Starfield’s shipbuilding tool will let you build your own intergalactic craft in Bethesda’s upcoming space game in a whole host of ways. The Starfield Ship Builder Mode will let you pick out parts for your ship, secure upgrades, and make the adventure-loving Stavast going on their travels look as cool as they deserve to be.
We got to try Starfield’s shipbuilder at Bethesda Gameplay Day and the tool is extremely user-friendly, but also impressively powerful. You can customise your ship extraordinarily quickly, but you can also spend time making it look exactly how you want. If you have a vision for your very own anthropomorphic spaceship, Bethesda has got you, but you’re probably going to have to put a bit of work in.
There are a huge variety of ship parts in the Delamar-based shipbuilder, ranging from shield generators to dockers, fuel tanks to drives, weapons to habitats, cockpits and cargo holds and landing gears and reactors and cowling and engines. When you choose a part, you’ll get a full preview of it on your ship and can change it if you don’t like it, but it also adds it to your inventory so you can hop over to the Starfield inventory console and put it in storage.
Once you’ve got a ship you’re happy with, you can hop over to the Starfield Upgrades console to spec it and make it better. This can determine what kind of ships you can secure for your fleet, but we’ll talk more about that later. You can also use these consoles to customise the ship’s living quarters, mess hall, control rooms, and cargo holds.
However, these ships and parts are just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re familiar with Starfield’s job and mission system, then you’ll know how crucial your ship is to how you make money out there. John Sawyer says that “how your ship is spec’d in the Ship Builder impacts the sort of jobs you’re able to take on elsewhere,” so you’ll want to make sure your ship is ready to go out into space and make some cash. But what design do you choose? With so many choices, Starfield might end up feeling like a sci-fi car show – something we all know how much Bethesda loves.
Luckily, we got to speak with the wonderful Lead Ships Artist, Ryan Sears, who told us that with a little bit of creativity, you should be able to make anything you want in Starfield’s ship builder. “You can paint it all any way you want, so you can be really extreme about it,” Sears says. “Like, you can make it look like a whale, if you really want to! Like, a literal whale. But there’s like, 99% chance that someone’s already done that, so if you have an original idea, I guess.”
Well, yes, Jeff Bezos already beat you to an anthropomorphic spaceship, but you can’t let that stop you. With just a few tweaks here and there, Starfield’s shipbuilder will let you create exactly the kind of ship you want, whether that’s one that looks like a whale, a literal barn owl, or something more understated. Be sure to check it out in the space game when it releases in 2023.