Starfield: the best ways to customize your ship
There are almost endless possibilities when it comes to Starfield ship customization, but if you’re diving in for the first time, you’ll quickly discover that there are some specific requirements every ship needs to meet, and while kitting your ship out is cool, you don’t want to leave yourself too heavy or hard to maneuver in the process.
While you can just buy new Starfield ships outright, it's more fun if you do it yourself, so we’ll explain everything you need to know when it comes to Starfield ship-building; ensuring that you can head out into the stars with something to make all the Spacers and Zealots think twice about coming after you.
The basics – Starfield
Bethesda
Here are some tips you should always keep in mind when building ships:
- Building ships is expensive – If you’re looking to build your dream battleship, then you’re going to need a ridiculous amount of credits before you get started. It'll likely have to wait until after Starfield's main story before you can build your magnum opus.
- Everything you add makes the ship heavier – a heavy ship will have low speed, mobility, and grav jump range. Adding extra engines can help negate this downside.
- Every system you add or upgrade will require more power – there’s no point upgrading a system when your reactor doesn’t have enough power to feed it.
- The docking port must always be on the outer edge of the ship – otherwise, that’s not docking, that’s crashing. Make sure you plan where your docking port is going to go. Here's a quick guide on how to dock in Starfield, if you don't already know.
Every ship system explained – Starfield
Bethesda
While areas like the hull and habitats are self-explanatory, each of the systems has its own intricacies that you need to pay attention to.
Weapons
Much like your regular guns, there are different types of weaponry you can attach to your ship:
- Energy/Laser weapons – Do rapid damage to shields and decent damage to hulls, you should always have at least one of these weapons attached.
- Ballistic weapons – Do little damage to shields, but heavy damage to hulls – good to use once you’ve used lasers to take the shields down.
- Missile weapons – Do heavy damage to both shields and hulls, but need time to lock on to the target before firing.
- EM weapons – Do heavy damage to ships’ systems, making them good for use in targeting mode once you’ve disabled a ship’s shields.
You can have up to three different types of weapons attached to a ship at once, and giving them more power increases their damage and reloading rate.
Shields
Shields are pretty simple. They protect your hull from taking damage while they’re active. Better shields allow you to dedicate more power to it, making them more resilient to impacts and recharge faster after not taking damage for a while.
Engines
Speed and mobility are extremely important in dogfights, so always make sure you have enough engines to cope with the weight and size of your ship. The engines are a system you can freely power up and down in battle without too much consequence, so don’t be afraid to pull power out when it’s needed elsewhere.
Grav Drive
Your Grav Drive determines the range that you can jump, which will determine how far you can go between systems. This can also be dragged down if your ship is too heavy or has low mobility. Pouring more power into it makes it charge up quicker, which is useful if you need to escape a fight in a hurry.
Reactor
The reactor how many power bars you have to allocate among your other systems. Reactors come with a very straightforward “bigger = better” equation.
Fuel Tanks
While it’s not technically a ship system, it’s just as important as any of them. These determine how far across the universe you can travel in a single jump. To make it to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, you’ll need both a powerful Grav Drive and plenty of fuel.
We also have a full Starfield walkthrough to help you save the galaxy one tip at a time.
