this is the third intro I've tried to write for this video the problem is that I can't help but turn it into a parable about the good and the bad of the game and this is what Bethesda does to us nothing is ever perfect everything needs to have caveats I mean I'm doing it again I am 200 hours into my Fallout Interstellar Edition experience and regardless of all the problems it is a lot of fun well for me at least the thing that keeps me coming back to the game however the thing that keeps me hungry for devouring the many things that can be done in it is the ship building it is compelling and it is compulsive I have spent many many hours designing many many ships I spent about 3 hours designing a ship last night and I'm already planning out my next one it is genuinely addictive but it is also frustrating in a way that only Bethesda knows how to achieve and there are a lot of things I have learned along the way that might be useful this is my Starfield ship building guide the first thing we need to consider is how big the ship is going to be and when I say big I don't really mean ins size although this does come into play what I mean by big is heavy and when I say heavy what I really mean is how much cargo do we want to store on it once we have the bare bones of a ship constructed the only real variable I.E the only thing that we can really change is how much cargo the ship is going to store we can swap out one weapon for another but this won't change the weight of the ship all that much we can add more Hab modules and make a big ship size-wise but those Hab modules don't really whale that much in comparison to everything else adding more of them only makes a negligible difference to the weight of our ship the combined weight of all the hab modules in my ships tends to be about 15% of the total ship weight so do we want 2,000 cargo do we want 5,000 cargo or do we want 10,000 cargo that is the kind of ballpark we are talking here the second thing to consider is money these ships are really expensive and we can't currently save a half finish ship so if we start on a ship build we probably want to be able to finish it in one sitting that means we will need a big pot of cash saved up take the cargo figure from before and times it by 50 I mean that should give you a rough ballpark amount for how much the ship is going to cost maybe add another 50k maybe even more if you want some seriously tripped out weapons item number three is to choose a stard but probably more specifically a ship manufacturer there are five manufacturers in Starfield damos Nova Galactic stoud Eckland Taio and H Tech all with their own unique and distinct Styles the respective stard for each of these manufacturers I.E the damos stard or the stoud eckan stard has the complete list of parts I think for their manufacturer but they don't stock parts from anyone else so if we were trying to build a whole ship from just one manufacturer then the best place to go would be their specific stard this is what I did at the beginning of the game because I wanted to design a ship with each manufacturer the alternative would be to find a stary yard which stocks from multiple manufacturers and there are a lot of those around the problem is that none of them hold all of the parts only a selection so we will have access to a wider array of things from different manufacturers but that selection won't be very deep and it will differ greatly from one stary yard to the next the final way would be to Source parts from Individual stards traing across the Galaxy to find all the specific bits that we require and I have done this multiple times and it is super painful and expensive every time you will reach this point eventually trust me because if you go deep into the ship building there is always going to be that one part that you don't have access to with one manufactur that you need and the ship design will be ruined if you don't have it so this is the prep work to be honest I start thinking about all this stuff the moment I finished the previous ship design it kind of takes place in my subconscious while I'm grinding weapon recovery from the bodies of dead Pirates and ecliptics I think of it while I'm falling asleep I digress this is all the stuff that should probably take place before starting the ship design process there are a few things we aren't going to cover or that I'm not going to worry about to start with the skill tree I think it's obvious if we want access to more Parts in our ship designs then we are going to want to devote a considerable amount of attention to putting the right skill points in the right places we are still able to design ships if we don't do this this guide is still relevant we'll just have less bits to play with enough said next crew we are going to have four members of crew available for our ship including ourselves and not including children and that is that to get to the perk in the skill tree that gives us more crew members would require putting a whole lot of skill points into this particular skill tree which not only do I think is a pointless skill tree but it also isn't really available to us if we have sunk all our skill points already into the ship design bits it's not worth the benefit of going through the hustle of reaching this skill point in my opinion if you have done so Kudos seriously Kudos but I'm not doing it for crew including me and that is all what this means is that weing most reach our crew limit with just a cockpit none of the crew allowance that we get for adding further Hab modules makes really all that much difference because we'll only ever have four crew the way to view the hab modules is as the scaffolding to which we attach the things that we want our ship to do in Practical terms the only Hab modules which are of any direct use to us are the science Hab and the workshop Hab literally everything else is filler however if we want a big ship with lots of cargo then we are going to need to allocate a significant amount of our undercarriage to landing gear and a fair amount of our backside to engines and it is sometimes difficult to fit all of the things onto the ship that we want and need I'll be coming back to these points in more detail in a bit what I'm trying to get across is that if we ever find oursel in a position where there are no more places to put things on a ship and yet we still need to put more things on it then the solution is to add more Hab modules and make the ship bigger the hab modules are to all intents and purposes almost completely weightless and adding more of them makes only a negligable difference to the ship's performance they are only the scaffolding and no more that they provide a function in the game and that we can run around them is really cool but in terms of a ship's design that is all that they are always have a science and workshop Hab if you use those things and I'd imagine you do but no other Hab is absolutely necessary okay okay now we can get to the nitty-gritty reactors our ship requires power the more the better in the bottom corner of our ship display is this panel where we can allocate power to the various things we have on our ship this is an important panel how we allocate the ship power on a momentto moment basis is a fundamental mechanic of flying a ship in Starfield if we are just cruising around minding our own business then we might choose to take power from the weapons and move to the engine or the shield in combat all points will probably need to be removed from the grab drive we aren't going anywhere apart from the battle and put into the weapons the game also has a tendency to reallocate all of our ship power resources willy-nilly just because we have set it perfectly In This Moment does not mean that it will be the same in the next the game will change our ship power for no reason at all and so this panel is something we need to pay close attention to constantly the moment we forget we will need it and it will be set up wrong the more points we have available to us in this panel the better these points go a long long way the quantity of points we have is solely provided by the reactor while we're in the ship Builder it is this number in the react information panel this is how many points this reactor will give us to spend on useful ship functions this is the primary metric that I use to judge different reactors against one another but there is a second metric we need to consider the class there are three classes of ship part in Starfield classes a B and C Class A being the lowest and Class C being the highest whatever class grade of reactor that we use for our ship will determine the maximum level class of part that we can use on that ship if we put a Class A reactor on our ship then we can only ever use Class A Parts if we put a Class B reactor on our ship then we can use Class A and B parts and if we use Class C reactor then we can use all the parts this is how I compare different reactors against one another from a numbers perspective from a ship design perspective I'm talking the physical action of building a ship here we also need to consider the reactor's physical size there are two sizes of reactor available a one block reactor and a two block reactor the two block reactor is obviously bigger and heavier but it also gives us a lot more ship points to spend in now a little control panel one block reactor is smaller and easier to fit onto a ship but obviously won't be able to do as much the decision for me is easy I want the biggest baddest most classes reactor I can find and I will find the money and space for it come hello high water I've been playing the game on the hardest settings which still isn't difficult enough for my liking really and there are some battles that are very close to being completely impossible every ship point I can scr out of my reactor is priceless the decision for you might be different the next thing to probably consider is the engines first up we have 12 points available to spend on the engines and no more there are twoo engines threo engines and four point engines all indicated by this number in the engine information panel whatever configuration of engines we choose to put on our ship when we add up all the points from all of the engines it cannot result in a number more than 12 that is the hard limit in practice what this means is that it's worth keeping in mind which engines we could use their respective power outputs the physical sizes of the engine how and where we could potentially mount it to the ship before beginning on its construction some engines just Mount to specific parts of the ship and we need to design the hab layout in such a way to make that possible maybe lay out a few of the engines you want to keep in mind at the edge of the ship Builder so that you can try them out as you go that's what I do for me I'm on to my second playthrough of Starfield and my ship building experience differed in subtle ways through each of those playthroughs in my first run of the game I was able to find this monster of an engine which only has two points and 55,000 thrust you know put six of these bad boys on the back of a ship and you can literally make an oil tanker into a fighter jet and that is just what I did and it's still one of my favorite designs so far but on my second currently unfinished playthrough I played the first on normal difficulty and then the New Game Plus that resulted from it I changed over to hard I haven't been able to find this particular engine anywhere there are lower versions of it which have much less power output and therefore make it you know not really worthwhile I don't know if this is a result of progression through the game or if it's the result of a change in the difficulty or if it's just randomized for each new game whatever the reason the engines that you have available might be different to the ones I can find and so you might be making different decisions to me regardless engines are really important it is definitely worth checking out a few star yards to see what is available before deciding on an engine setup if there is anything worth traing across the Galaxy to Def find it is the perfect engine cockpits to start with the cargo allowance that your cockpit gives you is pointless we want thousands of cargo there is a reason the starting number I chose was 2,000 and the 20 or 40 increase that any particular version of cockpit gives us doesn't even make a dent when it comes to numbers like this then the additional mass of the cockpit caused by the increase in cargo allocation is incredibly expensive in Mass terms as long as we have enough of it then money is completely irrelevant here the only thing we care about when it comes to spaceships is mass we can use Mass to generate cargo allocation much more efficiently by using specific cargo containers the cargo containers cost less in Mass terms than the cargo in the cockpit does so just get the most basic version and add cargo if we don't have anywhere on our ship to add cargo then add Hab modules and make the ship bigger to create that space next there are two kind of different types of cockpit and how we use them will dictate the look of our ship the first kind is what I would call the fighterjet style cockpit where it sticks out over the front of the fuselage in the style of a well fighter jet in the ships that I've designed with this kind of cockpit I've generally aimed for this fighter jet a aesthetic with wings and fins and the like it works well I like it the next kind is what I would call the battleship style cockpit where there is a kind of a hull of a boat beneath and the cockpit perched on top I really like these two these two analogies the plane and the boat are good places to start if you are just getting going with the ship Builder I can appreciate that looking at a big list of parts can be daunting I have certainly spent hours putting together and taking apart spaceships trying to come up with a a pattern or a formula that gives me a reliable starting place the best one I've come up with is the plane and the boat I suppose the alternative is to go for a Star Wars or a futur armor or some other sci-fi based TV show or movie and try and recreate one of the spaceships from that and I think that's great have at it there are some seriously Good Creations out there that people have made my opinion would be that I think it's a lot of work remember we won't have access to a complete list of parts anywhere in the game so if there are two parts that we can't decide between it's going to be a lot of work going Here There and Everywhere picking up and comparing them I think there's a lot of fun to be had trying to come up with genuinely unique creations although I can accept maybe that doesn't generate the clicks maybe this is just a case of my desire to create many many different ships and that if you are only set out to make just the one ship then you could make that one ship perfect and you would take it to all the different stary yards and pick the different parts and you know and finally tune that one ship Maybe that's part of it maybe it's my desire just to make lots and lots of different ones anyway however whatever this is the lens that I view the cockpits through and there are a couple of exceptions this H Tech cockpit and This Ti one can both do the plane job and the boat job they can both be mounted to the top and to the front I mean I don't like H Tech or Taio though or Nova to be honest damos and stoud Eckland are generally my go-to that is cockpits let's talk about Bays how we access our ship is a noticeable thing in the game I've played around with placing access at the rear of the ship and from an aesthetic point of view it works well but it is a complete pain on the backside game-wise every time I enter or exit the ship I'm 180° and some distance away from where I need to be so I've abandoned that approach what we are left with is front aess and side aess front access Bays come in two varieties and it is really difficult to tell the two apart the first kind of Bay has a door at the end as you enter so a Hab will need to be placed buttered up against it on the same level the second kind of Bay has a ladder and a habble needs to be placed directly above it to enable access each manufacture only makes one variety of bay so if you want a specific type of arrangement then you'll need to seek out the bay that works for you too's Bay is the first kind with a door at the end Nova H Tech and damos all have a ladder stoud Eckland has side AIS no front access is available with them there are two ways to te these Bays apart the first is to zoom in on the open hatch and literally look to see if there is a door or a ladder in the bay itself the second way is to pay attention to the blue snap points when a snap Point has an arrow in the center pointing in a specific Direction then that is an access point through which we can walk or climb a ladder through when the point in the center is just a blue dot then this is just a mounting snap point and not one we can get access through so if we look at these two Landing Bays we can see the blue arrows and the blue dots and we can tell which kind of mounting points we are looking at Side Access as I mentioned earlier is only available through stoud Eckland but I have found it to be really useful in many of my designs with other manufacturers even when I'm trying to keep to just the one this is the kind of part I was talking about earlier traing across the Galaxy to accumulate the reason is because it gives rise to some really interesting design choices placing the bait in the middle at the front of the ship can sometimes make things difficult with the rest of the ship design we are essentially given ourselves a big obstacle that our cockpit design needs to work around I've often found myself with tall spacecrafts simply because I'm trying to work around the awkward Landing Bay and that tallness has made them ugly this is my initial go at at Tire ship I really don't like this design I never I never actually flew this thing it was just immediate unsatisfaction the Side Access Bay removes that obstacle right where a cockpit needs to be and can make for a much cleaner design I definitely need to do a tire design with side axis that's going on my list edit I tried out a side axis Tire design and I didn't like it so I went back to front axis and I built this this is what I spent three hours doing last night anyway landing gear we need a minimum of four landing gear on our ship that's just basic physics well three should also technically work but that isn't allowed up to a point four landing gear is all we will need when we start loading up the ship with cargo containers we will go past this point and we will need more and that is because the landing gear provide a second purpose other than just to land on and that is to provide the thrust during Landing if we start getting to this point then the number we need to be paying attention to to is this one four landing gears with thrust two will do the same job as eight landing gears of thrust one so if things start to get critical we'll need to choose specific landing gears for their thrust and not just their looks weapons we are allowed three different weapons on our ship period and this isn't just three different types of weapon but from this enormous list we are allowed to choose three to put on our ship that is the hard limit another one these weapons all do different things and which ones we choose to put on a ship will depend on what we want I ship to do in offensive battle type situations the first ship we get the frontier is set up in I think what the game would make us believe is the traditional setup so a laser gun a mechanical ammunition based gun and a set of missiles and this is a fine configuration well I mean the guns themselves are crap and need upgrading to something better pretty much as soon as we can be afforded but the configuration is decent the game also tells us about electromagnetic weapons and how these can be used to Target an enemy ship's engines disable them and thus allow us to board I think the inference in the game was to remove the missile component of the configuration to allow us to put on the em if we aren't trying to blow up an enemy ship then what good are the missiles I tried this out in the game and it does work as intended the Em are very good at disabling engines without destroying the ship itself the problem is that if we ever find oursel in a situation where we are facing multiple ships and fighting for our lives then not having missiles is a serious handicap in fact in that situation having em on the ship at all is incredibly limiting there is a weapon allocation there not being used I even tried out having multiple ship configurations so I would have one ship with an em setup and one ship with a blow the Sorting thing up ASAP setup with the idea being to swap between the two for individual battles but this was a pain too you don't know what you were walking into sometimes and I found myself in a few situations with the wrong ship and I didn't want to load up an earlier save I have found the mechanical ammunition element of the equation limiting also as an effective tool for blowing up a ship when their Shield is down they are very good true but the range for each and every one of them is pathetic range is like having arms longer than your opponent in boxing if our range is double that of our opponents then we can hit them without being hit back having high range weapons on our ship in my opinion is absolutely fundamental so that means mechanical guns are out the single ship configuration I've ended up with is a pair of monster missiles a pair of Auto lasers and a pair of normal click and shoot lasers all with a range in excess of 3,000 M then if I want to board a ship I just have to be incredibly careful not to blow the damn thing up while I'm in the process of trying to disable its engines it's it's It's Tricky but it's doable there are also turrets and these things will fire at our enemies whether we like it or not we have no control over these guys and they take no prisoners if we are in a battle where just flying and avoiding enemy fire is difficult if you have played the game then I am sure you know the specific battle I am talking about then these guys are Priceless on the difficult settings I don't think I would have made it through that particular battle without them but just cruising around and taking down a few Pirates these are seriously Overkill they will obliterate anything they encounter you might want this but I want to board and Commander those ships I want a carcass for my next ship design so that particular ship from that particular battle is now my battleship any more encounters like that and I am zooming away from Battle when returning with this brute we also need to talk about points again these weapons have points that we can allocate from the reactor to make them more or less effective in our little blue ship panel thing from before so if we choose two weapons with three points then we will need six points of energy from our reactor to power them to full Effectiveness and we aren't limited to a pair of these weapons either we can put three or four of the same weapon on our ship and it will only count towards one of our weapon allocation the downside is that if they are all three-point weapons for example combined they will require 12 points of energy from our reactor and that is a lot my preference is two big guns over three or four for smaller ones there is also a hard 12o limit on any of the weapons of a single variety so we wouldn't be able to put five of those three-point weapons on our ship grav drives you need one yes but that's all really like the reactors there are single block grab drives and there are double block grab drives I've never found the need to use the double block ones a decent single block grab drive has always done a job for me shielded cargo BAS I don't bother if I pick up Contraband I just immediately go to the den or the key after a mission and sell it fuel tanks I have found that a fuel amount of about 400 does the job quite well but I don't think having more or less will significantly change the gameplay my early ships had only 200 and they seem to work just fine just do you Shield choosing the right Shield is a bit of a tradeoff it is all well and good choose the shield with the largest number of protection but if we aren't ever going to power it till its full Effectiveness then we aren't ever going to achieve that big number protection value if a shield requires 10 points of power but In the Heat of battle with everything else at Max we only Power it with eight points then we are only going to achieve 80% of the number that we chose the shield for and that is the moment we need the shield most for so if it isn't fully powered up in this moment then there aren't any other moments where it might be necessary we would be better off choosing a shield with only eight points of maximum power but one which achieved a larger amount of protection for that amount of power what we really need to do is work out where the power is going to go in a heat of the battle type situation work out how much power we are going to be allocating to the shield and then find the shield that provides the most amount of protection at that power level you may need to get your calculator out for this one I think that's all the major components I think there's a lot to this Builder there's a lot of nuance and I genuinely don't know what's relevant and what's interesting or or anything so I'm just covering everything um let's have a chat about ladders they're a complete nightmare I'm by no means an expert on the subject of Starfield ladders from what I've seen of other videos on YouTube they are a mystery even to those who have done extensive testing on them for my part I believe the game has an almost pathological desire to turn turn our perfect spacecraft creation into a labyrinth which only has a single cus is that the right did I get that right Securus route around it and if we allow the game to do this then this is what it will do it will turn our ship into a dungeon if we let it there are a couple of approaches I have found to deal with this firstly trial and error build a ship run around it is it sensible does it make sense is it what you want if not go back change something rinse and repeat it is exhausting but it can get the job done without all that much fuss you know it's a little viable strategy second build a complete vertical column of Companion Way Habs that links The Landing Bay with the dock on the top of the spacecraft and build outwards from there the game seems to want to make a direct route from The Landing Bay to the dock for obvious reasons and if we give it an easy path for for achieving this then it seems to tend to want to take it we will still have ladders but they should at least line up in a single column a slight variation on this would be to stagger the ladders from one level to the next I have found it to be easier to jump and boost between levels than to use the rubbish ladders but this isn't possible with a single ladder linking three levels it's too far to jump in one go so for my big monster oil tank of fighter jet I have staggered ladders so I can jump up one catch the ledge run over and jump up the second this isn't a terrible solution to the ladder's conundrum you know just don't use them we can also use Hab tunnels available through hope Tech and Nova to link Habs together and limit where the game can put ladders if two Habs don't line up with each other vertically then the game can't put a ladder there and it can't put a ladder through one of these tunnels so by widening out the spacecraft a little and preventing Habs from being one on top of the other we can screw the game a little and prevent ladders from forming in particular locations we can even make loops around our spacecraft with these things if we are clever about it this video is probably getting on a bit but I use this approached a really good effect with that oil tanker fighter jet if you are interested hit me up with a comment and I'll do a video of the build the last approach would be to use the twostory cockpit from Nova Galactic only available on Titan which has a shock bleeding staircase two of the damn things and it looks sexy as hell it's also worth mentioning that if we use this cockpit for a two Lev ship design and we are sensible about how we go about it then the game will recognize these staircases as genuine access between levels and it won't build any ladders we would have a ladderless ship design which is actually pretty damn cool and thinking about it it shouldn't be what where are the staircases in this ship designer I can only assume it's something they've left out so they can add it in some DLC at some point in the future Jesus Bethesda the last thing to talk about is performance it is no good loading our a ship with goodies if it isn't going to be able to look after itself in battle it needs speed and it needs mobility in the ship build panel it is these numbers we are interested in maximum achievable speed ship in the game is 150 and if we can get this it is nice but 120 or 130 should be enough there are ship speed advantages to be had in the skill tree that will push this number closer to the maximum so 120 or 130 should be enough you might even be able to get away with less maximum mobility in the game is 100 but I haven't been able to get close the best I seem to be able to achieve with a mediumsized ship and a decent amount of cargo is a mobility of 85 to 990 to be honest I've got to the point where if my ship reads A mobility of 100 and a top speed of 150 my immediate reaction is to think there isn't enough cargo on it now other than to show you a collage of all the ships I've designed in the game so far even the terrible ones the ones that I hate there really isn't much more to say I'm pretty sure I've covered everything if you have any questions then you know what the comment section is till next time
