hullmod they may or may not like, forcing them out of their comfort zone.

Neutral hullmods

Something I've been toying with is a sub classification of some hullmods, called neutral mods. Neutral mods will simply be hullmods that give buffs in exchange for debuffs as well. As they're internally balanced against their own debuffs, the cost to equip them will be negligible. This isn't really a radical departure, but I did notice that there were a lot of hullmods in both vanilla and modded starsector that cost many points to equip and the net gain to your build was effectively negative, meaning you'd basically never want to use it. By mostly removing the point cost and having an actual classification to them, they make a little more sense and inclines both players and modders to utilize/create them.

Negative hullmods

I was never really comfortable with D-mods, short for defective mods, in starsector, mainly because there's a lot of weirdness with how they're implemented. The idea of D-mods is that they represent your ship getting so beat up that the crew just say screw it and stop maintaining certain systems, which reduces deployment costs. This is fine on paper, but in practice the way you acquire them is just awkward. If your ship gets blown up in battle, you have a chance of it getting a random D-mod. I heavily disagree with this mentality.

For me hullmods represent either a strategy you choose to use in the case of hullmods you as the player install, or a "personality" of a ship if it's built in or a ship-class specific hullmod. But D-mods are neither. They're random to get and they can interfere with builds in a way that's not fun, and (for some reason) they're exorbitantly  expensive to get rid of without the hull restoration skill(which invalidates the mechanic almost entirely, the opposite problem!), something I never understood. I want them to be something to opt into rather than something forced onto you because you got blown up one too many times. If you want one of your ships to be held together with duct tape and bubblegum, it should be because you chose it.

To that end I want to treat negative hullmods as something you install like any other hullmods. However, unlike other hullmods which require items, negative hullmods won't. My hope is this encourages players to equip them if they have a few points to spare and want to reduce deployment costs.

Trivia

Little bit of design trivia for fun: The appearance of hullmods as an item is inspired by mega man battle network's chips. I always thought that the chips looked cool so that's what I went with. Ironically I never actually played those games, maybe some day.