Tips for "bad" players
This is a set of hints for Starfield for players who just consider themselves
bad at games, who are having trouble getting started, but really do want to
see what the game's about.
This list is by no means complete or thorough, but does try to cover some
things to be sure to do, and some ways to reduce frustration from combat.
It's not even organized, for which I apologize, but here:
-
Make sure you're equipping the gear (helmet, armor, pack), not just
picking it up. Basically this means clicking on them in the inventory so
that they get visibly marked. Clothes are a good way to test this if
you've told the game to "hide" your armor in settlements
-
Upgrade armor and gear when you can.
- Higher Damage Resistance (DR) is almost always good.
- Armor with Concealment makes you very hard to detect while still
-
Loot, steal, and sell everything practical. Stolen things can be sold to
the Trade Authority and the bar girl at the Red Mile. You can definitely
sell every single loose item in the Vectera base and the Constellation
Lodge for more credits
- Stealth (and crouching) dramatically helps stealing
-
Speaking of the Vectera base, there's a better boostpack in the cage at
the top of the shaft that you can juuuuuust nab through the opening
between the locked door and the left cage
-
Ensure you have a follower, like one of the Constellation gang, or the
Adoring Fan, if you chose the Hero Worshipped trait for him (you have to
run into him, he's usually in New Atlantis by the coffee shop, but
sometimes I find him in one of the other "cities' first). There are a
lot of other options, but most of them aren't as interesting. You can
tell if your follower is active by whether they're following you
(generally). You current follower will follow you on and off ships
(yours too) even if they're not crew. For followers to fight for you,
you need to be close to combat, but don't have to be fighting - just make
the foes mad...
-
You can avoid many combats, by Persuasion, by running past attackers, or
(though less avoidant) by letting followers kill them for you
-
It's possible to have more than one NPC assisting you, the easiest being
to start the questline on Akila, and then just keep the woman who joins
you and ignore the questline she's for until you level up some more (the
Akila questline has a difficult combat at the end of a long trail with
footprints that starts from a farm, so having better gear helps anyway).
-
In combat, prioritize attacking from range - the further away the better.
Test out which weapons can hit from a distance (this gets much better
once you aren't limited to marginal ranged weapons with \~3 points of
damage per hit)
-
Remember that you can always run away - it's not just something that
happens in Monty Python. Lots of enemies in Starfield are supposed just
too much for a barely airtight adventurer with a Cutter to handle. Pick
your battles. Prepare beforehand. Skill up first if you need to.
-
Stealth is highly useful (remember to crouch), and if you can drop
combat, your "downed" follower gets resurrected (see also run away)
-
You can delay missions with combat until you've levelled up and gained
better ranged gear. The Ryujin questline in Neon is a pretty awesome way
to do this, as an example (only remember one combat mission in it to find
out what happened to a special element shipment, and it's far into the
questline, shortly before a quest giving you another way to avoid
combats). Note that the one weapon that questline talks about, an EM
weapon, hits much harder if you hold the trigger for a bit before firing.
-
To be clear about "levelled up and gained better [...] gear", your
level controls whether you can buy better weapons and ship parts
from vendors - it is possible to acquire better weapons at lower
levels by going into the eastern galaxy early, or capturing higher
level ships with parts you can't buy... but that's a different
guide, don't worry about it now
-
During the Ryujin questline, you're given a great chance to steal
weapons from the Seokguh hideout, and that wakizashi in the case
provides a great way to ninja-strike enemies down from behind, with
appropriate Skills. Probably outside of the scope of this guide,
but still...
-
Finding the Mantis's hideout is not a good way to avoid
combat... although if you win it and gain the ship, some foes in space
will just grovel for you to let them go when you're flying it
-
Sarah's early mission to rescue an Artifact is combat heavy (in a ship),
but on lower difficulty I'd expect your follower could probably do the
dirty work
-
Give your follower a good gun, ideally with exactly one ammo, since they
don't consume ammo when shooting. Be careful about giving them XPL ammo
or grenades, though. Especially, if you want them to use the gun, make
sure it's equipped in their inventory, much like the first point
in this list (ammo itself doesn't have to be equipped, just carried).
They do have default weapons, though, so giving them one isn't a hard
requirement
-
Stealing from the weapon shop in the Well under New Atlantis is
popular. Note that opening the big yellow case on the desk gives
you something to hide behind to steal some of the things on the wall
-
It is possible to steal three good guns at the weapon shop in
Hopetown. Two are pretty obvious if you look. What's not so
obvious is that you can actually reach one of the Razorbacks through
the corner of the case when crouching
-
Once you finally find a good ranged weapon, skill up if needed to add
Suppressed (silencer), and take Stealth with the idea of working up to
Concealment (and Rejuvenation). Also consider Ballistics, Rifle, Sniper,
Armor Penetration, etc. Killing your enemies with a single shot from
over 100m away is amazing for making combat easier. Armor penetrating
magazines will also help your weapons
- Concealment dramatically improves shooting from stealth
-
If raising your weapons crafting to craft Suppression and all aren't
obvious, they're added at the weapons crafting workbench, with recipes
unlocked at the Research Station (there's one in the Frontier by
default), and said unlock require inputs of resources to the research and
sufficient skill to do it. Both requirements are explicit when looking
at them on the Research Station. The two gear crafting categories have
the overall effect of making play both more empowered, and easier
-
You can craft Regeneration onto armor, allowing health recovery
while out of combat, and without consuming more health kits
-
You can craft Auto Medic onto armor, so that med packs will be
used automatically, even if you didn't realize your health was low
-
You can craft Combat Veteran onto multiple pieces of armor, to
gain up to an added 45% reduction in incoming damage
-
Some Skills that look like they should help, may not really help.
Wellness, in particular, is both relatively useless and riddled with
bugs.
-
During the game, you should acquire Powers, which dramatically change
your options in combat situations. Even the first Power can be used to
utterly disable nearby foes long enough to kill one of them (although you
can't use them close together at first). So deeply consider each new
Power offered and test it out
-
Learn the keys that get you to your quick-access menu (for weapons and
powers) and to your Powers display. While you can just use your main
character UI to get to inventory and the powers UI, this is a lot of work
compared to using the quick access keys to switch instead
-
Remap (aka "rebind") keys if you don't like where they are. I have a
Kinesis Advantage keyboard with separate keywells, and like to move with
ESDF, so I rebound nearly everything. Starfield will occasionally tell
you to use a default key instead of your rebound key in special popups,
but the always-there guidance is right 99% of the time (aside, IIRC,
there was a problem rebinding keys in the sell-ship UI, where one default
couldn't be overridden, but otherwise I think everything's fine).
I recommend a tiny number of mods as being essential in this context:
- Starfield Community Patch
- StarUI Inventory
- Sit to Add Ship to Fleet (obviates redocking to return to 1st ship)
- HUD Show Power Name
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