AIUI is a ground-up rebuild of Starfield’s interface (inventory, container, and barter menus first, HUD, workbench, outpost, and ship builder behind them) as a single mod I own end to end. The popular community UI mods that most players depend on stopped updating; every game patch since has been a gamble. AIUI replaces that dependency with a suite that can be rebased onto any future Starfield update from source.
Why it exists
Starfield’s modded UI ecosystem has a single point of failure: abandoned upstream releases that patch compiled Flash files nobody can regenerate. When the game updates, the mods break, and there’s no source to fix. AIUI inverts that: rebuild the menus from the current vanilla files every time, apply my own patches as versioned source fragments, and ship one archive that I can maintain forever.
Highlights
- Rebuilt from vanilla, every time. The inventory family (inventory, container, and barter menus, plus their large-font variants) is regenerated from the current vanilla SWFs with AIUI’s patches applied through scripted decompile-and-import, not by editing stale binaries.
- Patches as source, not blobs. Dense-row layout and column-field changes live as versioned ActionScript fragments with a manifest, so every modification is diffable and re-appliable. A refactor of this pipeline was verified by SHA-256 comparison across 347 decompiled files: byte-identical output before and after.
- One model, generated code. Inventory columns are defined once in a canonical profile model (labels, widths, value renderers, sort keys, named presets) and the build generates the column registry, row layout, and sort dispatch from it.
- Trust gates before install. A regression test suite validates generated SWFs and string pools, and an audit script refuses to package any payload still carrying legacy third-party markers. Nothing installs unless both pass.
- A game-update playbook. A documented rebase workflow turns “the patch broke the UI” from a crisis into a procedure: re-extract vanilla, re-apply patches, re-run the gates.
Technical approach
The toolchain is PowerShell orchestrating Flash decompilation, ActionScript injection, and archive packaging into a single ESM-plus-BA2 distribution, with user-facing configuration in plain INI presets. Captured payloads from the old mods are kept strictly as reference material. The audit gate exists precisely to guarantee none of it ships.
