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Moments after you start playingStarfield, you’ll already be launched to space using a ship called The Frontier. The game has over 1,000 planets to explore and you’ll always appear near a planet’s atmosphere when you try to land on it for the first time. Sometimes, this might lead to encounters with hostile groups.
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Apart from these random encounters, you’ll also have to learn Space Combat for certain quests since they revolve around dealing with enemy groups on random planets or moons. If you know everything you may do during this combat, you’ll be swimming in Credits in no time.
How Space Combat Functions
The first thing you need to know about Space Combat is that you’ll find two types of Ships while you’re exploring around in space:
Hostile Ships
These will have a red-colored name and will usuallybelong to Factions like The Crimson Fleet, Eclipse, or Spacers. These will instantly start attacking you as you get close unless you’re on peaceful terms with them.
Non-Hostile Ships
These will have a blue-colored name and you can commonly find them orbiting the solar systems that arecontrolled by either UC Vanguard or Freestar Collective. These can turn Hostile if you shoot them or have a bounty on your head.
Some Non-Hostile ships can also be randomly found as you go to different planets, andthey might also hail to you and ask for help.
Once you find a hostile group of ships, it’s time to lock onto them and start attacking. The game automatically locks you onto one of these ships as soon as they get close, andyou’ll only be able to read their name when you’re locked onto them. Though this locking doesn’t do much apart from making it easy to track them.
The actual locking starts when the ship isinside the giant circle in the middle of your screen and in range. You’ll be able to see a bar at the bottom of this circle that slowly goes up. This bar goes up faster depending on how close the hostile ship is. Once it’s full, you’ll truly be locked on and this has a few benefits:
Keep in mind that enemy ships can use the Booster toinstantly remove the lock-on that you have.
However, you can also do that if you see that one of the ships has locked a missile on yours.
Every ship you fight will have a shield that’s displayed just above their health bar, andyou can’t decrease their health until the shield is fully gone. Moreover, this shield slowly regenerates if you don’t attack the ship for a few seconds. Once you’ve gotten rid of a ship’s health bar, it’ll get destroyed and a crate will spawn at its location.
You’ll also be able to seeyour Ship’s shield and healthon the bottom right of your screen.
While the shield slowly regenerates, the health damage is permanent andyou have to use a Ship Part to repair it.
This crate has a white icon and you can also see somewhite arrows at the end of the giant circle if they’re not on your screen. You have to lock on these crates with the same button that you use to lock on the ships, and you can loot the items inside by getting within a 500-meter radius of them.
As you level up in the game,you may upgrade a Skill called Targeting Control Systems found in the Tech tab. This Skill allows you to zoom in on an enemy ship once you’re locked onto it and you can use it to target specific parts of the Ship like the shield, weapons, or engine.
If you disable a ship’s engine, you can even dock onto them and board their ship. Thislets you get much higher loot and extra Credits.
How To Repair Your Ship
As mentioned above, all health damage taken by your Ship is permanent andthere are only a couple of things that can help you repair it:
