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Some Starfield skills have already been revealed, showing the basic stats your character will use to explore and battle the cosmos. Looking somewhat similar to skill systems in Skyrim and Fallout before it, the Starfield skills are split into tiers under five different categories that affect what you can do in gameplay (or how well you do it), and are enhanced by consistent use and practice, so using a skill over and over will seemingly improve how good it is! We’ll go into more detail below on all the revealed Starfield skills, what they do and how the system works as a whole.
All Starfield skills we know about so far
Skills in Starfield are pretty plentiful, with dozens broken up into the following five categories.
- Physical
- Social
- Combat
- Science
- Tech
While the specifics haven’t been revealed yet, the general purpose of each category and what it relates to can be estimated from available gameplay and information, as well as trends set by older Bethesda and open world games. Physical likely covers elements like carrying capacity and endurance, Social impacts your ability to interact with other people in friendly ways, Combat covers your ability to interact with other people in very unfriendly ways, and Science and Tech likely cover the more mechanical aspects of the game – lock picking, base buildings, crafting, spaceship mods and so on.
We expect to see more about all this revealed as we approach the release next year, but for now we’ve also seen the following skills, and added any we know details on ranks for below.
- Ballistics (Combat)
- Rank 1/4: Ballistic weapons do 10% more damage (challenge unknown)
- Rank 2/4: Ballistic weapons do 20% more damage (challenge unknown)
- Rank 3/4: Ballistic weapons do 30% more damage (challenge unknown)
- Rank 4/4: Ballistic weapons do 40% more damage (challenge: kill 250 enemies with a ballistic weapon)
- Demolitions (Combat)
- Rank 3/4: Explosives do 30% more damage and have a 30% larger radius (challenge: kill 125 enemies with explosives)
- Heavy Weapons Certification (Combat)
- Rank 4/4: Gain 30 Damage Resistance when aiming down sights with a heavy weapon (challenge: kill 250 enemies with a heavy weapon)
- Marksmanship (Combat)
- Particle Beams (Combat)
- Rapid Reloading (Combat)
- Rank 4/4: Gain a chance to reload your weapon twice as fast as normal (challenge: reload 150 empty magazines)
- Sniper Certification (Combat)
- Rank 1/4: Scoped weapons are steadier and have less sway
- Targeting (Combat)
- Rank 3/4: Greatly increased accuracy and range when shooting without aiming (challenge: kill 125 enemies without aiming)
There’s numerous other skills clearly available, but all we’ve seen of many of them is the images representative of them, so we can’t say for certain what they are.
How to level up skills in Starfield
Starfield crafting
Learn about Starfield crafting and research and how you can build your own weapons here!
As explained and demonstrated in the Xbox/Bethesda Showcase, the skill system in Starfield is based on a combination of skill points and in-game challenges. Game Director Todd Howard explained, saying, “You can unlock new skills as you level up, and then you rank those skills up by using them and completing challenges”.
So, in practice, levelling up earns you skill points which can be used to first unlock, and then level up, skills. You can only level up an earned skill, however, once you’ve unlocked the next rank by completing various gameplay challenges, as you can see above. We’ve also seen indications that you can get some advantages in them from picking the right Starfield backgrounds and starting skills.
Each of these core skill sets also appear to be grouped into four shelf like tiers, not all which are immediately accessible. While it’s not clear how yet, you’ll obviously have to unlock higher tiers to reach the more valuable abilities they contain as you level up. We expect to see more of that as we approach the launch day in 2023.
Starfield on PS4 or PS5 | Starfield ship customization | Starfield traits
