Starfield: How To Level Up Piloting & Weight Lifting With These Tricks

In Starfield, you’ll need to complete challenges before you can rank up your skills. And some of these challenges can be a huge pain in the butt — for the Piloting challenge, one of the most important skills in the game — you’ll need to destroy enemy ships. Unfortunately, enemy ships are surprisingly tough to find. And you’ll have an even harder time finding ships that don’t blow you away instantly in space combat.

And there’s an easy way to rank up Piloting. You can also make ranking up skills like Fitness and Weight Lifting easier — if you know the tricks. Below, we’re listing quick tricks you can use to rank up skills faster.

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 | Easter Egg Landmarks

How To Rank Up Piloting

To rank up piloting, you’ll need to find and destroy enemy ships — this is a lot easier said than done. While the galaxy is vast, there’s no easy way to locate ships you can dogfight. There’s no pirate territory, no Spacer controlled planets, or Mercenary space stations crawling with fighters in the void. But there is a way to find easy fighters and decimate them to quickly rank up.

• Travel to MAST in New Atlantis and talk to the NPC to the left at the Vanguard desk. Offer to join the faction. You can join no matter what. There is no limit to what factions you join — even if you’re already in another faction.
• Progress until you unlock the Pilot Simulator room. Using the Pilot Simulator allows you to score kills that add to your Pilot Rank Challenge.

The Pilot Simulator can be used even if you’ve completed the quest to join the Vanguard. Just use the elevator and travel down to the correct level of the MAST. You can use the Pilot Simulator over and over. To get even more kills easily, lower the difficulty in the settings so you can complete all waves.

Piloting is one of the most important skills in Starfield, and one you’ll need to rank up ASAP. Ranking up piloting improves your handling on spaceships and unlocks additional classes of ship. You’ll need to rank up Piloting to control Class B and Class C ships.

How To Rank Up Weight Lifting

The other most important skill? Weight Lifting. Weight Lifting lets you carry more items in your inventory. When you start the game, you’ll be severely lacking in inventory and cargo space. If you want to increase your maximum carry weight, you’ll need to rank up Weight Lifting. And unfortunately it is an extremely grindy challenge — to level up, you’ll need to sprint while carrying 75% of your carry weight. So, essentially, you need to be almost encumbered and then sprint. You’ll need to sprint thousands of meters, and each rank just keeps getting higher.

• To easily complete Weight Lifting Rank Challenges, travel to New Atlantis and sprint. Use the NET train to fast-travel to quickly recharge your O2.
• This trick can also be used to quickly rank up when attempting Fitness Rank Challenges. For those challenges, you need to be encumbered.

To make both ranks easier, you can even work out in a bedroom. If you own a house, sprint around in circles (or on a treadmill) and then rest for 1 hour to instantly recharge. Rinse and repeat until you’re buff enough.