Starfield Skills Guide
Sep. 1, 2023Starfield Skills Guide
In this Starfield Skills Guide, we’ll be going over how skills work in Starfield, and which are the most useful and Best Skills of the game.
If you are worried about spending your points and want to plan your character for success, make sure to read through and I will help you to prioritize what you should be aiming for first.
How Skills Work in Starfield
When you make your character, your choice of background will give you the first level of 3 skills. After this, you will gain 1 skillpoint per level of your character, which can be used to either unlock higher ranks of the same skill you are already using, or to get new skills.
StarfieldSkillsare not slotted or used actively, they are all passive bonuses for your characters, and they are divided into 5 Core Groups: Physical, Social, Combat, Science and Tech Skills.
Each group then has sub-categories: Basic, Advanced, Expert and Master. You have to spend a certain amount of points in each category to unlock the higher subcategory tiers.
Since you cannot respec, picking yourSkillscan be a rather paralizing affair. The best way to go about this is to think about your character and gameplay, and consider what you find the most important.
If your core aim is to excel at combat, then you’ll want to focus on mastering physical and combat traits. If your dream is to be a space pirate, then you’ll need to learn about space combat and starship design. If you just plan to explore and set up outposts, you’ll want to focus on scanning and outposting features.
There are a total of 16 skills in each of the 5 categories, and all skills can be upgraded to max with 4 points. This means you would need 320 points to completely unlock everything – which I don’t think is possible from what I have played as the max level I saw was 70+. Even if it were possible, getting there would take so long that it’d be a waste not to optimize.
My recommendation is to immediately take these specific skills because of the quality of life they provide:
You can get several of these skills from yourBackground, so if you pick right you’ll be able to get them all by level 5. From there, your choices become a lot harder as they’ll depend on what exactly it is you want to do.
The next skills you pick will depend on your playstyle, so I will describe the categories and the best skill within each.
Physical Skills: These are for those of you looking to play stealth or who want physique boosts. They are generally underwhelming or very situational as many of the bonuses are easily achieved via consumables or equipment, so it doesn’t seem smart to put points into them.
Some recommendations for them are:
Social Skills:These skills are a catch-all forNPCinteractions and questing. Your choices here will heavily depend on how you like to approach situations. I found that persuasion took care of almost everything and I didn’t really need bribery or such.
Some recommendations for Social Skills are:
Combat Skills: This category features all the combat bonuses for your character. We already mentioned ballistics, but if you want to specialize in a particular type of gun or melee combat, there are plenty of options here. Since this is all very personal to your playstyle, I’ll highlight what may work for most people rather than trying to focus on what each “build” may pick as they are quite self-evident.
Combat Skills: This category features all the combat bonuses for your character. We already mentioned ballistics, but if you want to specialize in a particular type of gun or melee combat, there are plenty of options here. Since this is all very personal to your playstyle, I’ll highlight what may work for most people rather than trying to focus on what each “build” may pick as they are quite self-evident.
Recommendations for Combat Skills are:
Science Skills: These are skills that cover a lot of very important aspects for exploration and character optimization. I suggest you focus on these and Tech skills early on as they can take a lot of tedium out of the game, and open up new gameplay opportunities.
Recommendations for Science Skills are:
Tech Skills: Finally, Tech Skills are all about your spaceship and robotics. Many of these skills have a deep and meaningful impact on your gameplay, so you should be looking to spend your points here from early on.
And that’s a wrap for all the skills available in the game! As a final tip I will mention that companions and crew also have skills, and this will determine where you assign them. Use the Ship menu to assign companions and hired crew to your ship or any outpost with a “Crew Station”. Each companion or crew member provides unique passive bonuses to make your ship or outpost run better.
If you’re looking for more Starfield content, check out thewiki, ourBeginner Guide, or ourStarfield Review!
Fexelea
MMO raider by day and guide writer by night, Fex enjoys multiplatform gaming, good books and animes, and streaming with a cold beer.
