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Ship customization in Starfield has been confirmed, giving you the ability to modify your spaceship and create builds from assembling a large variation of pieces. Building ships in Starfield is clearly going to be one of the biggest appeals and challenges of the game, crafting your own Millennium Falcon and customizing stats and elements to ensure that you get the best possible ship to navigate space in, from weapons to shields to how far you can go at lightspeed. The basic principle of building ships in Starfield appears to be modular, combining full sections together in different ways – engines, cockpits and so on – into a unique creation that fits your spacefaring needs. With that in mind, we’ll go into more detail on everything we know so far about Starfield ship customization and how it works below.
How Starfield ship customization works
Ship customization in Starfield is modular in nature, with footage at the 2022 Microsoft/Bethesda Showcase revealing players piecing together full sections and rooms of ships to alter stats, swapping out engines, landers, cockpits and so on, rather than building those sections individually. Not only that, but the reference to a “vendor” in the top-right corner of the UI indicates that players will not be building these components themselves as part of the Starfield crafting and research system, but buying them from set locations (an idea reinforced by the fact that each of these components and modules have corporate logos emblazoned on them).
Nonetheless, these mechanics do appear fairly versatile. Despite all the ships we’ve seen sharing the same mechanical semi-realistic aesthetic, those presented ranged from sleek-looking fighters, to bulky warships, to squat cargo couriers and more. We even saw ships without weapons or shields altogether, suggesting that if you’re really hard up for cash, you can rip out everything but life support and the thrusters, and try your best to make it across a dangerous universe in a tin can on a firework.
We also saw that certain components require different ranks in the “Starship Design” skill either to buy or use, likely meaning that better ship parts will require higher Starfield skills to either buy or use successfully.
Starfield ship stats
During ship customization, the same eleven stats were always presented at the bottom of the screen, clearly representing the core aspects of any spaceship. They were listed as follows:
- LAS
- BAL
- MSL
- Hull
- Shield
- Cargo
- Crew
- Jump Range (Light Years)
- Mobility
- Top Speed
- Mass
A lot of these appear to be self explanatory, especially when taken into the larger context of the presentation and the footage of flight afterwards: Hull and Shield represent two types of health bar for your ship, Cargo is how much loot you can store onboard, Jump Range is how far you can go at light speed, and Mobility and Top Speed affect your flight agility when you’re going at any speed less than “C”.
But some are a little less obvious at time of writing, either in what they mean or what they do. LAS, BAL and MSL very likely refer to weapon/damage types (Laser, Ballistic and Missile), and seem to indicate the general combined damage output of each weapon type – so all your laser weapons add to your total LAS stat.
Beyond that, the slightly more uncertain ones are Crew and Mass. Crew is a stat that certain modules like cockpits and habitats expand on, raising the Crew number, but we don’t know yet if that means they need more crew members to operate, or simply allow for a bigger team on your spacecraft. Either is possible, but we suspect the latter, especially with the tidbit that players can hire NPCs to crew their ships accordingly.
Mass is something that every module in Starfield seemingly adds to, which is represented by a red colouration in the stats, indicating that more mass is a negative element. Looking back through the footage, we saw that adding new components to the ship raised its mass and penalised its Jump Range and Mobility, suggesting that the heavier your ship is, the harder it’ll be to fly. The exact stats altered may vary on the component itself, but we expect to find out more closer to launch.
Reactor/Power Distribution
Alongside the “core stats” for each ship along the bottom, there’s also a constant indicator in the top-left that compares numbers for “Reactor” along with “Equip Power”, representing the amount of energy your ship’s reactor is generating along with how much energy is actually being consumed. There’s a bar horizontal to it that indicates total energy production, and six vertical indicators above that, labelled thus:
- W0
- W1
- W2
- ENG
- SHD
- GRV
We can make a good estimation of most of these meanings – three varieties of weapons under W0, W1 and W2 (likely Laser, Ballistic and Missile) and how much power they draw, along with the energy drain on Engines and Shields. It’s GRV that’s a little more obscure – but the descriptive text on the Fuel Tank component tells us that interstellar jumps from system to system are done by the “Grav Drive”, which seems pretty likely to be what GRV stands for.
Starfield Ship modules and components
Below we’ve listed all the types of ship modules and components we’ve seen used, customized and utilised in the Starfield ship customization system, along with the stat blocks attached to each one. The brief glimpses of the vendor stores indicated a large variety of options for each component, with at least eleven types of landing gear alone.
Cockpits
Pretty self-explanatory, this module is clearly going to be the module from which the ship is operated, as the footage shows the player character sitting in the Cockpit chair before taking off.
- Cargo
- Health
- Crew Slots
- Mass
Engines
The player in the presentation stacked two different copies of the same engines on the back of their ship, suggesting that “Engine” basically means “giant jet booster for extra fastness”. Though notably, when the Engine was added, the ship’s Jump Range fell and the Top Speed didn’t change at all – what did change was the Mobility. We look forward to finding out if there’s separate modules to buy for acceleration, or if this was simply an engine that specialises in handbrake turns.
- Class
- Engine Thrust
- Manoeuvring Thrust
- Engine Health
- Health
- Mass
Fuel Tanks
One of the simplest modules we saw, the in-game description tells us that Fuel Tanks specifically store the Helium-3 fuel for the ship’s aforementioned Grav Drive, used for the long-distance light speed jumps from system to system, and larger tanks allow for further, more frequent jumps before needing to stop for gas.
- Grav Jump Fuel
- Health
- Mass
Landers
About as simple as it gets, these components are the landing gear/legs for the ship that allow you to touch down on new worlds. We saw a few of these being tinkered with, some of which had different levels of skill requirements, though it’s not clear if they actually function differently from each other or if you’re just buying a better health/mass ratio.
- Health
- Mass
“Hab” Habitat modules/Control Stations
“Hab” modules are the connective central pieces around which your ship appears to be built, and at first we thought they were distinct from the larger “Control Station” sections, until the descriptive text for the latter described itself as a “Habitat Module”, making it pretty clear that the Station is just a larger, better version of the former. Otherwise, they seem to hold space for crewmembers on your ship.
- Health
- Mass
- Crew Slots
Cowls/Cowling
Cowls or Cowling for your ship appear so far to be simple bulk without a clear function beyond boosting stats a little, so we presume it’s either armor plating for when you don’t know what else to cram on the available space on your ship’s exterior, or just a bit of cosmetics to smooth out the lines and angles of your ship. Either way, their only stat effects we’ve seen so far are adding small amounts of Mass and Health.
- Health
- Mass
Cannons
The one cannon we saw properly revealed in the showcase was the Mauler 104L, a stout-looking piece of artillery situated on top of the Cockpit. The actual stats associated with the weapon don’t seem to indicate its firepower, or it’s just inferred by changes to the “BAL” stat along the bottom.
- Class
- Reactor Power Req
- Health
- Mass
Lasers
For those who like their firepower a little more futuristic, the Dragon 221P MW pulse Lasers we saw on the ship might look like ugly camera lenses, but don’t seem to require anything unique over the cannon. In fact, they actually used a little less power, though that may just be down to the stats of the overall weapon and not indicative of a trend.
- Class
- Reactor Power Req
- Health
- Mass
Reactors
Brief glimpses make it seem like Reactors are one of the most expensive parts of the ship, and considering how essential and complex they’re clearly going to be, you can see why. The Crew Rating element suggests that NPCs will be required to keep a Reactor in good form, and the unique Repair Rate stat sounds like it’ll be able to fix itself (or it just represents how fast your hired goons can do it).
- Class
- Power Generated
- Repair Rate
- Reactor Health
- Health
- Crew Rating
- Mass
Customizing Starfield ship cosmetics and appearance
The Showcase confirmed that players can, at the very least, recolour and paint their ship’s hull, with options for colour hue, saturation and brightness on individual modules. So far we haven’t seen any options for purely cosmetic self-expression beyond that – so don’t get too hopeful for colourful murals on the thrusters or fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror until we have those sorts of things confirmed.
Starfield ship builds
It’s clear that from the presentations and descriptions that ships will be built for a purpose – that the “perfect ship” is more situational, and players will have to balance elements like firepower, defence, flight, cargo capacity and jump distance according to what they want to achieve, or try and make an all-rounder craft and let piloting skill make up the slack. Some of the ship builds we were shown included:
- Laser-focused, balanced defence build
- Cargo freighter with high Hull and Mass
- Weaponless, shieldless ship with high Jump Range
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