Starfield: How Space Travel Works

Travelling the galaxy isn’t as simple as hopping onto a spaceship and scooting around. Space travel is a big part of Starfield and zipping around the galaxy is going to take some getting used to. To help you get a grip on this major change in the Bethesda open-world exploration formula, we’ve put together an exhaustive guide covering every aspect of space travel for total beginners. If you know nothing about Starfield and want to understand how the game works, we’ll explain in-depth. This is how exploring the galaxy (generally) works, and why it might not be as expansive as it first seems.

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More Starfield guides:

Best Skills | Best Ship Upgrades & Mods | All Companions | All Romance Options | All Settlement Locations | Join All Factions | How To Pirate Ships | Secret Companion | Secret Ship & Suit

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How Space Travel Works

In Starfield, you’ll need to use space travel to progress missions, explore new planets, or dog-fight enemy vessels. You’ll be travelling in space constantly.

• Travel Between Planets & Locations: Press [LB] to open your scanner. From here, you can jump directly to mission locations, planets in the same star system or new locations marked on your map. As you progress the story, new locations will be automatically marked. Planets will also be marked and may reveal new locations if you travel to the system.
• You can also open the map menu and select locations to travel. From the map, you can automatically select your current mission objective area and travel.

Using the Scan function makes traveling much easier and faster. Using scan can be done on the ground as well as space. You can instantly jump to discovered locations or planets that way. You can even travel to new star systems — but that takes extra effort.

• Travel To Star Systems: To jump between star systems, you’ll need to power up [GRV] engines. One power bar is enough to jump to an entirely new system.
• You can only instantly jump to star systems you’ve explored once before. If you haven’t explored the Star Systems on your route to a location, you’ll need to make individual jumps to each area. Select a Star System on the Galaxy Map and hold [X] to jump.
• Some planets may feature dangerous enemy encounters, mission prompts, or helpful settlements. Explore to see what you can find! Each Star System has multiple planets you can check out.

Scanning Outside Major Settlements: When you arrive at major star systems with spaceports, your ship will be scanned. If you’re carrying illegal cargo called Contraband, it will be immediately flagged and searched. To avoid getting caught, you’ll need to purchase cargo upgrades for you ship called Shielded. These Shielded cargo upgrades allow you to hide cargo.

• How To Fight Enemy Ships: Dogfighting is necessary in space. You’ll encounter pirates and other threats. You can even become a pirate yourself and rob cargo from ships you find while exploring the galaxy.
• Add bars to your [LAS], [BAL] and [MSL] for maximum damage. [LAS] is strong against shields, while [BAL] and [MSL] are strong against hull.
• Balance your [SHD] and [ENG] power. Shields help defend your ship, which are critical for avoiding constant damage. Engines give you speed and boost, which you’ll need to avoid incoming missiles.
• Missiles are your strongest weapon. You’ll need to lock-on and fire homing missiles to deal high damage to targets. To quickly break shields on enemies, use both Lasers and Ballistics, then unleash missiles.

Before you can improve your ship, you’ll need to increase your Piloting Skill. This critical skill is essential for flying better ships so you aren’t killed so fast. Before you upgrade, you’ll also want to hire Crew. Crew can be found at any bar in major settlements. Hire them and assign them to your ship. Whatever their skills are, they’ll immediately be added to your total skills. Yes, their skills become your skills. Fill up on crew as quickly as possible to enhance your skills with ships.

• NOTE: While crews share their skills, you won’t be able to fly better ships unless you increase your piloting skills personally, for your character. For the purposes of getting better ships, crew piloting skill is ignored.

How To Avoid Detection In Space: To avoid combat, power down all systems except for 1-2 power bars in [ENG]. The more power bars in your weapon systems, the easier your craft will be to detect. The further away from an enemy you are, the less likely they are to detect you. By doing this, you’ll be able to carefully scoot toward starships, space stations, or valuable loot.

Finally, you can hail or board almost any ship or space station. Doing so is a little tricky.

• How To Dock / Hail: In space, target the ship or station you want to board or hail. Press [A] to target and button prompts will appear. Hold down the buttons shown. On Xbox, press and hold [X] to dock, or hold [A] to hail. Not all vessels will respond to hails.

Hailing can be used to issue threats or more. If you can’t dock with a ship or station, you may want to try hailing first. Unlike with fast-travel, you’ll want to stay out of the scanner to dock or hail. Only targeting is required.

• How To Rapidly Board / Disembark: You don’t have to slowly enter your ship and sit at the cockpit or stand up and exit. You can instantly board and disembark using your Scan function.
• On The Ground: Press [LB] to open the scanner, then target your ship. Press [A] to instantly fast travel into the cockpit.
• In Space: After docking or landing, hold [X] to disembark. Alternatively, if you need to use your ship functions, hold [B] to Get Up and walk around the interior of your ship. Then you can exit through the ladder and ramp.

Even when interacting with your ship’s ramp or entrance, you can immediately board. By selecting [Cockpit] you can immediately hop into your pilot seat instead of walking through the ship interior.

When disembarking at major settlements, you can even instantly fast travel to locations you want to visit first. When you select a settlement on the planet map, multiple locations will appear. You don’t need to walk to every major location — you can instantly port there while your ship docks at the spaceport. That makes travelling around the map and completing missions smoother than ever before.