Science is Sick BUT... | Science Skills Analysis & Tier List | Starfield Handbook

the science skills in Starfield are sick and they unlock more content in the game than any tree even more so than Tech I'd say unfortunately there are some stinky little skills that hold the tree back from being perfect and it really sheds light on just how basic and uninspiring a good chunk of the skills are in this game I've been back in the lab testing all 16 of the science skills and the results are in knowledge is power so please share your thoughts in the comments on what I missed or might have got wrong let's dig in our first skill today is astrodynamics this is a generally useful skill that simplifies travel between systems by extending your jump range and decreasing your fuel consumption while it's by no means essential it can be useful earlier on if you don't have the credits to invest into grab drives or fuel upgrades on your ship that may also require Starship design to access being realistic though it's not that expensive to get some solid upgrades outfitted on any ship the main benefit of increasing your jump range is that it has a dramatic effect on how your ship performs jumps to distant systems without hitting certain minimums for jump range you simply can't reach certain systems at all or use them as intermediate jump points to hit further Target destinations you can see this comparison of how much longer the route is when I use a ship that has a lower jump range which is fine so long as you have enough fuel to make it feasible this is very much a nice to have skill that I would only really recommend upgrading when you find space travel becoming clunky and you're forced to make additional pit stops along the way to your destination if you have the credits to upgrade your ship directly that's a better option than shelling out a skill point here if you're going to put some points in though I'd say ranks one and three are the most valuable as they both have grab jump distance modifiers which helps optimize jump routes which indirectly decreases fuel requirements a final way to combat this is by having Sarah Morgan or any other crew member with astrodynamics on your ship though they only decrease fuel cost and do not increase jump distances overall it's a skill that does have practical uses but you can easily make do without it I'd still say it's a c tier skill that you should only invest in if you're really feeling the strain of space travel and you don't have the credits to upgrade your ship next up is geology which is a pretty trash skill in all honesty as manually Gathering inorganic resources is horribly inefficient compared to just spending a few thousand credits at just about any vendor in exchange for hundreds of resources when starting out ranking up this skill gives about a 50% chance to receive twice as many resources per Harvest while out exploring each rank increases the Rarity of resources that benefit from this skill with the final rank making it possible to get additional rare resources now this is pretty vague but after testing around 200 Rock samples it seems to be around a 10% chance to receive a single additional reare resource which is is terrible these are the only benefits from the skill and unless you're doing some fully self-sufficient no shops playthrough then don't waste a single point in this skill you can also just set up outposts to extract all the resources you need for a particular project even the unique ones once you get those set up you may as well have an unlimited supply of whatever you need this skill is probably one of the most well warranted f- rankings in the game medicine is not a useless skill but it's certainly far from good each rank of medicine increases the effectiveness of meds and the rate at which they heal by 10% with the final rank providing fighting 20% and the chance to cure an Affliction so you get a bit more value out of that fourth Point based on my test you have around a 10% chance to cure an Affliction and it can only cure one Affliction even if you have multiple personally I think the skill is only worth investing in if you actively struggle in combat and are constantly popping Med packs to the point where you're entirely running out of them and you need to resupply them at vendors if you're on a higher difficulty there's certainly a better case for this but even so you're actually better off just putting the points into Wellness first since Med items heal off percent max HP so the increase in healing from a med pack is identical up to rank three of Wellness or medicine there's a tiny difference at rank four that favors medicine but you wouldn't have the higher HP pool that Wellness provides you which I would say is objectively more useful to prevent getting one shot by stronger foes in any case you're probably better off putting points into more offensive than defensive skills if you even need to bother investing in either I'd rank this a d with the rank four perk maybe warranting a c as it's slightly more useful research methods is an interesting one that I could see people having mixed opinions on with each rank you not only decrease the cost of research projects by 10 20 then 40 and finally 60% from ranks 1 to 4 but you also permanently decrease the cost to craft items by the same amount rank four comes with the additional bonus of making sudden developments twice as common and let me tell you you really feel this one there are cases where I've tried to crank through a bunch of research projects and end up only having to supply about half of the unique ingredients which is super convenient now the argument for this not being a great skill is that you could just do a few vendor runs and rock up most of the research materials you'd ever need but if you're doing any serious crafting this translates to massive Time Savings not having to seek out specific resources it's also great for speeding up more complex Outpost or XP credit farming as the more advanced craftables do decrease in cost if you just doing an Adaptive frame build however this would be irrelevant as it already has a base cost of one aluminum and one iron so it would never decrease lower than that obviously an important note is that this does not reduce the cost to craft Outpost modules in The Outpost post Builder tab but it does work for all other crafting like meds weapons Etc overall it's a solid skill that removes a lot of headache out of researching and is exceptionally good for anyone who crafts a lot I think this is an a tier skill that can skew one point up or two points down depending on if you value the convenience this provides our last novice skill is surveying and this one is another highly preference-based convenience skill geared toward those who are interested in Exploration without any upgrades your scanner has a pathetic range of 10 m which can make surveying a real chore as you pretty much have to have your face in a bush for it to register the scan without any investment rank one is easily the best investment as you double your scan range from 10 to 20 M and this will honestly probably be more than enough for 90% of players further ranks continue to increase the scan Distance by 10 m each up to 50 m and it does speed up full surveys of planets but not by an amount that I'd say justifies the full four points of investment unless you're really into fully surveying many planets you also get scaling Zoom levels with ranks but it doesn't change the phys physical distance you actually have to be from a scannable entity to register the scan so I find it pretty useless unless you're trying to get a closer look at some moons I'd say this is a b tier skill that's very convenient for explorers but for the general player who only does the odd full Planet survey a single point is going to be more than enough subscribe or you shall suffer the Eternal gaze of the citizens of the settled systems and no amount of mods will break it or do it because you want more research-based Starfield content similar to serving botney is another skill that explorers will benefit tremendously from along with anyone interested in diving into Outpost building normally it takes eight scans of a plant to fully scan it but each rank of boty drops that number down by one with only four scans being required at rank four this effectively makes exploration twice as fast and in all honesty probably even more than that as I've noticed you'll have instances on planets where you just can't seem to find more than a couple of each plant for long stretches of exploration you receive identical benefits as you would from geology where you have a chance to receive receive additional resources from each Harvest but that's nothing special rank one is where all the actual important benefits are you gain additional important info about each plant including the resources you need to cultivate it at an outpost and whether that plant is a valid candidate for growing to begin with typically it's only the small to mediumsized plants as they need to fit in the actual greenhouse and the large Plant models just wouldn't fit there so I'd say one point in botney is a must for players with any interest at all in Outpost and that dedicated explorers shouldn't hesitate to drop the full four point points and would likely consider this an S tier skill if you have no interest in wandering around planets scanning plants for hours you'd probably consider this a d tier skill but I would still consider the one point at least for the Outpost aspect I'm going to skip ahead to zoology here as this is almost a carbon copy of Botany except it's for creatures instead of plants same sort of deal where Progressive ranks give you more resources of higher qualities and scan requirements to complete a scan scales down from 8 to four this scan requirement decrease is actually so important for creatures scanning for explorers because if you've tried to fully survey more than a few planets you've probably spent a stupid amount of time trying to find some of these sneaky little shits for some reason they have significantly lower spawn rates than the larger creatures and even relanding on a planet doesn't guarantee you'll find some in some cases even the larger creatures suffer from this depending on the planet so only having to find four of each is a giant plus if you're keen on surveying rank one again is the star of the show here where you unlock the ability to create animal husbandry facilities at Outpost to produce animal resources you also supposedly can Harvest resources from creatures without harming them but I've tried walking up to creatures to harvest even with them being stunned with em weapons and that never did anything so either I've done something wrong here or it really was just referring to Outpost farming them finally you have the same benefit from the scans to see if a creature youve scanned is eligible for resource production in your Outpost with most violent creatures and those little elusive being excluded from that list rankings for zoology are identical to botney put one point in for the Outpost unlock and it's an S tier for explorers and a waste of points for those of you who dread Planet wandering if you haven't given exploration a fairshake I'd recommend trying it again honestly I've had some good fun just roaming around some of the more vibrant life-filled planets scanning is an allright skill that has value to those interested in piracy as well as exploration each rank allows you to detect one tier higher of resources on planet surfaces while scanning but this only means from a surface scan perspective you can still always find any resources listed on the planet summary so long as you're in an eligible area to find it so scanning is not a hard requirement it simply helps you zero in on resources more effectively you can see the difference in the map visualization with each Progressive rank on screen here on the piracy side of things each rank gives you a little more information about the ships around you while in space starting with just reactor information and total cargo value at rank one then crew Hull and Shield information at rank two now I can't say for certain whether this factors in the captain's hold where typically you'll find tons of Loot on boarded ships but I want to say that it doesn't maybe someone here has experience that can confirm if it is factored in let me know if you do know the answer here rank three gives you the general damage rating of the ship which is actually extremely relevant for understanding the success potential of a piracy attempt assuming no other ships are present you can just use that value and compare it to your own this is just the summ value of all the weapon systems to give you that damage rating the fourth and final rank details the actual allocations for their weapon system and also allows you to see exactly what that Target ship is carrying so you can decide if it's really worth engaging with them and whether you have a fair shot at succeeding in a piracy attempt to begin with this skill definitely has its uses for pirates and explorers but it's far from revolutionary however I'll be kind and say it's still warrant to be as the information it provides can be quite useful in the right situations so I've seen a few comments floating around saying spacit design isn't a great skill but I have to disagree here there's some fantastic benefits you can get from this skill that definitely makes the points feel worthy of investment now don't get me wrong it's no weapon engineering but there are some utility mods for carrying capacity and O2 regen strong defensive benefits that can be very useful for damage soaking healing item boosting and even HP regen which can save you a huge Point investment in the physical tree finally just being able to change the actual boost type of your pack is huge if you find a superior legendary pack with awesome roles that happens to be a power or basic pack to the significantly better balanced or skip pack this is at least an a tier skill in my eyes the just shy of pushing s I'd recommend waiting to put the points in however until you know there are upgrades you're ready to Shell out the skill points for so head over to an equipment modding table first in check another fantastic skill on the list is weapon engineering this skill is no doubt one of the best skills in the game as it unlocks the absolute best of the best means of improving your weapons in Starfield from Optics to grips and stocks to mags and batteries you have a wide variety of options at your disposal to customize weapons to your liking and some combinations are absolutely nuts the Hornets Nest coach man that many of you pointed out in the comments last video is a perfect example while you can access some basic weapon mods without skill point investment obviously the best are gated behind the final ranks of the skill and they're honestly well worth it I would Max this skill out well before putting points into the combat tree any day as this unlocks mods that can work for literally all weapon types in the game versus many of the combat skills that are for very specific weapons and damage types easily an S tier skill across the board with the similar advice to only spend the skill points once you're ready to drop materials to upgrade your weapons of choice another worthwhile consideration is leveling research methods before this and any of the other crafting base skills to speed up the research projects and drop the crafting cost I'll be making a video in the near future that covers every weapon mod in depth so keep your eyes out for that astrophysics is yet another excellent skill for explorers and it's honestly a reasonable pickup for players who enjoy using exploration as a means for leveling versus things like XP farms at Outpost rank one lets you scan moons around the planet you're currently on rank two extends us to anything in your current system rank three for any Celestial body within 16 light years and then finally 30 Lighty years at rank four the distance benefits from three and four are not especially necessary as it's usually better to travel to each system at least once if you're interested in the the Stars my destination achievement and it also unlocks it as a valid travel route which makes travel less of a hassle down the road if you do a lot of exploring the biggest benefit from astrophysics is the percent chance of discovering a trait when scanning from space if you've ever tried to scan a planet with three or more traits you know it's a giant pain in the ass to knock all of them out as they're so godamn far from where you land this 50% chance is a huge timesaver and you get XP directly from your ship anytime you discover a trait from the scan also gas giants you scan always count as a fully completed survey and can award over 200 XP each in many cases so just two ranks in astrophysics can rack you up a significant amount of XP over the course of cleaning through every system and getting all of those gas giants which you you can also sell to Vlad for additional credits pushing to rank four will also save you hours of onf foot surveying time not having to find every trait on every planet obviously this is far from the best way to level in the game but if you plan on exploring most of what the galaxy has to offer this is just free efficient XP so it's definitely an a tier skill that's worth the points if you're going on a 2001 Space Odyssey but if that's not your Space Jam then it's probably not the slam dunk skill you were looking for and it'll be more of a d tier skill I really didn't want to call Chemistry a bad skill but once you realize that certain ingredients in chemistry must be purchased from shops or looted or are exceedingly rare like kemite it becomes clear that it's next to impossible to sustain a reliable supply of highquality chems not even accounting for the fact that a lot of these endgame chems only last for 10 seconds to 5 minutes which is frankly way too short each rank of chemistry provides access to new chem entirely or upgraded variants of existing chems rank four looks like a pretty cool perk as it says you'll occasionally craft triple the amount of chems but just how often does this actually happen well I tried making hundreds of chem with chemistry Max and it's an embarrassing 3.3% chance to proc this effect was it really two match task for Bethesda to make even half of these rank four perks in this game at least somewhat rewarding like damn I've tried to see as much good in this game as I possibly can despite being a very cynical person but it's actually sad how uninspired or Flatout useless the majority of skills are in this game you could have easily made chem you craft last twice as long at rank two and become twice as potent at rank three and that took all of 30 seconds to think of and it makes the skill 10 times more compelling for me to invest in I doubt this would even be difficult to program since we know nutrition basically does exactly that for food and you could always make crafted chems use a different Item ID with an indicator like stolen and Contraband items have anyways game design rant over do better Bethesda there is one funny thing about this rank four perk and that is that it rolls this 1 in 30 chance for every crafting batch you do not each individual item so you can make 999 items in one batch and you'll get 297 of them if the odds are in your favor obviously this technically means nothing in the long run but it's neat that you could get spooned on one lucky big roll for now i' say chemistry is a c tier skill only because it does unlock some cool chems but since they're heavily resource limited and don't last a meaningful amount of time either it's just not worth dumping the points into in my mind the rank four perk is also insulting and some f minus tier that should be changed immediately Outpost engineering is pretty much a must-have skill for anyone planning on decking out their Outpost but it's not particularly descriptive in what each rank actually provides I'll save the proper Deep dive on this for a future video but generally you have very basic versions of most Outpost structures power generators and resource production objects at your disposal with zero investment in the skill to start each rank provides a combination of more advanced versions of what you already had access to or a completely new set of objects for example at rank three you unlock reactors for power generation while it's completely viable to build an outpost capable of making a solid XP farm with no skill points invested in this skill you will be missing all of the superior Fabricators and resource generators for more complex Outpost construction all the fancy decorations and a few other features rank four is obviously a giant benefit as it drops the resource cost of building modules by 50% but the value of this is diminished as you progress further in Outpost construction and have more consistent access to all the necessary building materials from extractors I considered giving this an S as it does unlock a huge chunk of output Post building content but I'm going to give it an a simply because there's no true necessity to rank it up past rank one in order to have a reasonably positive Outpost building experience though I would suggest putting in at least the three points if you have a medium to high interest and fully exploring the Outpost building system a neutronic fusion is probably as simple as it gets for skill explanations the first three ranks provide one additional reactor power and the final rank gives you two this is just a very nice to have bonus that certainly wouldn't hurt if you do a lot of ship based combat this skill obviously has lower effect iveness the stronger your reactor gets for example C-Class ships with reactors that push over 40 points only end up getting about a 12.5% buff after four points of investment it's a good skill but for the total benefit it provides I'd still say it really only warrants a b if I'm being honest considering this is a master skill I think it should provide twice the amount of power per rank than what it currently offers second last on our list is planetary habitation this skill isn't bad per se but it's definitely a dumb skill that pretends to do more than it actually does with each rank you unlock the ability to build outposts on planets with increasingly extreme conditions the first being actually somewhat relevant as there are quite a few deep freeze and Inferno planets and three of the six planets with unique resources fall into this category rank two is for planets with extreme pressure but there are less than a dozen that fit into this bucket of over a thousand planets so that's pretty useless rank three actually is more useful as toxic and corrosive atmospheres are significantly more prevalent finally rank four covers planets with extreme gravity which applies to any Planet above 2 GS which there are also less than a dozen of if you exclude the gas giants which you obviously can't land on and none of them are for Unique resources so again it's completely irrelevant it seems like they just ran out of ideas here and thought it would make the master tier skills sound more interesting and enticing to put points in but come on that is such lazy you could have easily tied in something like increased build limits or increase the active build Zone you can work with for an outpost like how hard is it to get the slightest bit creative on these the final benefit from this skill is you get four more Outpost for each rank so you can go from your starting Outpost Max of six up to 22 at rank four now unless you're some planetary conqueror who wants outposts across the Galaxy you're probably never going to hit this limit and even the most complex endgame outposts don't use more than 15 from what I've seen overall I really don't like this skill because it feels lazily designed but there are some absolutely necessary components to it where you will have to hit rank three in order to access every resource for extracting so I'll reluctantly give it a b rank four however is is complete ass and you should never ever put a point into it unless you have a very compelling reason to go beyond 18 outposts that rank for perk gets the F of Shame which is really tragic for a master skill as with many of the other science skills I recommend holding off on the point investment here until you absolutely have to our final skill today is special projects and this is a generally good skill that probably is actually worthy of being a master tier skill rank one is a requirement for completing the most powerful projects of all the crafting and outpost related skills while ranks 2 3 and four unlock the ability to craft the necessary components for building those endgame Outpost structures and crafting high rank suit and weapon mods now you can buy many of those in shops as well but not in nearly as great a quantity as the more common materials leaving Scavenging as your only other method of obtaining them but that's not sustainable for large scale Outpost building this is also critical to endgame XP farming as it hinges on Crafting unique manufactured components so this is a must if it's something that you're planning on doing the final benefit is that Outpost extractors have the chance to produce addition resources but this one is kind of like chemistry only a tiny bit better it feels like it's around a 5% buff after testing which sure it's something but it's nothing remarkable in the grand scheme of things you're also probably not going to notice this unless you're very diligent and you return to your Outpost before your storage containers cap out but we're going to treat that as a bonus here as the true perk was the unlock components that you get because this skill does actually provide pretty well all the highest level craftable items in the game many of which are extremely strong like weapon and suit mods along with the ability to reliably craft the prerequisite components for these upgrades I'll be kind and throw special projects into the S tier as that would only be fitting and I've been on enough of these skills as is so God knows Bethesda needs this small win despite my nitpicking on a few of these skills and my criticism of the overall lack of creativity in skills in the game in general the science tree is probably tied as the most essential tree to dump points into aside from the tech tree as you're entirely gated from accessing content without a significant investment of skill points here obviously it's your prerogative whether it's content you'd like to access but in most cases you do get tangible benefits from investing in this tree with things like suit and weapon mods and pretty much all significant Outpost upgrades being walled Behind these skills in some ways it almost feels like you're forced to play this tree at the expense of others just to experience the whole game but honestly I still think it's my favorite tree as I enjoy exploration and outposts are a daunting but rewarding system to set up the general Takeaway on this tree is that you can get by without investing the points in many of these skills until your character is actually at a stage where it becomes relevant and feasible to do so to summarize the tree AST Dynamics is useful for simplified travel But A Good Ship will probably have the same effect geology is complete medicine is okay but Wellness is better research methods is convenient and in many ways very good but is irrelevant if you don't care about supplying the extra resources put one point into serving it helps a lot and more points for the Explorer fans botney and zoology should also get one point each to unlock the Outpost benefits and Max it out if you're doing serious Planet exploration scanning is all right but not remarkable SPAC suit design and weapon engineering are gangster but you can hold the points until you're ready for upgrades astrophysics is key for explorers and will save you hours of time but it's useless otherwise in all honesty chemistry is underwhelming and the rank four perk is bait Outpost engineering is critical for Outpost obviously and again save the points until it's time to use them a neutronic fusion simple effective but less so for ships with powerful reactors planetary habitation is necessary for Outpost building but it's dumb and the rank four perk is next to useless unless you have a high gravity fetish or you really want 22 Outpost for some reason special projects is special it's worth the points when you're ready for it and thus concludes the science tree we've got one more skill treat before we've covered all 82 skills and then I've got a lot more planned for weapon and space suit mods and Starfield mods itself so make sure you've got those notifications on to cast them as soon as they drop thank you to all existing and new patrons your support is genuinely heartwarming I still got a few slots in my discounted tier so if you're interested in an elevated mumbler experience with some exclusive perks make sure to grab one while they're still available if you haven't watched me and my hundreds of loyal test subjects put all 17 combat skills to the test make sure to check that one out here next I'll see you in the next one peace

Channel: UncleMumble

Views: 364,223

Keywords: Starfield, Starfield news, Starfield rumors, Starfield weapons, Starfield Outposts, Starfield Crafting, Starfield Story, Starfield Lore, Starfield Quests, Starfield Spaceships, Starfield Traits, Starfield Skills, Starfield Backgrounds, Starfield Economy, Starfield Research, Starfield Planets, Starfield Factions, Starfield Crew, starfield direct, bethesda, todd howard, skyrim, fallout, goty, star, field, premium, settled systems, handbook, constellation, bgs, starfield handbook

Id: 5w1WV3gO7dU

Length: 24min 9sec (1449 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 06 2023