Starfield illness
Navigating the Settled Systems can really stress your immune system, putting you at risk of catching a Starfield illness or disease.
Going to a hazardous environment without the proper equipment makes you vulnerable to a Starfield illness. These illnesses will need to be treated with medicine items, or by seeing a doctor, or you’ll be traveling the Settled Systems with a cough and a debuff.
If you’re looking to reduce the number of diseases you find in Starfield, make sure to grab the best armor and clothing pieces.
What is a Starfield illness?
An illness or disease is essentially a debuff applied to your character. You can become ill by visiting hazardous environments and planets without the proper protection. There is also a good chance that a number of Starfield creatures are able to infect you with a number of diseases if they attack you – a mechanic we have seen in previous Bethesda titles.
Once you become ill, you will see the name of the illness on the watchface of your compass in the bottom-left corner, as you can see above.
List of known Starfield illnesses
At present, we only know the names of a handful of illnesses. Once we know what debuff they provide, we will update them.
- Cough
- Soreness
As we learn of more Starfield diseases, we will be back to update this guide.
Preventing Starfield illness
If you want to reduce your chances of getting sick, you’ll want to pay careful attention to your armor’s stats, and the planets you’re visiting. Each planet has a temperature stat, and each temperature will require a different approach. For example, visiting a frozen ice ball in your beach suit is a guaranteed way of catching a cough.
Different pieces of armor confer protections against four major environmental hazards:
- Thermal
- Airborne
- Corrosive
- Radiation
It’s possible that radiation will work the same way in Starfield as it has in the Fallout series by reducing your maximum health the longer you stay in it. However, this has not been confirmed.
Removing Starfield illness
Ordinarily, you will want to see a doctor or use a healing item to remove the debuff, but it is possible to recover naturally from an illness. The Decontamination skill confers a boost to your natural immune system, conferring larger bonuses as you rank up the skill.
