Highlights
- Fans are discovering a trick to control ship module placement in Starfield's ship builder to prevent random door placement. It can be frustrating when designing larger ship interiors.
- Reddit user AlanCave shared this alternative placement method and helped hundreds of players make spacecraft design less frustrating.
- The ability to select doorway connection points between ship habs will aid in creating striking vessel interiors. The PC modding community may enhance shipbuilding mechanics in the future.
One Starfield player recently found a way to install ship modules without letting the game randomly decide where to place their interconnecting doorways. Their discovery soon made the rounds on social media, indicating that many Starfield fans were unaware of this newly shared trick.
The most flexible way of installing spacecraft modules in Starfield's ship builder is to use the Add action—which defaults to the A button on the Xbox controller or G on a keyboard—to select a new part before dragging it to the desired position. However, using this method to join two modules with traversable interiors will see the game randomly decide on the location of their connecting doorway. That's a non-issue when handling one-by-one blocks that only have a single opening for an entrance anyway, but it can make for a frustrating experience when trying to design interiors with larger ship habs.
Fortunately, it turns out that it's possible to prevent the game from picking a random slot for an interconnecting doorway by designating such a location in advance. To do so with a mouse and keyboard, Starfield players simply need to select the hab node where they want the access entrance to go with a left click before pressing the Add key and picking the desired module to attach. Using this trick with a controller is slightly more complex, as it requires hovering over the target doorway node with the analog stick, holding both gamepad triggers, and then pressing A to open the module selection menu.
This alternative ship module placement method was recently outlined by Reddit user AlanCave, who seemingly helped hundreds of players make their spacecraft design efforts less frustrating, as suggested by the upvote count of their newly posted tip. The resulting implication that many fans were unaware of the trick isn't particularly surprising, as Starfield doesn't actually explain the benefit of this alternate module installation method, even though the ship builder UI does hint at its key and button combinations when hovering over a free node.
The ability to select doorway connection points between ship habs is bound to help players design striking vessel interiors with less trial and error. Even some of the most skilled engineers among the fandom previously complained about struggling with this aspect of shipbuilding, with that group including the player who authored an amazing Starfield replica of the Titanic.
As far as PC is concerned, the modding community is likely to eventually improve the accessibility of the game's spacecraft construction mechanics. While Starfield mods that make shipbuilding better already exist, they are mostly focused on minor tweaks like improving UI responsiveness and camera controls. More intricate solutions of this sort should become possible once Bethesda releases the Starfield Creation Kit in early 2024.
Starfield is available now on PC and Xbox Series X/S.