Talk About a Brief Look at My Starfield Experience
Talk About a Brief Look at My Starfield Experience
I need to mention first that I've managed to boost both the challenge level and graphics options with the newest update. Understanding how to obtain useful items early on has also played a role. It’s even possible to skip to another system during intense battles if you lack ship parts for repairs in combat. When you return, your progress will be preserved.
I used to play at 50% resolution, but now I can run at 65%, achieving better performance outside than before. My FPS drops only to around 45, compared to under 40 before. This gives me smooth movement and aiming, which was usually slow. The visuals are also clearer, especially the NPC faces. I’m using a mix of low and medium settings at 1080p based on my hardware, but the game still looks much better than it did in older versions.
While ships greatly impact dog fights and better weapons increase firepower, their usefulness depends on when you tackle quests. It’s often a guessing game about weapon levels, but enemies tend to match your skill more closely. Delaying missions can lead to much tougher encounters. Most videos I’ve seen of the second and third missions are usually played at less than half my current level.
The Ship Builder remains a persistent pain point for me, though acquiring multiple ships is manageable—up to ten allowed. If you struggle to build a perfect ship, you can opt for different vessels instead. My usual approach is to upgrade weapons and engines on the starter ship. Despite claims about barren planets and tricky builder mechanics, there’s still a lot to enjoy in the game.
These are three of the main missions from the end of the Crimson Fleet and UC storylines. I began on Easy mode, which the first mission uses, but the other two are Normal.
for a good appearance on the ship, finish the freestar ranger questline. when it comes to ship combat, you can slightly reduce speed, which helps avoid heavy damage. press spacebar plus wasd, then press throttle; lightly tap shift for engine boost while avoiding missiles. focus on targeting only certain systems—don’t destroy everything if there are too many. hit their main weapons first, then switch targets. you can fire all three weapons at once, but usually two weapons with turrets are enough to quickly eliminate your target. in new atlantis inside the UC building, there’s a ship combat simulator where you can practice. it begins easy and becomes more challenging, so joining the vanguards is necessary to progress.
Thanks, but I'm already familiar with all of that. I just didn't want to expand the intro too much and explain everything in detail. You already have the Star Eagle ship if you watched the videos—you'd have seen it. The only drawback is the lack of cargo shielding, and I've had trouble adding even the smallest shielded bay at Red Mile. It's a tough combat experience, particularly with rapid fire missiles. I'm also using those dog fight tactics, but targeting mode often leaves me vulnerable to other ships.
My preferred approach in dog fights with the Star Eagle is to stay close and roll through as I attack, then dive up with boost, and arc left or right to catch the next target. With the skills I've developed (see below), and the speed and mobility of the Star Eagle, that should get the job done. I don't always focus on attacking one target until it's destroyed, since that can draw other ships in. Instead, when they do, I switch tactics and move slowly but steadily to win the battle.
😉
I also tried the pilot training sim as much as possible, which helped me master my Piloting, Targeting, and Shielding abilities. The only issue is that the sim only includes the Hoplite ship, which is fine for tiers 1-4 but problematic at tier 5—way too difficult. I could easily progress through tier 5 without issues, but I was often caught in a firefight. I also used Debug Mode on the reset panel, something Tuala mentioned when I finally gave up on the sim and submitted my test results.
I've found that many people struggle with tier 5 on the sim. Some claim they took cover behind a nearby space station, but it seemed too slow and over-the-top to try.
shielded cargo is meant for contraband only; you must pair it with an antiscanner to be truly effective (even when carrying contraband on the ship).
sim lvl 5 is a challenging beginning, but investing in tech skills will make it manageable—spoiler.
Spoiler: there are 6 levels in the simulator.
In reality, I've frequently hidden contraband in the Razorleaf using only the shielding available, without a Scan Jammer or any additional abilities. Just before making the jump to sell it, you should perform a quicksave, then reload the save once it’s detected. They claim that shielding alone has a certain success rate, but based on my experience, the odds are leaning toward your side—most of the times I had to reload a save twice during a single smuggling attempt. Usually, it’s just once if at all. I haven’t purchased any skills that aid in smuggling, whether Deception or technical ones.
I see two main approaches to playing the game. One is to complete every requirement meticulously, investing time in building skills, researching, modding, upgrading, and crafting—while the other is to simply tackle quests, scavenge along the way, and play on Normal or Hard difficulty, occasionally saving a quicksave. I enjoy the game, but I won’t waste every waking moment on it.
Of course, some might say jumping between systems for repairs during battles takes more time than building up your ship. But I’ve only done that once, and it was when I lacked any ship parts to fix. It also requires time to gather funds and use the ship builder, so I see these choices as more about personal preference than the best or worst options.
For deep RPGs or tiered loot games, I usually opt to sell older gear, weapons, or vehicles once better ones are acquired. These games often simplify skill-building, upgrades, and modding to keep things manageable. For those seeking deeper immersion, these details can feel unnecessary. To me, it can be more tedious, as I often just switch to better items, sometimes even on the hardest difficulty. Some skills are useful or essential for certain missions, but I successfully completed the entire Ryujin Industries questline without stealth abilities and still finished the Sabotage mission undetected.
In summary, when it comes to choices, I tend to wait until I accumulate enough skill points before deciding what’s worth investing in. Often I pause, try a few skills, and only then decide if they’re worth the effort. If most of them made a clear impact, I wouldn’t be accumulating points just to keep them.
A useful feature that would help many players would be a Ship Building skill that simplifies ship construction—perhaps with an exploded view of all parts, allowing you to select and install upgrades automatically. Alternatively, improving keyboard and mouse functionality alongside the ship builder could make the process much smoother.
you can transport it discreetly even without shielded cargo
move to any planet—like using Jemison as an example
immediately after jumping before scanning begins, press M and choose a landing spot anywhere on the planet (you can't be in town)
retrieve your contraband from the cargo and exit the ship
dispose of the contraband on the exterior floor of the vessel
return to the ship and press the spacebar to enter orbit
they will scan you, but it will clear because no contraband is aboard
once you land back at the same spot where you dropped your item, collect it and then use fast travel to town
be cautious during fast travel through the spaceport—scanners are active, so keep the contraband off the ship cargo unless you want to be detected
LOL, suggesting a Scan Jammer followed by a long explanation?
Really, why bother with all this effort when a quicksave would save time and effort, especially if it’s just needed a couple of times?
The more I hear about these games, the more I see people wasting hours just experimenting without purpose. One person even built a ship that looked like a diesel truck—though in reality, it wouldn’t work at all. That’s why some call it GTA in space! 😊
-----VERY SLIGHT SPOILER HERE-----
OK, one last video from this playthrough on Normal mode. I got tired of waiting for Vlad to say he had more temple locations to explore, so I decided to do the Revelation quest.
-----MAJOR SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT!!!-----
Spoiler
There are several things I realized in doing this quest that are a huge let down for me, but that is because I caught a glimpse of the One Giant Leap quest that follows it. I did this partly to decide whether to include a One Giant Leap video here as well, but also to confirm whether my assumptions about what happens in it are correct. I was correct in that it is merely a fairly short conversation/decision based quest where you travel to Unity, the center of the universe, and decide whether to enter it and continue via New Game +, or backtrack toward empty space and resume your current playthrough. For me, there's some big positives, but also big negatives in how New Game + works. What I like is you become a Starborn, and are given a pretty decent space suit and ship. You also keep your player level and ALL your skills and powers. However you lose any ships, outposts, weapons, ammo, and gear you had.
This means all the time you spent scavenging, trading up, and modding weapons, along with all the gear and ammo you collected and stored, suddenly vanishes. All the time you spent mining resources manually, or via elaborate automated mining outposts, along with any ships you painstakingly built, are now just gone. This begs the question why anyone would want to put too much time into mining resources, researching, modding of weapons, or building outposts and ships. It seems to me, if you are looking for max replay value, you instead breeze through the main questlines, focus mainly on artifact collecting, go to Unity as soon as you can, then repeat that process until you get the final level of Starborn armor and ship, which is the 10th New Game +. THEN you go through the Unity portal, make the choice at the lodge to reset all quests (which is merely telling them you're Starborn now), and then and only then, do a playthrough in earnest, playing all the quests, and building and modding to your heart's content.
Anything other than waiting for the final Starborn armor/ship you're looking to achieve to play a fully fleshed out campaign is just going to feel like more very repetitively wasted time. It also makes players like me, whom opt to just sell lower stat weapons as they go, collect vs build/mod ships, and forego outpost building, made the right decision to avoid all that, at least in the first playthrough anyway. In fact, as I implied above, if you're looking for a fleshed out campaign experience on the hardest difficulty with the best gear you can get, it seems better to skip those options for at least NINE playthroughs! Otherwise, one could easily start feeling like a grind masochist.
Revelation
Spoiler
There are some key things about this quest that were strange to me. The first is this location is marked on the star map as level 75. Thus I assumed I would have to be somewhere close to that in player level, otherwise I feared it would be too hard, especially any dog fighting that might occur. After all, I was only at player level 43 when starting it. You also can't leap frog from system to system to get to it like you can pretty much any other place you don't have a far enough reaching grav drive to get to in one jump. You can get to a system very close to it, but when you try to make the final short jump to it, you'll get an error onscreen saying you need a bigger grav drive.
So the game is literally forcing you to either use it's finicky as hell with KB/M ship builder to seriously upgrade your grav drive, or take a prebuilt ship that may not be as capable in battle. This caused me to take the ship I was rewarded in a questline I did for Constellation working as a consultant for Stroud-Ecklund, a starship manufacturer. I was trying my best to steer that quest in a way that my consultation lead them to a battle capable ship, but it started looking like compromises had to be made, as each person on the design team had very contrasting ideas. This lead to a ship that could supposedly handle any situation. In fact, I now realize had I insisted on the bounty hunter type ship the team leader was suggesting, it might not have had a sufficient grav drive. The result was a HUMONGOUS 30 light year grav drive, on a ship that was overly large, hard to get through due to multiple ladders and stacked cargo bays, and horrible maneuverability. It also had only two slow firing weapons, with no missile launcher.
Naturally I thought this ship would be no match for a dog fight against starborn, especially if they were level 75! As it turned out, there were only 3 starborn ships, and only one had to be destroyed. In fact it seemed like the two main starborn characters you are said to be fighting fled to the planet after doing a certain amount of damage to their ships. They were also nowhere NEAR level 75. All the starborn I fought in air and on ground were no more than my player level, in fact most were only level 30. This kind of took the mystique out of this quest for me. I can only hope it gives me more challenge as I play on harder modes, but to do that, I'll have to hope to acquire a more battle capable long travel ship, or deal with the ship builder, all because the travel restrictions to this ONE place make no sense whatsoever.
There's also something about this quest that makes it feel strange, as if it wasn't well thought out, or it was rushed due to a possible bug with Vlad not offering more temple locations to search for artifacts. It's description says you are to collect the FINAL artifact, yet it actually gives you SEVERAL artifacts. This combined with some chat I've read about some people getting more temple locations from Vlad, and some not, makes me think they rushed development of this KEY part of the game. I feel like it's either a bug, or they came up with a change of plan mid development deciding to make more temple locations available with each New Game +. That would've been fine had they also reworded the Revelation quest description to say you are collecting the final artifact
S
plural, not just artifact!
If you read the spoilers, you probably guessed that I won't be posting the final quest One Giant Leap. However I will likely come back and post some more as I progress through New Game +.
I'm currently at player level 49, having collected all the artifacts and temples Vlad has instructed me to find. The quests for One Small Step and Powers From Beyond now appear as finished tasks. In NG+, the One Small Step has replaced the Among The Stars mission in the main game, so Vlad provides you with every artifact location without requiring further reports. On the other hand, the Powers quest hasn't been handled the same way—though I possess all the required powers, at least half of them are now at level 2.
My current situation involves around 300,000 credits. I’m torn between completing Revelation to obtain the remaining artifacts using my new Starborn vessel or revisiting the Razorleaf ship from the Secret Outpost quest. The issue is that I’ve been playing in Hard mode since beginning NG+, which has made space combat challenging. In particular, I've struggled to destroy just one of the three Starborn ships needed for a cutscene to allow me to land on the planet. Once, I managed a cutscene where I was locked onto one ship, but the other two destroyed me every time. The Starborn ship has solid protection, moves quickly, and cloaks well when boosting, yet it only has two weapons; the fast-firing one inflicts minimal damage against it, and the other has an extremely slow rate of fire. Additionally, it cannot be upgraded at all.
I need roughly 65,000 more credits to purchase a Narwhal, which is a solid Taiyo Astroneering ship. I’m considering revisiting the Crimson Fleet questline to earn the 250,000 credit reward and acquire the best available vessel. At the same time, I plan to install 30 additional unique modules in the shipbuilder to unlock Starship Design level 4, hoping a custom-built ship will suffice once I reach NG+ 10 on Very Hard mode. In the meantime, I’m working through installing 30 more unique modules to earn 65,000 credits while scavenging and selling along the way.
Currently, I’m engaged in the Freestar Rangers questline, trying to see if completing it and earning credits through scavenging can help me reach my goal. I’m contemplating a return to Normal difficulty, which might be necessary if I grow tired of the repetitive challenges—especially since even the terrestrial fights are now significantly tougher. This could be a viable option if I decide to slow down.
I’m uncertain whether this game accurately portrays the multiverse concept (though I haven’t personally believed in it). In NG+, it claims you enter a new universe version, but the only notable change is that none of the characters remember your identity. Apart from that, everything remains almost identical. From what I’ve observed in some NG+ review videos, occasionally when you return to the lodge, a hostile version of Sarah or Andreja might appear with a weapon, accompanied by others, intending to harm you if you don’t comply with their demands. This seems more like an unusual occurrence than a completely different universe.
I'm now at player level 50, with around 378,000 credits. I attempted the Revelation mission using both the Shieldbreaker and Narwhal ships, but neither managed to overcome the challenging dog fight against the Hunter, Emissary, and their Guardian in Hard mode. I also lacked any Ship Parts for hull repairs, and I was using rear view instead of cockpit view, which felt less responsive, particularly on larger vessels.
After a long and frustrating session late at night that stretched into 4 AM, I finally grasped the ship builder mechanics to the extent of upgrading the shield and weapons on the Razorleaf. This is the bounty hunter ship you can obtain relatively early in the game, making this approach quite cost-effective—around 120,000 to 130,000 credits. This is significantly cheaper than the 201,000 to 365,000 credits needed for the Shieldbreaker or Narwhal ships, especially when the Commerce skill is maximized.
However, I also had to upgrade the grav drive and Helium 3 capacity just to reach the location of the Starborn during that final battle. This meant upgrading the reactor as well, since those components demanded more power. The only drawback of using the Razorleaf in tough fights is its smaller size and shorter length, which made fitting the Class C shield difficult.
Despite these improvements, the upgraded Razorleaf was much more capable. I managed to acquire 4 Ship Parts while jumping through the battle, and used the more responsive cockpit view this time. Still, I had to lower the difficulty back to Normal for the dog fight. A benefit of being a smaller ship is that it's easier to reach a Mobility stat of 100 and a Speed stat of 150—both solid numbers.
However, I did raise the difficulty back up to Hard when I arrived on the planet, and even chose the attack option at the temple, opting for a harder ending instead of negotiating peacefully.
The decision to attack led to a much more intense and prolonged battle than expected, causing significant ammo consumption and even a crash at one point. I managed to capture most of the enemy, but some parts were missing by the end. I might need to side with the Hunter or Emissary next NG+ to balance the odds.