Erlkönig: Starfield Tips, Spoilerfree

Backgrounds

Choose a background either for roleplaying purposes or purely to accelerate getting specific base skills you might want. Some backgrounds are especially good at providing skills needed to open up game options, that is, skills that don't just provide bonuses, but enable game mechanisms, such as:

• Bounty Hunter: piloting, targeting, boostpacks
• Cyber Runner: stealth, security, theft

All six of the above skills open up game options, whereas most other backgrounds include less essentials skils that are modifiers to characters stats like Fitness, Wellness, or Weightlifting, or specific to certain weapon types like Pistol (inferior to Ballistics), or include Gastronomy, which many players view as optional - although some foods provide substantial bonuses. One other background is notable though, despite only opening up two mechanisms:

• Bouncer: boxing, security, fitness - fitness supports boxing

...and having both boxing and fitness is two steps towards the high end physical skills, especially Rejuvenation, which can be extremely helpful in Extreme difficulty.

The other backgrounds are generally less efficient unless they support something specific to your run, or work well together with a trait or some other synergistic aspect.

Traits

Most traits are modifiers to existing character attributes, provide access to some faction-specific resource, and so on, but a few stand out as adding new aspects to the game, or having occasional dramatic effect on your ship (instead of just a flat repair rate bonus):

• Hero Worshipped - free, early, utterly non-judgmental pack mule
• Kid Stuff - additional scenes, significant gifts
• Taskmaster - abrupt repairs in space
• Wanted - additional encounter types, XP, and loot

Skills

A bunch of skills adjust characters stats, health, or O2 limits, looting rates, crafting efficiency and so on without actually affecting gameplay mechanics, and so are lower priority skills (from my perspective).

Instead, look for skills that change or add gameplay, rather than just give bonuses, until you find yourself really needing a specific bonus.

That leaves these skills as the main ones we're interested in, and the ones that can affect Background selection the most:

• Physical: Boxing, Stealth, Martial Arts, Concealment, Neurostrikes, Rejuvenation. I've also found Nutrition to be helpful on Extreme for the buffed buffs.
• Social: Persuasion (to avoid save scumming), Theft (unless you hate stealing), Negotiation (low priority), Isolation (very useful for Nishina in the main questline), Outpost Management (if combined with related Science skills), Manipulation, Ship Command, Deception (for smugglers), Instigation (not necessary if you do the full Ryujin questline)
• Combat: All, influenced by weapon preference, especially Armor Penetration. Note that Heavy and Lasers together make it possible to even finish the main questline (up to Very Hard, at least) using only the Cutter. Look for skills that can stack for your favorite weapon. Recently I've discovered that Dueling now scales well, and radically reduces ammo costs on higher difficulties,
• Science: Surveying (useful in combat), Spacesuit Design, Weapon Engineering, Chemistry (if you want drugs), Aneutronic Fusion (this is nice prep for NG+, too), Special Projects (for some players), Outpost Engineering (combined with Planetary Habitation, Botany, and Zoology) Astrodynamics (for some solo players, or if marooned in some corner of space on a captured ship)
• Tech: All, influenced by ship weapon preference, especially: Boost Pack Training, Piloting, Security, Targeting Control Systems, Payloads, Shield Systems, Starship Design (for most players), Boost Assault Training (for some players)

1. If you think you'll want to capture ships, skill up Pilot to B class ship (rank 3) ASAP (use the flight simulator in New Atlantis if you want to save time), otherwise there's a good chance your first valuable ship capture won't let you fly it, which means you won't be able to fully capture it nor sell it.
2. You'll want to be able to use boostpacks, so plan to get the first level of the skill early, either immediately if you want to grab the boostpack available in the first area, or by level 3 otherwise. The game can be finished without boost capability, but that's an unnecessary hardship for most.
3. Unarmed combat scales well if you go as far as getting Neurostrikes for stunning, which scales to higher levels, but the raw damage of unarmed doesn't scale up well (and the game doesn't grant you better corpse loot for not blowing your enemy full of holes). Stealth helps all combat styles, including unarmed and bladed combat. If you get to Neurostrikes, you'd really want Rejuvenation too, probably the only recovery skill that is a game changer. Both require a deep skill commitment if you want them.
4. If you're a hoarder, like I am, raising your carrying capacity through the Weightlifting skill is probably pointless (I know, this is counterintuitive), since you'll be overloaded halfway through anything anyway. There are several other ways to avoid encumbrance, including one you'll discover later.
5. I've been in a single location that consumed scores of lockpicks, with many of the locks at master level. Security 3 skill is really useful, and on occasion opens up alternative solutions (and loot, obviously).
6. That cutter you start out with can be pretty vicious if you max out Lasers (stacking fire damage), Heavy Weapons, and Isolation. And although the stat sheet in-game says it has a range of 3 with no unit given, it hits targets at ~12 meters just fine. You can even win using just that as a weapon, though this is quite challenging. However, using everything else is far too fun to skip out on, and virtually all players choose other weapon skills initially, several of which have similar overlaps, like Ballistics and Rifle.
7. Crafting skills are super useful, especially if you want to use stealth heavily, since being able to add Suppression to an otherwise amazing gun is far being than just hoping one will drop.
8. Rejuvenation is amazing enough to take almost anything in Physical just to unlock it, especially for max rank with its in-combat health regeneration.
9. When Isolation is active, that max damage bonus of +40% to your personal weapons (and unarmed) also affects your ship weapons. Having an active follower disables Isolation, which means you really want to avoid having an active follower while you're piloting, but there's no downside to detaching your follower while in space (where he can't get out and leave), or when your follower is in the crew. These make Isolation fantastic at high levels for ship combat, not to mention when you're alone on the ground (or forced to be alone by a certain critical quest, assuming it doesn't have a bug around this skill). While on the ground, make sure any follower you have is well-armed enough to make up for your lost damage bonus, and distracting enough to mitigate your lost defense bonus (grenades and some weapon with Hornet Nest would do fine if you don't die in the splash damage, among other options).
10. Many of the challenges have easy solutions that may not be obvious, like getting your ship's shields damaged for Shields by just bumping into asteroids or a spacestation, or level up Boxing by beating up level 1 critters on various worlds (although some challenges require opponents to be hostile), doing scanning for Surveying entirely from the rover, doing some ship challenges in the New Atlantis simulator, etc. I haven't tested whether sneak attacks on Andreja might count for Stealth, but you get the idea.

Questlines

1. It makes good sense to explore side quests even if you've never finished the Constellation questline. Some time later, if you find yourself at NG+2, it makes sense to contemplate whether side quests fit your objectives.
2. You'll almost certainly discover mysterious powers. It's good to check whether you have all but one (in the related UI which doesn't exist until you discover the first power, the empty spot on the far left above the midline) before walking into any weird, obviously significant floating orbs. If you're missing a few, you can pick them up later, but some players feel aggrieved when they figure out what's going on. Be aware that the count of undiscovered somethings in that UI may be totally wrong.
3. It is possible to marry all four romantic partners at once, although the spiritual one will only marry you if you're actually single.
4. Doing the questlines for all four romanceable Constellation companion is recommended, and some of them are essential for certain gains.
5. If you like any of the Constellation members' outfits, and want one for yourself, calm down, you can't have it, can't buy one like it, but have (as of 2024-05) TWO chances to get one of your own:
   1. There is a chance to find such an outfit in the Lodge basement, although don't bother looking unless you're notified about it.
   2. IF you go to war with the two faceless annoyances, you might find yourself entering a Lodge containing multiple corpses: STOP shooting and loot the corpses first! (caveat: I've seen this fail for looting clothing once out of several times)
6. Quite a number of quests can be solved in ways / have solutions that the quest does NOT tell you about. Again, I highly recommend avoiding websearching them until after, so you don't ruin things.
7. NG+1: I recommend: Don't skip when first talking to Sarah, you will miss out on a huge number of differences you may not even understand if you put off Don't skip until a later NG+.
8. NG+2 and on: Try to be different, every time.

Valuables

1. The 105 magazines are far more valuable than they might appear, since their effects are eternal. Don't bother piling up copies of the same magazine though - any magazine lacking a description is one you already had. Also, trying to find all of them is a borderline, if not actual, madman's choice, since some only provide tiny improvements, so don't let yourself get obsessed by them. (As of 2024-05, there is no achievement for finding all of them). That being said, having all of them in your inventory at once is rather satisfying.
2. On Vectera, in the starting area, there's a boostpack you'd probably like to have, and can, that adds some playstyle options on Kreet (the next site you visit), but its lack won't change what loot you can get or anything.
3. If you want more drama, don't buy ammo. :-) You'll still probably find yourself swimming in it later anyway. If you take this path, at low level you'll probably want to avoid automatic weapons, since Bethesda nonsensically thinks extra bullets do less damage. If you find yourself seriously low on ammunition, the cutter, unarmed, and blades are some of your other options.
4. Even little chests that describe their fullness as --/-- are bottomless and can be a huge help to lootgoblins on Extreme, as a way to disencumber yourself while cleaning a place out, before taking it all to the Rover to Fast Travel to your ship.

Weapons

1. Pick up weapons briefly even if you don't want them, since you'll still keep their ammo when you drop them, substantially boosting your ammo stash.
2. Some weapons have a focus mode (the cutter) or sighting mode (various) activated separately from shooting.
3. Some weapons can be charged for stronger shots by holding the fire button before release, including the MagSniper and Novablast Disruptor
4. Most guns also have a weapon bash action.
5. Blades have three controls, for two types of attacks and a block.

Movement

1. On the PC, map a key into the second keybinding for the jetpack, giving you one control each for biasing towards going more up versur more forward.
2. Fast Travel has some subtleties worth noting:
   • You can Fast Travel to your Ship even when massively overencumbered if you're in your rover. But be warned that quite a few things can cause your rover to return to your ship without you.
   • You can Fast Travel out of the bottoms of caves.
   • Consuming something to raise your carry max may be enough to disencumber you to allow Fast Travel
   • Giving some of your stuff to your follower may also be enough to Fast Travel
   • Having an outpost on a planet makes it possible to Fast Travel there even if you normally would have been blocked due to not having a discovered route

Starships

1. Between Vectera and Kreet there are spaceships that are potentially capturable, especially the last in any group. Your capturing chances are better if you have the Targeting ship skill, which lets you take out their engines with a far lower chance of outright blowing them up.
2. While captured ships are sellable, often what you scour out of the inside will be worth more than the ship itself. Combined, ship captures are a great way to gain credits.
3. Never register a ship through a ship vendor, instead always register it through your own, personal, fleet UI, which costs less, and can be done almost anywhere.
4. You can use sleight of hand to sell unregistered ships under the guise of a registered (home) ship by timing your sale tightly with switching ships. Bethesda probably didn't intend this, but it could be viewed as an unintended roleplaying choice - would your character cheat the ship vendor?
5. TL;DR: Use the Sit to Add Ship mod, or you face what follows:
   Capturing a ship in the base game automatically undocks you from your original ship - if you're quick, you can target and redock with the 1st ship (greatly complicated in 2024-05 Beta, see below). This is useful, since your captured ship is probably shot all to hell anyway. You can make this slightly easier if your capturing ship's docker faces forward, since during the undock, your original ship will want to move away, and will usually want to turn (because of the docker location) first to avoid banging into you, giving you more time to attempt to redock. If your ship gets too far away from you it may grav jump out of the system, leaving you in your bullet-riddled new treasure, or it may loop back towards you. You can shift ship power to the ruined engines of your capture to try to help repair them in time to chase your first ship if needed.

   Ship Capturing from 2024-05 Beta to 2024-11 (and onward, probably)

   The game no longer automatically makes you the owner of the new ship when you undock (at which point the old ship would start moving and then jump away after a little while). The following bizarre plan works in the Beta to capture a new ship, and keep it while returning to your old ship. The quicklys refer to not letting game time pass, you have plenty of time once in the galaxy map or the fleet (ship overviews) UI.

   1. collect underpants (no, wait, wrong plan, instead...)
   2. capture new ship
   3. do whatever with the new ship's loot, drops, locker, and cargo
   4. sit in its pilot chair
   5. undock
   6. optional: repair your engines in case you have to chase your old ship
   7. point your new ship at your old ship, and move close
   8. if you like, you can observe the problem with the following:
      • Check your fleet UI, both old and new ships appear
      • Note that the new ship is not your home ship
      • Redock with your old ship
      • Board the old ship
      • Check your fleet UI, note the new ship is missing!
      • Get back into the new ship's pilot's chair to continue
      The only way to own the new ship is to make it your home ship, but we want to do that without the old ship grav jumping away, so we aren't going to use the Fleet UI to do it. Instead:
   9. ensure a stable view of the old ship, you'll need to target it soon
   10. ensure no power is going to warp and all power is allocated to other systems - yes, this will be impossible on some weird ship builds - keep in mind that if a crew member with Aneutronics (for example) gets dragged over, the ship will, fortuitously, not use the added unallocated power
   11. start a grav jump to somewhere while grav drive is still unpowered, this will return you to your cockpit view
   12. if any crew caused added power it should just sit in the unallocated power bar - your ship count should have incremented too - be careful to be quick checking this, since game time is passing and two timers may be running
   13. quickly jump into the fleet/ship UI and check that the new ship is now your Home ship (triggered by starting a grav jump instead of by setting it through a UI)
   14. quickly pop back into the galaxy map UI and cancel your grav jump destination - this may take more than one try since some time has to pass for the drive to wind up
   15. quickly find, approach, target, and redock with your old ship - if you wait, it'll grav jump away
   16. return to your old ship
   17. reverify that your captured new ship is still in your fleet
   18. Profit!
6. Ship's cargo gets transferred to any new home ship (even if it overfills the target) but the captain's locker stays where it was - this makes it easy to lose track of items in lockers in different ships, so be careful
7. Budgetwise, to fully upgrade the Frontier to fight in level 75 systems could cost a bit over 300k credits. However, there are lots of alternatives to that path (capturing better ships, different ship combat styles, fleeing, heavier EM, etc). Also, you can't do said upgrade at low level, and may actually lose all of your ships before unlocking all the parts (don't worry about this, it'll make sense later), so try to skip upgrade levels to save credits, i.e. Try to wait long enough to make bigger upgrades, so that you don't lose as much cash on intermediate ones.
8. Joining the Vanguard at the MAST provides early access to at least one weapon you probably will never need to upgrade later, so it's a great way to save credits on upgrades on certain weapons you'd just throw away as your level increases and unlocks better weapons.
9. The flight simulator grants full credit as appropriate for ship-related skill challenges.
10. Missiles have long range, but can only be initially locked onto a target at relatively short range (which makes no sense to me personally, but there it is)
11. Ship ladders block fire, nonsensical but super useful.
12. One type of ship is exceptionally difficult to capture, impossible to capture in space, and only capturable on the surface if you're already running (or driving) up its wing as it's landing. The door trigger is invisible, but highlights near the base of the door until the crew emerges. Depending on your timing, you may encounter opposing crew outside as you exit (if you exit), or in extremely rare cases, have to cope with them inside. This ship type can only be acquired by capture prior to NG+.
13. Bug: Glitched physical ships. If your ship vanishes, sinks into the ground, gets overlapped with a bogus ship, etc, you can almost always get it back by going to any other ground shipyard (there are/were bugs around switching and modifying ships while in space-based shipyards that could block the staryard's docking port) by fast travel and modifying your missing ship.
14. Bug: Your ship shield strength may be wrong. There is a bug around ship shields that can cause your shields to be artificially low, which is due to bad code around followers that boost your shields (like Vasco). You'll probably need to websearch this if you run into the issue.
I happen to love the Cabot cockpits, but no other player-available parts actually fit against it esthetically, because the part that does is for a class M ship players can't fly.
15. Bug: Walking atop NG Cabot cockpits may still have a geometry bug where you can fall in through the windows and get (mostly) stuck. Note that the ship viewed from outside is not the real ship interior, and so you wouldn't be able to just stroll out of the cockpit normally. Walking between the windows works fine.
16. Bug: Robbing Frontier from the Bay is possible if you're a bit too frenzied grabbing lootables from the bay under Constellation's starship Frontier, and pass an associated Persuasion check. However, the loot literally comes from its cargo, meaning all you've done is emptied it without having to enter the ship first. It does count towards a skill challenge progression.

Companions

1. Most of Constellation, except for Vasco, are innately Good, and those Constellation companions will never accept you harming innocents (if they know about it…). So if you want to go darker, you might want the Adoring Fan trait, Vasco, and other followers you'll find elsewhere. You can, of course, change out your crew while sitting on any planet to better fit whatever you're up to, and switch to any follower you can talk to (or to none at all).
2. Telling one of your companions to come follow you around (i.e. not to just sit around, or join your crew) can vastly improve your survivability in higher game difficulties, since your follower is essentially immortal, can used to block gunfire, doesn't consume that one round of ammo (perfect for 40MM XPL or those rare 20mm rounds), and in the case of the religious one, even be used to test out your attacks. Don't be entirely reliant on one though, since one of the most complex areas in the game only lets you in, alone.

Let me first say you should play into the game without mods until you have solidly run into the wall of vendor credit limits, and/or feel like all the clicking to sell hundreds of items to vendors is getting silly, or hate abandoning your good ship to capture a lessor one. It's good to be able to feel the difference the mods make.

Impact on Achievements and UX

Starfield creates two side effects if you add mods to it.

• Greatly complicates handling saves, hiding some of them in disconcerting ways unless you use the View All option
• Disables the gaining of new achievements

To address both of these, you need a mod. Here's one that worked very well for quite a while, although I'm having trouble with it as of 2024-04 but haven't addressed it since I have all the achievements anyway. But saves are still inconvenient because, Bethesda.

• Baka Achievement Enabler (if it works for you)

Enablers

Include as needed to support other mods:

• SFSE (starfield script extendor)
• All in One Address LIbrary
• Starfield Plugins Text Enabler

The Starfield Community Patch is worth considering, although as Bethesda fixes bugs the patch should become less relevant. However, I'm using it currently and it isn't coping with the starship shield bug,

The Most Important Mods

Other Life Changing Mods

• UnarmedWeapon (gives you a way to switch back to unarmed via hotkey)
• More Missions from Boards (more quests = good)
• Place Doors Yourself (gives you control over ship hab interconnections)

Immersion and Profit

One that completely overloads you pretty often, but ... profit! This shifts game balance notably towards having more credits. If you are a compulsive looter, you will be often become much more encumbered if you have this (or a similar) mod enabled, so be warned, and you may find that even the game Settings won't let you adjust vendors to keep up with your massive supply. These also warp game balance somewhat, since being strapped for cash adds meaning to a lot of early game activity, so these limit how long that lasts:

• Shades Immersive Looting (make enemies' equipped items lootable)
  - sadly it doesn't punish you for filling the armor with hundreds of holes from a fully automatic weapon
  - combining this with nudity mods makes it very easy to tell from a distance which bodies you've already looted
• [For loot goblins] (pre-2024-05) Richer Merchants (10x works well, not needed immediately, the new Vendor Credits setting in the base game may obviate it)

Optional Ship Mods

• Save Unfinished Ships (essential for some ship builders)
• Functional Ship Infirmaries (with a ship infirmary and either the Akira doc or Medicine skill, you can heal ailments and so on)
• Functional Brigs or Useful Brigs (lets you sell captured NPCs to the police)

Some that are just nice

• See Distances in Light Years
• Astroneer (if you like ship building puzzles, a bit glitchy, but very nice when it's working)

Stuff from Mods

The only mod with an outfit I have actually liked:

• KZ Va'ruun Vestiary (great outfits, and they drop in Va'ruun'kai)

Starship Parts

I like these but they twist game balance somewhat, and if they become unavailable or break, so do all your ships that use parts from them.

• DerreTech
• TN Class M

(N)PC Body Mods

Seriously, I just wanted to look more like a real human in my nude runs through the game. The current texture I'm using still has painted-in shading that the actual 3D shader makes superfluous, but it's better than the vanilla game.

Various outfits are vastly improved by having better core body textures.

The NBiS below has a much better mesh (geometry) than the default. Which textures to use is a question any player would need to explore themselves.

• No Bras in Space - (much improved mesh)
• Better Vanilla Nude - (texture, though with too much shadow)