Starfield builds

Looking for the best Starfield builds? Skills, powers, modifications, and more all make the delicate art of choosing a Starfield loadout a struggle. In fact, you might not even think about a specific build at all until you’re too far into the game to go back to the beginning. With a forgiving skill tree and plenty of ways to tweak your equipment, however, getting back on track isn’t too difficult.

If you’re coming into this straight from the character creation screen, you’ll want to comb through our various databases before reading ahead. The weapons database and skills database should be your first port of call, but the research projects database will pave the way for some of the more intricate parts of your Starfield build. Once your build is ready to go, familiarise yourself with the Settled Systems major hubs by using our Starfield maps, including interactive versions of the Neon map, New Atlantis Map, and Akila City Map.

Best Starfield builds

Right now, we’ve broken the best Starfield builds into three distinct category: Stealth, Melee, and Social. If you’ve played a Bethesda Softworks RPG before, you’ll likely already know what we’re talking about. They’re mainstays of the team’s fantasy worlds and can offer a bit of familiarity in an otherwise wholly new environment.

Here, we’ll brief you on the basic principles of each, helping solidify the pros and cons of a chosen path in your mind. With that, you’ll be in a better position to choose which road to take for your character. Once you’ve made your decision, click your desired one to see a detailed breakdown of the best Starfield backgrounds, traits, skills, weapons, armor, and anything and everything else that makes said build tick.

Best Starfield stealth builds

• Heavy damage
• Unique opportunities
• Requires patience

Kicking off on the tips of our toes, the best Starfield stealth builds revolve around sneaking. The clue is in the name. Though you’re welcome to trot around friendly towns and outposts with a smile on your face, your real goal is to slide through the shadows, picking locks, stealing items, and assassinating foes before they have a chance to react.

With a stealth build, you’ll be spending most of your time walking slowly around vast landscapes. It’s not a path for the inpatient. As time goes on, however, you’ll learn skills that allow you to even sprint and pounce like a lion, doing what you do best at speed. Whether you make your make with silenced weapons and range or up close, shank foes with swift blades, or avoid conflict altogether is up to you.

Best Starfield speech and social builds

• Commerce-focused
• Reading-heavy
• Entirely unique
• Little combat

If you’re looking to live your life on the right side of the law, the best Starfield speech and social builds might be more up your alley. Rather than sneak around the shadows for nefarious means, you’ll use your wit and charm to dissuade others from doing bad deeds — though you’ll also have the ability to talk your way out of a precarious situation of your own making.

Though there’s little gunplay involved in a speech and social build, you’ll still get your kicks from a wholly unique experience. The locals have a lot to say, and either by bartering with them or convincing them to join you on your grand crusade, you’ll gain access to unique storylines, special treasures, secret access to otherwise unknown places, and make a pretty penny while you’re at it.

Best Starfield melee builds

• Fast and visceral
• Unforgiving
• Easy to spec

Like the idea of bringing your bare fists to a gunfight? Through carefully chosen traits, powers, and perks, you’ll strike a delicate balance between brains and brawn with our best Starfield melee builds, giving you the means to close the gap between you and the heavily armed guards you’re likely to find throughout the cosmos.

If you’re able to act fast and read the room, you’ll have no trouble throwing down while staring down the barrels of a dozen guns. Weapons like knives, axes, and swords work just as well, but they’re not wholly essential, either. Trust in your guns. Your biceps, that is. You’ll come out on top, and you won’t have to worry about running out of ammo.

For some more essential reading, learn about the Starfield factions like the Freestar Collective, Enlightened, and Sanctum Universum. With the right traits, you’ll be able to dive deep into their organizations, finding all manner of unique loot and locations. And if you’re focused on the main story, learning more about Constellationwill help your mysterious adventure make a little more sense.

Alternate Starfield loadouts

If you’re looking for a more informal Starfield build that you can make your own, we’ve also put together some fun Starfield builds that can get you started, like our Starfield samurai build.

A few fun Starfield builds:

Cyber Runner Assassin

If hiding in the shadows and leaping out at your enemies is your thing, consider taking the Cyber Runner background. It confers the following rank 1 skills:

• Stealth – being harder to detect is crucial to getting critical strikes.
• Security – hacking advanced locks early gets you better access to weapons and loot.
• Theft – pickpocketing your enemies of all their ammo neutralizes the risk of a prolonged firefight if someone spots you and you don’t want to fight back.

This will get you through locked doors early on, and provide you with bonuses while pickpocketing. Speaking of which, be sure to allocate skills into the Dueling skill for increased melee damage, or the Ballistics skill if you’re planning on using a silenced weapon.

As for weapons, you can’t go wrong with the trusty Combat Knife, but you may want to consider keeping an Urban Eagle, preferably silenced, in reserve for when you’re outnumbered.

Psycho Firefighter

This is a build designed to get up close and personal in a very loud way. First you’ll want to take the Chef background to get your hands on the Dueling skill early. It also confers:

• Gastronomy – more health from food items is always welcome.
• Scavenging – because you’ll need as many resources as possible to upgrade. your armor, and buy healing items.

You may also want to invest heavily in the Physical skill tree so you can get the Neurostrikes skill, turning even your fists into deadly weapons.

Speaking of weapons, you’ll of course want the Rescue Axe. It’s thematic.

And to round it off, pack as much Aurora as you can handle. We don’t know the effects of this particular Starfield drug just yet, but nothing screams psycho firefighter than all the drugs on Neon coursing through your axe-addled brain.

Freestar Ranger

Fancy picking off your enemies in a one to one duel? The Homesteader background will probably have you covered. We don’t yet know what skills are available with this background, but we predict it will have Outpost and Wild West-themed bonuses to help you settle down on Akila, the home of the Freestar Collective.

Next, invest skill points in the Marksmanship and Ballistics skill trees to increase your ranged damage. Take the Freestar Collective Settler trait, which will give you more positive relations with the Freestar Collective faction early so you can get the best weapons and armor for your cowboy build. It might put you at odds with the United Colonies, but true rangers don’t care about that. They only care about justice, and showdowns.

As for equipment, we feel that someone will create a Starfield mod of the NCR Ranger armor, which is just a classic armor set perfect for this build.