Highlights
- In Starfield, players have the freedom to build their own space-faring vessel, including unconventional designs like a gun-shaped gunship.
- Upgrading and maintaining your starship is crucial in Starfield to tackle advanced enemies and space combat side quests.
- The ship builder feature in Starfield has been well-received by players, allowing them to unleash their creativity and recreate iconic starships from other franchises.
Starfield offers plenty of freedom to players when it comes to building their own space-faring vessel, and one of them took their assignment a bit too literally by designing a gun-shaped gunship. Though finding good weapons in Starfield is an important aspect of character progression, the game also urges players not to neglect their starship. The Frontier may have its quaint charm during the opening hours of Starfield, but it won't carry players deep into the endgame.
Whether through buying a new ship in Starfield, or by designing their own, players have to keep upgrading their vehicle to be able to fend off increasingly harder ambushes from the Crimson Fleet, or even just to tackle side quests that involve space combat. However, ships in Starfield represent the game's most obvious money sink, which is why it's not only recommended for players to keep saving their credits, but also to establish passive sources of income through Starfield's outpost system.
The ship builder was used by a Starfield player named ComCrisis to design and construct a vessel that quite transparently encapsulates the main function of a starship in the Settled Systems: as a weapon of deterrence. The shape is that of a pistol, and since the design was shared on the official Starfield subreddit, other fans couldn't help but wonder if the ship's name was "Desert Eagle", or perhaps more accurately, "Space Eagle". True to a genuine firearm, the ship's design also makes it so that its weapons all fire from the barrel of the gun.
It's admittedly a quite clever design, and shows just how enthused and creative players are being with the ship builder in Starfield, whether through original designs, or faithful recreations of their favorite starships from other franchises. Building a Borg Cube from Star Trek, or constructing a Star Destroyer in Starfield has shown that Bethesda's gamble with a fully modular ship builder paid off, as many players consider it to be the best feature in the entire game.
With official mod support on the way in early 2024, Starfield mods will allow players to elevate their ship design skills even further by adding new habitation decks, weapons, engines, and other ship parts to an already wide pool of options. Ultimately, whether they use it for gameplay or merely for creativity's sake, it may take years before Starfield's community ever gets bored from using the ship builder.
Starfield is available now on PC and Xbox Series X/S.