Erlkönig: Starfield: Ship Building

If you're having trouble with ship building…

• You may be trying to build large, complicated ships too soon
• You may be using ship parts mods or ship building mods way too soon
• You may need more info on balancing mass versus maneuverability
• You may need an outline of how to approach ship part selection

It's better to be comfortable with the vanilla ship builder before adding mods, and the first mod to add, after door auto-placement has driven you nuts for a while, is Place Doors Yourself (PDY).

Note that the ship builder doesn't let you see inside habs while building, so you really need something to tell you which spots in which habs make good connection points. With, for example, the Frontier, if you connect a hab to the Frontier hab on the front/left or front/right you lose the research lab or the bed, respectively. Both of which are kind of important. This soft of thing applies to lots of habs, and to most - but not all - ship mods. So the more habs you have to choose from, the more you run into accidently obliterating parts of them you want with doors.

Here are some example ship habmaps.

To explore parts and ships

• https://inara.cz/starfield

When learning how to use the ship builder

• Focus on core ship parts, not the ones added by mods, which often have quirks or more complicated positioning requirements or lack habmaps
  • Crimson Fleet Rearmed, for example, is fantastic, but mixing those parts with normal parts is extremely weird from a positioning perspective, especially for bay and landing gear, plus it expects you to figure out its quirk (like not having vertical hab connections as of last 2025), so hold off if new to ship building
• Focus on all class "A" Reactor, Weapons, Engines, and Grav Drives at first
  • The Reactor class must be equal to or higher than the highest Weapon, Engine, or Grav Drive class
  • There are good reasons to have a class C Reactor yet still have class B or A Engines (notably the 3015s) or Weapons (notably the Obliterators)
  • The class A 3015 Engine is the fastest in the game, so for any ship with small cargo space, this is the engine you probably want
• You must (barring mods) not build more than 40m from your ship's center
  • With mods you can build larger ships, but landing bay placement can get weird between the landed ship and the landing pad
  • You can build surprisingly tall ships, but the odds of running out of places for landing gear increase
• Landing gear can be a constraint - you'll unlock gear with higher capacity, up to 4 (800 mass) pretty quickly, where you can stuff like 14 of them under a 4x4 ship, for 9600 ship mass liftoffs, or more under larger ships
  • Capturing a ship with these 800 mass thrusters is pretty handy at low levels
• The hardest thing to add to ships tends to be cargo, which has the most impact on other aspects of the ship, so don't start by trying to make a class A ships with 4,000+ kg of cargo. Instead, start with small cargo sizes, like a few hundred
  • You can add additional containers inside your ship that aren't counted against the ship's cargo capacity and don't affect Maneuvering, but they also aren't linked to cargo for crafting - you have to grab the items manually :-)
    • (it's possible that some containers might link to benches you built in your ship, i.e. weren't part of the hab, need to test…)
• Place Doors Yourself is essential if you want to control door placement - i.e when the ship builder isn't putting them where you want it to and you're tired of it's... um... creativity. However, this only applies as ships grow, and PDY is nearly useless on small ships
• The icons used on connection points are subtly different, with weapons only vs inter-hab connection points. To allow for a door, you have to connect two habs' at their respective inter-hab connection points (and, if using PDY, also add the door type)
• Yes, there must be a walkable path from the cockpit to the landing bay and to the docker
  • This means your habs should all be connected and your cockpit, docker, and bay need to be connected to your habs. The ship builder connects habs automatically if you don't have PDY enabled, but if PDY is on you must place doors manually between habs (and for windows)

General guidance

• The new (2026-04) StorMax 70 Cargo Hold and other game changes obliterate the 1000 kg cargo mass threshold for using the 3015 engines while keeping 100 Maneuverability.
  • The 70 has a cargo-to-mass ratio of 6.5, 36% higher than the ratio of anything else
  • This means that 212 mass for 1000 kg (Polo 2030 e.g.) now gets you 3 x StorMax 70 for a 1365 kg base cargo
  • Bouyant Insulators, also from this update, dramatically lower ship mass, including cargo, improving Maneuverability
  • With the BI, you can put 6 x StorMax 70s, for a 2730 kg base, almost three times the pre-skills / pre-skill base before
  • With skills, you can push your cargo capacity over ~4,000 kg, still with speed 180 and 100 Maneuverability
  • The only downside to them is they are limited to port/starboard connections only without mods
• For light ships, see the Examples later on
• For heavy ships, you want a C reactor and huge engines, specifically for maneuvering thrust
  • That Slayton SAL-6830 that can be unlocked by a quest is great for this, but comes at a huge cost to the rather hidden factor of boosting and boost recovery. Simply put, they suck for boosting
• General points to keep in mind:
  • Mass is the enemy of Maneuverability - cargo is usually the largest mass
  • Cargo can easily be the single largest mass in a ship
  • When picking parts, one can pick options one step above the minimum required, so as to reduce expense on the next upgrade, which also makes backing off easier if you end up with too much mass, as well as saving credits in the long run
  • For similar parts, more connection points is usually better
  • If hull (ship health) isn't a concern use less massive parts
  • Some ships will refuse attempts to rename them, or revert them after you leave the builder
• Overview of the process in the Ship Builder
  • Add all the parts you want to add, don't bother attaching them yet
  • Delete ship parts you don't want
  • Then assemble them - focus on how habs are connected first, then the rest
  • If you can't attach everything, an extra hab or structural part may help
  • Be sure to assign your weapons, but if you have few than three, you can ignore the harmless warning about it
• Pick…
  • Your cockpit first since it adds to your cargo size
    • Upgraded versions of a cockpit are more efficient at adding more cargo than any cargo part, so they're always a win from an efficiency perspective (note: mods may have exceptions)
  • The Bouyant Insulator is essential if it's available
    • If you have access to it, add it before exploring other massive components like cargo, engines, fuel tanks, etc.
  • Your additional cargo size, pull in cargo parts early so that maneuverability is more accurate when picking engines and other massive parts. See the raving above about the StorMax 70
  • Your reactor. Unless you're building a ship specifically to be small, you basically want the most powerful reactor you have access to, so make sure it's in your pile of parts in the builder. Also ensure the reactor is within the scope of your Piloting Skill
  • Your shields. Regen rate matters if you can avoid getting shot long enough for it to kick in, but if that doesn't happen much with your own combat style, you can ignore regen
  • Your grav drives. Skills and crew improve your jump range so if you may not need the range-30 drives to jump 30. Using less massive drives helps your maneuvering
  • Your fuel tanks. For a small ship, 100-200 is fine in the early game, where you're still exploring incrementally. Later on, or for larger ships, you'll want more for those cross-galaxy jumps (mostly for convenience)
  • Your habs. Habs with built-ins are quite nice, but you can go into ships (outside of the Ship Builder) and decorate them with most of the same facilities: beds, research stations, workbenches, etc. Later you'll likely want habs to allow more crew and passengers, etc
  • Your docker and landing bay
    • It's convenient to have a forward facing landing bay, ideally in the front half of the ship, centered, to match up with "front" of landing bays and pads. However, you can put them in all kinds of weird places and it's fine as long as it doesn't stick off of the sides of the landing pads
    • Docker placement is more nuanced. For example, in space-capturing ships without the StAStF mod, you benefit from a forward facing docker, because it makes it easier to find and dock with your original ship. However, due to Starfield liking to put you on 50% speed at undock, you have to turn immediately to avoid hitting, for example, the spacestation you just left. With StAStF, putting your docker anywhere is fine, mostly being a choice about your view while docked and the aforementioned forced thrust at undocking. There is something to be said for the drama of being able to see the ship docked with.
  • Your engines to push your maneuverability up to 100. If not possible, higher is better - preferably at least 70. Anything below 50 would benefit from more turrets instead of just fixed weapons (but always have a least one set of fixed, probably non-missile weapons for ship captures, shooting asteroids, etc)
  • Your landing gear. You need 1 thrust unit per 200 mass units, so those big 4 thrust thrusters support 800 mass each
• Check feedback from the Ship Builder UI
• Adjust anything you need to, usually tradeoffs to improve maneuvering, usually involving:
  • less cargo
  • lighter choices of Reactor (C/40 -> B/39 can save almost 60, e.g), Grav Drive (try to stay above 23, calculated with your skill/crew bonuses, to be able to make the long grav jump needed anywhere), Fuel Tanks, and Shields
• Assemble everything
  • Start with the cockpit, habs, docker, and bay, which must all connect
    • Don't obliterate hab fixtures you want to keep by having openings replace them
  • Keep in mind that engines have to go somewhere, usually on the back, when doing your hab layout
  • landing bay and landing gear bottoms must all be aligned to match vertically
  • weapons may need some added structural parts to mount
  • some structural parts can be handy for mounting engines
  • if using PDY, you must add parts for openings between habs and windows, but do that last
  • you can often just stick the grav drive, reactor, and cargo in random places and be fine
• Check feedback from the Ship Builder UI about misalignments, ship size overruns, etc
• Adjust as needed
• Commit your new design

How to get a ship

• Eccentricities: One can ground capture a starborn Guardian after Walter's Artifact quest, then fly it while saving up the 300-350k credits for a full ship overhaul. Combat in them requires a totally different skill set (close range, stunning ships, using a stunned ship as a shield, dealing with weapon regen, etc), but capturing ships with them is oddly satisfying (and easier on higher difficulties… um… after you adapt)
• Capturing: Hugely helpful at bypassing lots of incremental ship upgrades, which cost a fortune. Capturing some huge ship with huge Reactor in the "east" galaxy dramatically advances things, and is great for giving you free ship parts above what you may have unlocked already
  • Ground captures are easier, often trivial
  • Space captures are more involved, especially since Bethesda keeps making it more difficult to capture a ship and keep it when you return through the docker to your original ship. Currently you have to start a Grav Jump in the new ship - then abort it - then redock with and enter your old ship - then check that your new ship is still in your inventory. This silliness can be solved with the mod Sit to Add Ship to Fleet, but it's good to do the vanilla dance a few times first just to say you can. :-)
  • EM weapons are great for ship capturing, especially at lower difficulties when otherwise you'd probably just detonate your target otherwise. Counterintuitively, on the highest difficulties your enemies are sturdy enough to take more non-EM weapon fire, making EM a more nuanced choice, and also making it much easier to capture ships with Guardians.
• Quests: The best quest ship is probably the Star Eagle with an A/29 Reactor. The Kepler R (kitchen sink) ship only has a C/24. Both benefit from changes, random examples being to:
  • Extend the habs into the side pods for the Star Eagle
  • Completely rework the Kepler R except for keeping the landing gear
• Buying ships: Ugh. A super expensive way to access ship parts you haven't unlocked yet

Example light ships at different ends of the game

• Early game, one approach is upgrading the Frontier to have 3x Obliterators and SC-1 missiles (huge magazines) and a 2nd set of missiles (both on 1 pip of power each, keep this trick in mind).
• By late game, one can pretty easily upgrade the Frontier to C/Reactor/40 or B/39 ship with 4x 3015 Engines, a 1500 unit shield, around 1,000kg 4,000 kg (Armada update) of cargo (with Bouyant Insulator and Skills), 100 Maneuverability, 180 speed, 6x Obliterators, a set of SC-2 missiles (they have huge magazines), and lastly either another set of (different) missiles, or EMs, or particle turrets