We’ve wondered if Starfield would allow you to build or fly spaceships for a while. Of course, we knew from the start that the game would involve space travel, but we didn’t know if the ships would just be a glorified loading screen or some sort of fast travel system. Fortunately, it looks like it’s much more involved than that.
How does ship building work in Starfield?
You’ll be able to build a ship in Starfield, which will work a bit like the base building does. From the gameplay reveal trailer, we know each vessel has the following stats:
- LAS (Laser?)
- BAL (Ballistic?)
- MSL (Missile?)
- Hull
- Shield
- Cargo
- Crew
- Jump Range
- Mobility
- Top Speed
- Mass
There is a multitude of different parts that can be combined to make your ship. To construct your ship, you’ll have to piece together cockpits, hab modules, landing gear, cargo modules, and more. From what we’ve seen so far, it looks like there’s a huge amount of configurations that you can devise.
Like with bases, you’ll be able to assign crew members to your starship. The gameplay reveal trailer didn’t go into detail about this aspect of the game, but we assume that crew members can boost the performance of your systems if you assign them appropriately. Perhaps they’ll even have their own stats that you can level up.
Can you control your ship?
Once you build a ship in Starfield, you can fly it to any of 1,000 worlds. That means taking the helm a flying it through space. The stats from above will factor into how the ship handles. We assume a ship with high mass will likely have low mobility. So, you probably won’t be able to just build the biggest ship possible and expect it to turn on a dime.
We’ll learn more about how spaceships will work in Starfield as we approach the release date, which is sometime in 2023.
