All Starfield ship customization details revealed so far

It comes as no suprise that space travel will play a big part in Starfield, Bethesda Softwork's upcoming new NASA-punk RPG. As the recently shown hour-long official gameplay primer dubbed Starfield Direct has proven, manual space flight is a well-realized nexus of several gameplay mechanics. To get around the Settled Systems, players will pilot their own spaceship that can be fully customized from broad strokes to minute details.

The means of ship customization in the game will involve modular ship parts, including various appendages that can be bought or salvaged from other ships. It seems to have taken a few pages from the Kerbal Space Program playbook, although its physics-based sandbox element might not be as present. The player can also hire crewmates that will individually bolster certain attributes of the spaceship.

---

Everything we know about ship-customization options in Starfield

The ship-customizing UI in Starfield (image via Bethesda Softworks)

Given the success of the settlement-building system introduced in Fallout 4, its re-appearance in Starfield was always a foregone conclusion. As the Starfield Direct confirmed, building and managing the home base will reprise its role in Bethesda's next big title. The ship-building and mangement aspect, on the other hand, will be its own separate feature-complete system.

The player will be able to modify their spaceship by talking to the portmaster or equivalent technician on any civilized planet with a spaceport. As evident from revelations in the Starfield Direct, the starter ship they get will be a standard Constellation ride.

Ships have several modular parts, and the starter will likely have correspeonding Constellation-manufactured pieces. Each module can be replaced with other components, including those from other manufacturers. Examples of these manufacturing companies from the Starfield Direct include Light Scythe, Nova Galactic, and Deimos. The components will have their own manufacturer-specific specialties, in turn dictating the default appearance of that part, both inside and out.

---

All the different modular ship parts available in Starfield

The modular ship parts we can see in the trailer includes:

• The Cowling: The exoskeleton of the engine, such as the hood of a car.
• The Shield Generator: Will likely affect the maximum shields as well as shield-regeneration rate.
• The Docker: Better dockers might help you dock rogue ships faster and farther away during combat.
• Fuel Tanks: Implies that there will be survival gameplay elements when traversing outer space.
• Grav-Drive: The fast travel in the game makes use of the grav-drive to fold space and jump through the distance, and better grav-drive will allow fast travel to farther systems.
• Engines: Will dictate overall performance, and will likely have further sub-classes.
• Cockpit: The interior look and functionalities of the controls at the pilot's disposal.
• Cargo and Bay: Overboarding, offloading, and storage of both salvaged materials like mining rewards as well as crew inventory.
• Reactor: Possibly allows the rate at which the ship can recharge ship-related resources like fuel, and minor non-structural hull damage since there is a separate repair system available at shipyards.
• Weapons: From what was shown, the ship can have up to four different weapons possibly mounted to the front, flank, and rear.
• Hab: Short for habitat for the crew.
• Bridges and other connective parts to flesh out the ship's structure.

The player can have more than one parts of certain modules. For example, they can have more Hab modules to increase maximum crew capacity. The game's limitations as to how big players can make their ship seems to be liberal.

Magnitude comes at a cost, though, as there will be a separate 'Mass' attribute. This means that larger ships will have slower acceleration, or higher cooldown for their short-range "Jump" or dash ability. The individual expertise of crewmates that the player hires in their journey will also affect these stats.

Space combat in Starfield is not all scorched earth, as you board other ships and hijack it as your own. If you like a particular part on a bypassing pirate ship, the space-fleet mechanics enable you in hijacking it, taking it to a spaceport, disassembling that part, and adding it to your own ship.

The bounds that the system allows makes way for all sorts of oddball designer ships. To show off this freedom in spaceship-fashion, the trailer even included a Gundam mech spoof.