15 Starfield Ship Building Tips & Tricks you NEED to know

if you're struggling to get your head around the finer points of ship building in Starfield then fear not because in this guide I'm going to walk you through all the basics you need to know in order to build any type of ship that you like I've also got some great tips and tricks for just making the whole process quicker and easier so there should be something in here for everyone if you're interested in seeing me do a longer video where I build whole ship from scratch then drop a comment down below and let me know so first up we're going to talk a little bit about how you unlock all the different ship parts and where you can find them the ship parts you unlock are not related to your Starship design skill they're actually unlocked by level the Starship design skill will allow you to use parts and install them but you'll still need to hit a certain level to unlock particular ship parts you'll need to hit level 60 in order to unlock all of the available ship parts in the game and then even once you've done that different parts are available from different locations from generic ship technicians like the one on new Atlantis which for a lot of people is going to be their first experience of a ship Builder they just sell a few basic bits they've got quite a good selection of weapons and a few other things they're pretty lousy on Habs which are your main living areas and if you want more interesting Habs you're going to have to visit the specialist shipyards but we'll come to those in just a moment because one of the most useful places to actually do your ship building is at your Outpost if you build yourself a landing pad with ship builder at one of your outposts you can then go to the little computer console there and you can actually do ship building from one of your outposts these are pretty good places to do it because you'll find that you can actually build any of the different structural items in the game from here it's the biggest selection of structural items you'll find anyway it's got all these specialist ones like damos H Tech Nova stoud and all this stuff that normally you'd only find at individual specialist ship Builder so it's really good for structural pieces and it's got a fair amount of other stuff as well there is a bunch of specialist gear that you're only going to find at the particular shipyards but your Outpost has a very good selection of structural pieces as well as a reasonable selection of habs and quite a few other basic components The Specialist shipyards where you can find various unique Habs and other ship modules are H Tech Nova Galactic stoud Eckland too astring and damos shipyard hope Tech can be found in hop toown which you'll find in the valow system on the planet pvo and if you land here then you just go and talk to this ship technician and you get access to all of the hch specialist ship modules Nova Galactic can be found in the soul system which is where we live if you didn't realize and they're based on Titan which is one of Saturn's moons you go over to Titan find new Homestead and land here and talk to the ship technician here and you'll have access to all of the Nova Galactic stuff that you want to use stoutland and too astran can both be found in neon which is in the volley system on the planet volley Alpha I assume the ship techn here would sell you stoud Eckland or too aering stuff but they seems to be a bit bugged out and is normally missing somewhere out in the vast suedes of ocean underneath the planet or apparently sometimes way way up in the sky but if you can't find this ship technician there are still ways to access both of those shipyards if you head inside and look for the stoud ekland showroom and then just make your way inside and use the computer terminal on your left in order to access Teo astring you need to head down into the big red building this is the ryujin industries offices make your way into the elevator and you'll be able to select Teo aering on there head a bit deeper into their offices inside this room here chat to Veronica young and she will allow you to use the Teo aering parts to modify your ships and finally for the D stard we are back in the soul system this time in orbit around Mars you should be able to find a marker for the D stard which you can then fly to and dock with inside the stary yard you just need to make your way down downstairs and talk to Nick Al here who will sell you any bits you want it can be a little Annoying having to travel between different shipyards in order to get the parts you want for a particular ship build but the Outpost Builder is often a good place to start and then you can go out and get some other specialist gear that you need to from there once you're actually in and building your ship there's a few little useful things to know so you'll see there's a bunch of different blue connection points you'll see popping up when you highlight different things and there's three different types of connection the you need to know about the blue circles with the little moving Arrow towards them indicate passageways and these are going to be things that when you link them with other passageways that will create a route through whether it's a ladder or a corridor there are certain situations in which that won't guarante it but we'll come to that a little bit later as well as being able to just click off of the side of the ship here and pull up a menu and select everything you want you can just click directly on these connection points and it will only bring up a list of things that can be validly connected to it on PC you just click directly on the connection point and on Console you hold down the left and right triggers and then press a so this list here is stuff that can only be connected to that passageway this can take structural inputs as well as passageways it won't be able to take guns but if we connect something like Caro to it there won't be a passage going to it but it will be connected if we connected something that had a passageway on it as well like another Hab then we'd expect it usually to create a doorway between those two areas the second type of connection is a structural one so that's this little blue circle here without the arrow pointing to it you can connect basically the same stuff as a passageway to this but you won't get a route through so you see if I hold down my triggers and click a to pull up the list of connectable items we can attach Habs here but there won't be a root through into the engine of course but you can attach all types of different structural items here the third and final type of blue connection is the little blue square this is a weapon connection and if I pull up the list here you'll see it only gives us weapons available to mount so in some situations if you want to mount a weapon onto something you have to actually build a weapon Mount you can see originally this was a blue circle just a structural connection and then if you wanted you could add a different structural piece that has a square connection like this one and then on that square connection you'd be able to add a gun if you want to move the height of the item up and down that you're trying to place you can do that by pressing R and F on PC or up and down on the d-pad on Console you can see it says on the right there it shows the height of which I'm building I can move this cargo unit up or down wherever I want it to be it will still try and snap to these things sometimes if I'm kind of near that sort of height you can see I'm one down here and it still tries to snap but it's generally a lot easier if you just have things at the right height and you can make it all work a bit more nicely you can also use this for going down underneath your ship to have a little look and remember you can zoom this view in and out as well by using the right and left trigger on a controller there's also a few other useful controls at the bottom of the screen to pay attention to you can select individual items or multiple items by tapping them with the corresponding control on controller that's RB I can select these three things then click on them and move them over here as one unit if I wish to do so there's also a select all option which on console is lb you can pick up everything click that and then move the whole ship around this has a really handy other use that I'm going to tell you about in just a minute another option along the bottom here is duplicate you'll see this usually available it's not always available because some items if they're not available at the stary yard You're Building you won't get the option to duplicate them so you see these caros here I can duplicate this just fine and build another one of those but this little yellow equipment plate which you put on for mounting guns I can't duplicate this cuz it's not available at the stard it doesn't give me the option pressing y doesn't do anything I can move this around but if I wanted to build another one I'd have to go to my Outpost stard in order to build some more of these so a really useful thing to understand is ship power or module power so you see up in the top left it shows you your power bars and you're familiar with these from the start of the game you put Power in and out of things you power up your lasers you power them down you put Power into your Shields Etc and each of these bars in the top left has a maximum of 12 bars of power that can be put into them now this is useful to know when you're Building engines or weapons on your ship you'll see when you're building a different engine it will say max power on the left there of two or a different number some of them can be three see down further down the list we got ones that say three and some that say two and you can have a number of engines even different types ofin but that max power is how many bars you're going to have available up in the top left there for your ship power and that has a maximum of 12 so if your ship engines have a max power of three then you'll only be able to build four of those maximum if you try and build five like we have here you can see that we've got an error and if we do a flight check it will say ship is using too much power for the engines we have to reduce the engine count same applies for your ship weapons you can have up to three different weapons on your ship and each of those weapons can go up to a maximum of 12 power so you can see underneath here I've got these Vanguard obliterator Auto protectors they have a max power of two and so I've actually got six of these mounted onto my ship there's three on this side and three on this side if I tried to build another one we'd get the same error that we had a minute ago we go to flight check ship is using too much powerful weapons reduce weapon count for my missile launchers that I have on top here these have a max power of three so I'd only be able to have four of these rather than six I've actually only got three cuz I think they look fine just on this a little bit but we could place another one onto the ship somewhere if we wanted we could chuck one on there and that' be absolutely fine we wouldn't have an error for that this only really applies to weapons and engines Shields and grab driv still have a maximum power of 12 but you can only have one Shield generator one graph drive as well as one reactor so that doesn't really come into it you can't have two Shield generators so you don't really need to worry about whether you're hitting the maximum of 12 power or not whilst we're talking about power personally I prefer just to have two weapons and then that pretty much allows me to have my power just stay the same all the time I don't really have to move my power levels around particularly during combat I find kind of annoying I'll talk a little bit further on in the video about what weapons are the best weapons you should be using that help you out whilst doing this but personally I prefer just to use a couple of different weapons rather than three another good tip to know is starting with a decent starter ship when you're going to build something you can't build something just from an empty slot you have to have captured a ship or bought a ship and then delete that one and then build the new ship you want to build but you don't have to delete all the parts of that ship you can find one that has maybe a good reactor that you want to use a good grav drive or other expensive parts that you might want to reuse and particularly parts that might have a higher Starship design rank than you currently have you can go and capture ships that might have parts that have Starship design rank three or rank four required in order to build them but if they're already on a ship you've captured you can still use that part and then build up a ship around it without having to level up up that skill you can do this by buying ships from the vendors if you've got tons of cash or by flying around in space and stealing ships it's pretty easy to take over enemy ships you just need to make sure you have targeting Control Systems tier one unlocked that gives you the ship targeting functionality you can then Target ship's engines take them out board them and then take over the ship a place that I really like to go and do this recently has been the system of serpentis you'll find the system off to the far right hand side of the map it's a level 55 system and when you go to pretty much any Planet within this system you'll almost always get attacked by 1 2 or three Varun ships you can fly out here if you need to you can then turn it down to very easy difficulty and then when you find a nice ship maybe one of the ones that's a mark 2 or a Mark III dock with that kill the Varon take that ship and often they're going to have a really nice reactor or Shield generator or grab drive or all of those things on them that you can reuse with a good weapon setup you can deal with these ships even from from a pretty low level so it's a great place to go and get yourself some ships and some XP and loot and credits pretty early on something else useful to know about when you're building ships is utilizing cross braces and spines which you can find in the hab section H Tech has a cross brace and a spine as well as Nova Galactic also having a cross passage which is a similar thing what these allow you to do is force connections between Habs because the game is a bit weird with how the hab connections work basically when you connect two Habs together the game will just create one doorway going between them and it's also averse to creating Loops so if we created something like this Abomination for example putting all of these Habs right next to each other it's going to be a complete mess of doorways and blocked off entrances inside which we'll just go and show you very quickly so here we are coming up from ground level you can see we've got a route straight through into the cockpit here but if we look around there's not really much in the way of doorways despite all these connections we've actually got got one doorway here and then if we follow this we can go through this room and keep making our way through all of these random little modules that we've built but you'll notice it just seems to go in one big long route and we won't actually be able to Loop Round back to the start despite there being a module here there could be a doorway here going through into that one but there isn't and if we go even further around once we get to this last room here you'll see that there's nothing on the right that is going to allow us to get back to where we started despite knowing there is a Hab just on the other side the game for whatever reason doesn't seem to let you build Loops naturally like that it'd be great if you could just manually Place doors and ladders wherever you wanted would be a much better way for it to work but at the moment it is a bit tricky so what you can do if you want to make a bit of a loop here is to utilize the cross braces and the spines so if we move this Hab out the way for a moment and we wanted to put a corridor in here this here will create a corridor which we can connect up to this Hab and then we know that there's going to be a doorway between these two pieces we can then do the same over here if we want make a copy of this and connect that and then we know there will be these two doorways you can then repeat this process and actually create a loop if you want and that would hopefully create a loop between those if we were a little bit concerned about potentially it not connecting up one of these two we could move this one further along and then we could grab a cross brace and Chuck that in there and that's going to work in exactly the same way but it just lets you do it on a different angle again we can do the same with this one here if we wanted a corridor going between the front section here the all-in one birth 3x1 and the science lab at the back we can actually move this back one grab another spine Chuck that in there and then we're going to have a corridor going through there as well it's a little bit janky but it's a nice way of guaranteeing there being passenger ways where you want them to be huge shout out by the way to YouTuber total eclipse he's done some fantastic videos on ship layouts and how to utilize these spines and cross braces really well I'll put a link to his Channel Down Below he's got got some fantastic videos talking all about building I'd definitely recommend going and watch them he's got some great stuff in there so if we just Chuck these Essentials back on the ship we'll jump down and we can show you inside by the way wouldn't it be great if we could just jump inside and have a little walk around before confirming any of this stuff particularly with the weird way that these this routing works unfortunately you have to confirm and pay for everything and then come out and change it all if you realize you screwed it up there we go so the Abomination just got bigger and we can now confirm that it's it's not got any errors it does have warnings but you don't have to worry too much about those and now we can go inside out very very wide boy and show you the new routing as you can see entering the ship from below is pretty much the same we're going to have the cockpit Dead Ahead here but hopefully if we spin around we're going to have a corridor here and a corridor here and hopefully one at the back as well and you see we should be able to run all the way around through here through this middle bit this is our little Central brace you see don't get the edge bits it looks just like the other spines and we can go all the way through Loop Round to the back we can see all the way down to the cockpit there through our middle bit we get into this back section of the ship here and then we can go around into the other side all the way down here and you can see that we can come around and it's a complete Loop so it's a really nice way of been able to force these roots it's really annoying when you have big long dead ends within your ship I find quite irritating so this is a fantastic way to help out with that situation again shout out to Total Eclipse got some great pointers from some of his videos on how to do this something I would recommend using on your ship but also using with caution are Port holes so you'll find different ones at various shipyards if we pop this on here and maybe one around on the other side as well we'll jump into the ship and go and take a look at them you can attach these to all sorts of places on your ship and as you can see they give you these awesome views sometimes of surrounding space or if you're on a planet you can see everything that's going on on the planet and they do look great and add a lot to any ship build what's important to remember though is that you can attach them to a lot of habs and when you do this it's going to affect what is actually inside of the ship so you can see we're in the Armory section at the moment got these boxes here we've got this port hole side here if we actually go back to before we put the port hole in you can see that where we had this port hole actually is getting rid of a weapon case here and this going have all sorts of effects depending on what Habs you have you tend to lose a lot of stuff on the sides if you Place Port holes in so just a little something to be mindful of when you're shoving Port holes on the side of everything just make sure you're not putting it on an area where you might be losing something cool you won't want to lose one of these mannequins or a load of weapon crates if you had this on the outside and put a port hole here you'd lose all these so just worth keeping in mind one of the most annoying errors you can get in ship building when you're doing big builds particularly is the module not connected ship has unattached modules and it won't let you save the ship sometimes it's very obvious where this is but often it can be quite hard to locate if you've maybe moved a couple of bits around replaced an item you can end up with an item hovering that doesn't really look like it's hovering and it can be really fiddly going through and trying to figure out what on Earth is causing this error in order to very easily solve this you just need to do select all which on controller is lb we select the whole ship here click a to select the ship and then move the whole ship and then whatever isn't connected will be left behind there you go we can see we got an item that was underneath the ship was not connected basically when it selects all it selects every everything that is connected to the piece that you've clicked on so by selecting all here it's selecting everything that's connected together except for this one little piece that was hiding underneath the ship another thing that is useful to knowe is that every time you change anything on your ship it's going to put every single item inside it into your ship's inventory and not only does that mean if you change a module like this and I put something different in there like a different cargo unit for instance it also does this even if you just change the color of the ship or even the ship's name so if we do select all here and then click in the left stick to do color and then change the ship's color even by the tiniest little thing we put it one notch on saturation and then do accept and go back it gives us this warning message that all items will be moved to the cargo hold seems a little excessive it does it all the time and it kind of makes having an Armory and storing all your items nicely in your ship pretty pointless unless you're never ever going to touch anything on that ship ever again and you then end up in these silly situations where you just have tons of items in the MK section in your ship cargo hold full of all sorts of absolute junk that you need to then get rid of a great early game option for a very powerful weapon on your ship is the Vanguard obliterator Auto protector this is a particle beam weapon and you can unlock this very early on in the game you do have to complete the very first Vanguard quest in order to get access to it but once you've joined the UC Vanguard you go and do the first mission on tetti once you return turn from there and talk to the commander you'll then have this unlocked in your Shipyard they're only class A you don't need any special skills in order to build them so you can build them incredibly early in the game they have a power of two so as we mentioned earlier you can have six of them on a ship and they just do absolutely devastating damage to both hole and shields I really like running primarily these and then I don't have to worry about switching power between lasers and Ballistic weapons these also have a massive range and a pretty good fire rate so they just do huge damage even when we're shooting ships here on very hard difficulty they absolutely melt through enemy ships I tend to combine these with missile launchers there's loads of different options for Great Guns you can put on your ships if you want to experiment these ones are a bit higher tier you need Starship design rank two these are the atlal atlatl 28a missile launchers one of the strongest class a missile launchers you can get these are a great class a missile launcher again with a good range and they do loads of damage we could upgrade this this is a Class B ship if we wanted there are slightly better ones on there as I said there's absolutely tons of different weapons in this game you can see there's the class B version of these missile launchers they do slightly more damage if we wanted we could chuck those on you see they do have a max power of four so we'd only be able to have three of those and they are a bit bigger so we'd have to figure out where we could shove these onto the ship but I think the ones we got on there look pretty nice and we'll stick with those for the time being certainly though the Vanguard obliterator Auto protector Great Guns to get on your ship early game and you won't regret making that decision just to talk quickly about mass and maneuverability you'll notice as you add more things to your ship your Mobility down in the bottom right will go down if I Chuck on some more cargo to the ship here you can see it goes down to 55 it's going to go down to 48 and the more of these we Chuck on the lower that Mobility goes and our jump range will go down and our ship mass will go up the lower that Mobility number goes the harder your ship is going to be to navigate around in space you can see now that we're down below I think 50 maybe triggers it we get warning saying reduce mass or add engines to improve Mobility we can't add any more engines sometimes you might be in a situation where you can but I wouldn't worry too much about that Mobility number unless you're getting it ridiculously low if you've got good Shields and good guns like we do in this ship you can actually do pretty well even with low Mobility I took this ship down to 40 Mobility for a bit of a test and flew around fighting some enemies on very hard difficulty and I really didn't struggle at all it didn't feel particularly bad even fighting multiple enemies normally I have 65 with this ship it can go up to 100 maximum Mobility if you took off a bunch of weight but I wouldn't fret too much about your Mobility going a little low 65 is absolutely fine and we've got 6,000 plus cargo on this ship just remember that it really helps to have your thrusters unlocked and to be using them as much as possible in order to unlock the ship thrusters you need to get level one in the piloting skill that will unlock them and then when you're playing on a controller you can hold down RB and then move the sticks and on PC you just just hold down the space bar you can use this when turning to turn yourself a bit more sharply I find it helps you turning a lot even when your Mobility is quite low and once you get used to using it you'll use it pretty much every time you turn around in space by the way if you want to rename your ship it took me a little while to First find this when I was playing the game you have to go into flight check you see in the bottom right you press the button for flight check that's the start button on controller and once you've open that it then gives you the option to rename your ship which controller is X as mentioned earlier if Weck change the name of the ship is going to move everything inside it into your ship's cargo hold so do just keep that in mind and last but not least we'll just quickly look at a couple of skills that are pretty essential to ship building and ship combat and also how to level them quickly the piloting skill we just mentioned will unlock ship thrusters increase your turning rate and maneuverability and allow you to fly Class B and class c ships so very important for flying different types of stuff that requires you to get kills on enemy ships targeting Control Systems will unlock the ship targeting functionality which is basically essential as well as improving the effectiveness of that and that requires you to get ship kills whilst in targeting mode You Can level those both up either by flying to serpentis as we just talked about and put it on very easy if you need to and blowing up Varin ships that's probably going to be the most fun way or if you like you can go into the UC Vanguard Ship Simulator and you can kill ships in there and they also count the other main skill is Starship design this one seems a bit harder to level up at first this will unlock new modules or allow you to install new modules on your ship in order to rank this up you have to place unique ship modules onto your ship and the easiest and cheapest way to do this is by using structural components on your ship I'd recommend finding a spare ship that you don't care about or just going capturing a cheap enemy one like this awful thing here you can see I've already been doing it and what I tend to just do to level this up is attach structural components to the edge of it so just whatever you want to do put that one on and they have to be different ones each time so we'll do those three W all count as different ones and you can do another three different ones on the side here save that then open it back up and then delete these three and put a different three in there and you'd get through it in no time it's going to be easier to do this if you go to your Outpost Shipyard because it has much more structural items available and it's also worth noting that the list of unique items used resets at each tier so if I was doing tier one by placing these three things and we hit say 10 items or whatever it is to get up to rank two when we trying to do the rank two challenge we could use these same ones again and then we'd have to use a few extra ones to get up to 20 or 30 or whatever it is for the second rank so I didn't realize that for a while it does make it a bit easy you don't have to try and remember what ones you've used at tier one it just starts again each tier you get up to so that's everything for today hopefully you've now got a much clearer picture of how ship building Works in Starfield if you have any questions or other tips and suggestions then please drop them in the comments section down below and if you enjoyed the video then why not like And subscribe and check out some of my other Starfield tips and guide videos

Channel: The Beard Guys

Views: 35,928

Keywords: starfield, starfield gameplay, starfield tips, starfield pc, starfield xbox, starfield xbox series x, starfield guide, starfield help, starfield game, starfield tips and tricks no spoilers, starfield tips and tricks, starfield tips for beginners, starfield tips no spoilers, starfield beginner guide, starfield ship building, starfield ship guide, starfield ship building guide, starfield ship building guide xbox, starfield ship building guide pc, starfield ship design

Id: KuTcgm9EiVo

Length: 26min 20sec (1580 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2023