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How to acquire, use, and enjoy the Starborn Guardian
Acquiring
- NG-n is associated with receiving the starborn Guardian n at
start, up to a maximum of n=6, or VI, which is also received in NG+
thereafter
- Guardians can be captured in pre-NG or in any NG+ game with two primary
constraints:
- be past the Starborn quest in the Constellation questline
- (the Hyla II skip to the scorpion puzzle also works, IIRC)
- only when the targetted Guardian is landing
- I currently have a game where the Constellation questline is complete,
except for going through the Unity, and haven't seen Guardians land in
a while. This could be a bug, or an end to capturing Guardians for this run, not sure.
- to ground capture a Guardian, it's recommended to be running up the
wing while it's landing, to repeatedly attempt triggering the door from
the fuselage just below it, in the few seconds before the crew comes out
- …locking the door as they do so
- once the technique is understood (timing and where/when to activate the
door), arriving at the door in time nearly guarantees success
- usually the crew will appear outside on the wing while the player appears
inside. In extremely rare cases, the player may encounter the crew
inside, while trapped at the end of a corridor with nothing that looks
like a door
- a Guardian landing site will often see another one land there again later
(possibly interposed with other ship types over time?)
but in general making them farmable.
Note that you're looking for a site where
the Guardian lands after you arrive there by Fast Travel
- captured Guardian are typically tier I, II, IV, or rarely VI (max).
- No sign of tier III or IV
- Player level seems to be irrelevant
- Airless moons lacking ground clutter are excellent for finding them
- Fermi VII-c Guardian IV (mostly) and VI (one?) seen
- Huygens VII-b Guardian IV
- Farming this for Guardians is also helpful for farming Essences
from all the starborn that come out of them
- One Outpost can be plunked down, and then 4+ Guardian-specific landing
sites found in the same tile
- a captured Guardian may be a higher tier than the player's original
Guardian (if any)
- the cargo and captain's locker will often have some loot, usually
something unusual like a a few Veryl-Treated Manifolds
- usually, the longer you wait inside your new ship,
the farther away its former crew will wander,
so jump back out immediately if you want to farm essences
(assuming they're not shooting you inside, of course)
Selling
- Guardians are locked against vendor sale with a keyword,
which on PC can be manipulated:
- The keyword used is
CannotBeSoldShipKeyword, hex 03413f2
- To manipulate this, you need to have the ship's GBFM selected:
- In the Guardian, select the pilot chair
- Use the mouse wheel if the object isn't type FURN
- Use that FURN id as the argument to
getspaceship
- Use that id as the argument to
prid, a GBFM id should then show
- Use
haskeyword 03413f2 to see if the ship is locked
- Use
removekeyword 03413f2 if you want to unlock it for sale
- (This doesn't register the ship)
addkeyword 03413f2 can be used to lock ships against accidental sale
- I had thought this no longer worked with the FL/TA update,
and yet it seems fine as of 2026-06-28
Upgrading
- since the Guardian VI can't be modified,
higher capability is entirely through improving skills,
appropriate crew, and/or tactics
- Energy Weapon Systems skill challenge is advanced by using Solar Flare
- Missile Weapon Systems skill challenge is advanced by using Gravity Torpedos
- Supposedly the ship upgrade terminal (Terran Armada) effects are fleet-wide,
but exclude Guardians from those effects. Boo.
Combat
- typically you will need to fight rather differently in Guardians, leaning
heavily on stun torpedoes, and speed to dive into range, move behind
enemies, and possibly to escape to recharge
- with all supporting skills, capturing level 60+ ships on Extreme (ship
combat) is entirely viable, and this likely extends to max level ships
with some luck and a good supply of ship parts on hand
- usually the problem is that your weapons' magazines have run dry, and
your fire rate is bottlenecked by your recharge rate,
getting shot by some second ship,
and your shields are gone.
For captures,
just taking some damage may be worth it if it lets you finish capturing -
but not if you explode.
For killing ships,
as long as you added some actual hull damage,
go ahead and boost away to let your shields recharge.
- you can cope with a group of enemy ships by quickly switching targets and
stunning them with Gravity Torpedoes, capturing one, and repeating
- [caveat: it's usually hard to capture anything but the final ship
in most cases in the vanilla game]
- while attempting to kill the engines of one ship of a stunned group,
you may need to break to restun the others before returning to your main target
Inside
- chests can be built on board for additional storage separate from cargo
- you can add furniture, workbenches,
and so on in the side alcoves and still largely retain the
same open appearance as an unfurnished ship, if you're fond of it
- higher tiers of the outpost skill unlocks various decor with style
more compatible with the ship's
- there's enough space to split a good part of the cockpit into two floors,
although the builder makes this pretty tedious, I have one now though,
where I placed a carpet centrally and expanded it using commands.
The result, it turns out, is actually pretty nice, level with the
upper railings and almost all of the added space is usable.
Author's Context
So from 2024-12 to 2026-08, I've been farming ship captures while flying
Guardians (see list below).
Despite the risk of jumping into too much trouble,
escaping by grav jumping to, say, Va'ruun'kai,
is strikingly quick in a Guardian.
The only real problem I'm having is running the magazine dry before taking the
enemy's engines down, leading to a plink.....plink feeling that's definitely
worrying if there is another enemy ship loose.
I'd like to capture a level 75 Va'ruun ship to nail down that this general
approach is solid, but I'll need to find one practically alone...
Difficulty (ship combat) comparison with capturing in a Guardian at NG+13 -
this should be progressively easier in lower NG+ counts (below 10) and
easiest in pre-NG.
(As mentioned earlier, routinely chain-capturing isn't normal in vanilla,
and is probably due to some mod I'm using - but I don't know which one.
It is possible to capture more than one ship in some fights, though,
especially if the other ships are distracted by SysDef or something,
or perhaps boosts which break target locks are the reason)
Generally I feel that, on Extreme, I can capture or destroy any group of
ships where the foes' levels total below roughly 130,
and bit more likely for each foe that's level 40 or less,
and notably less likely for each ship beyond three foes,
and that I'm in trouble if they use EM weapons.
- Normal (dialed down difficulty for the test)
- Foes: a quad of a ~24, ~35, and two ~55s
- captured all three higher ships
- Extreme
- Foes: a pair of a level 64 and a 24
- Foes: group of level 30 ships
- had to stun all of them, then captured all of them
- Foes: a 4 and two 52s
- captured one 52
- napped in it for an hour (which has to sound pretty random)
- the other enemies had vanished
- Foes: a ~33 and two 44s
- had to pause disabling the 1st 44's engines to restun the others
- 2 captured, 1 destroyed
- Foes: a trio of level 50+
- they disabled my engines multiple times, presumably with EM weapons
- they won :-(
- Questline: Failure to Communicate, quite challenging (at level ~195)
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