Holy Grail of Starfield Ship Building

Your ship’s stats are wrong. The Starfield ship builder UI is broken. This is a tool that not only fixes it, but shows you the best ship parts for any character, at any skill level. It not only shows correct ship weapon damage, but calculates DPS considering power allocation, skill bonus, crew bonus, and even magazine perks. Not relying on the game’s UI, but data mined from the creation kit corroborated with in-game tests.

Admittedly, much of this appears to already be known by the Starfield Community Patch, though I did not confirm whether all of it is or not. Further, I readily admit I’m not a data engineer, and some of my findings may be incomplete or inaccurate, or my version of the game bugged beyond repair. I did attempt to corroborate my findings with actual, in-game tests, along with the findings of others in the community, though the latter was more difficult to confirm.

At a minimum, I do believe the base statistics, including the impact of power allocation, can be relied upon. This tool can, and should, be considered a collaboration, as it pulls from work done by many others in this community, and has a separate citations tab that lists them. The factors used in this workbook are approximate, such as the factor to determine when maximum Mobility has been exceeded, but they can still be reasonably reliable in evaluating ship parts.

Finally, this is not meant to be a complete ship builder tool. Rather, to quickly identify the best ship parts available for your character, at your level, as well as to satisfy those of us that like to dive deep into the numbers. Please kindly comment on any edits/corrections as you find them.

Thank you for a fun, engaging, community.

Link to Starfield Ship Builder Tool - YOU WILL NEED TO MAKE YOUR OWN COPY IN ORDER TO EDIT:

[TayschrennSedai]

Can we just take a moment to also admire how he transitions from the workbench to the spreadsheet and the whiteboard to scrawling his explanation?! Top notch, my dude.

[pdexBigTeacher]

Bethesda needs to just hire you to make this game better. Thank you!

[jamesbooth]

Old retired guy here.
If I were still in the real game, I would recruit you to analyze my businesses and build useful analytical tools.
I really enjoyed the quality of this worksheet, and I understand the level of focused submersion required to build the tool.
The linkage into the star map was a great 'flex'.👍🤣

[cassieudy]

Amazing work. I can't imagine how much time you spent on this. Insane!

I've been doing my own non-scientific, non-methodical weapon testing, and things "felt" so wrong across all my different builds, that I started completely ignoring listed stats. I would instead look at a weapon's required level and total cost as an indicator for potential efficacy. It was an attempt to try and interpret the developer's intended role for a particular weapon at a particular level. "Is this meant to be an end-game part?" or "Why is this seemingly crappy part so expensive?"

Now, this method has not actually been that useful for finding "better" parts. A full set of particle beams--any of them--is still hilariously OP, clearing all content on max difficulty with ease. But what I DID learn is that the other weapon types are a lot more FUN to use.

For example: on paper, a laser turret with inferior damage and 1000 range would never be equipped over a particle turret. But in practice, the range limitation on that laser turret fundamentally alters how you engage the enemy. It turns your ship into a hit-and-run close combat attacker. The pulse laser turret isn't constantly trying to empty its magazine, like a particle turret with infinite range would, and thus actually has time to reload before you boost back in and find your next firing solution. We have just unlocked an entirely new style of gameplay by using bad parts.

Anyway, I am rambling, but really I just want to encourage people to try alternate weapon types. I love Starfield's ship builder, but I was getting pretty bored of ship combat... until I stopped putting particle cannons on everything. The true end-game is making the coolest possible roleplay ship, right down to it's combat load-out. This tool is going to be a massive help for exploring that. WOW!

[ghostpasha]

You have the best Starfield gameplay channel, hands-down. Keep up the great work, my man. Spread the gospel of the White Dwarf 3015!.

[stevekuhns]

DOOOOD! All I can say is THANK YOU! This tool is amazing. Thank you so much for all your work and the work of others that ended up contributing to this. I am really learning to love shipbuilding as a result of your videos. I am currently running several of your builds and I love that this allows me to look at all aspects when shipbuilding!!!

[cerebralhawks]

This is awesome, for those trying to build ships from scratch. I got no mind and less patience for how all these parts actually fit together. What I can do is follow a guide for a ship that someone else says is the best ship, once I have the money to actually build it.

What would be cool, and I'm not sure if it's possible, would be some kind of automated guide, where a person could input their level, skills, check whether they did the Stroud-Eklund/Slayton mission, etc., and could follow a guide on how to build a ship, and others could upload said guides. I mean watching a guy on YouTube talk about it and all their color commentary is fine, but a chart might be better.

[obiwankenny]

You are doing the Great Serpent's work with this.

[redbacc]

I was having a really crappy day, and then I opened YouTube and saw this video.

You sir are doing the (star) Lord’s work.

[shanehall]

Wow much data to decipher. This is incredible…

[Arch_Twisted]

Ship Technician, if you see this, here's some info that might help.

I'm not sure how or where you could include it, but there is some good info to be known about the He3 Tanks with their fuel-to-mass ratio (F:M), and the landing gears with their landing thrust-to-mass ratio (LT:M). Cargo also has important things to note as well, and there is another aspect to Shields that may need to be considered.

For example, the Ulysses M10 He3 tank provides 50 Fuel for 12 Mass, for a F:M of 4.2. The Ballistic Solutions 500T provides 210 Fuel for 29 Mass, for a F:M of 7.2. Four M10s would weigh 48 Mass and only grant 200 Fuel, and a 500T would take up 1/4 the space of those four, provide 10 more Fuel, and weigh about 34% less. I've figured that the He3 tanks worth using in most cases are the 500T, 900T, M50, H30, H40 and Titan 550. the tanks that are basically redundant are the 100G to 400G, M10 to M40, and the H10 and H20 in most cases as other tanks just provide better Fuel to Mass and fit in the same spaces. The tanks I left unnamed are wild-cards.

As for landing gear, the Hope 55 is the best for it's Landing Thrust to Mass ratio of 1.3. However considering it's dimensions, it's likely most people won't be able to incorporate it into a build in a pleasing way. So the next best options are the NG-20, Accu-Lander 11 and the Pinpoint 3G (all variants of all three) the NG-20 providing the best LT:M for it's 1x1 size, and the Accu-Lander providing a good LT:M while also having a variant with many snap-points. The Pinpoint 3G is ascetically pleasing (in my opinion) and has a variation with a decorative pseudo-engine effect. But for most builds, the NG-20 is going to provide the best performance for a Lander.

Also Cargo. The Capacity to Mass ratio (C:M) isn't really all that notable, they're pretty even when you compare Standard Cargo to Standard Cargo (Average C:M of 4.73), and Shielded to other Shielded(Average C:M of 3.33, Average 1.40 C:M less than Standard). The only outlier is the Shielded 10ST Hauler, which has about 0.70 worse C:M than the other Shielded modules. So, for the most part, the best practice is simply to decide how much Cargo Capacity you want and how much mass you're willing to take on. Then find the single closest module to that and put it (or them) on your build. 1 module that carries 1500 takes up less build-space than 3 that grant 500, and they'll likely have close to the same Mass and C:M Ratio.

Finally shields. I seen the Health to Power ratio (H:P) but it might be good to make a choice based on Health to Mass ratio (H:M) for people prioritizing Speed and Mobility. The Assurance SG-1800 has a great H:P of 133.3, but the H:M is 10. Meanwhile, the Vanguard Bulwark has a H:P of 120.8 (the 4th best) and a H:M of 20.7 (the Best) making every point of Shield Health being worth over double it's savings in Mass. Another popular choice is the 28T Defender at 125.0 H:P (2nd best) and 16.7 H:M (above average). So it's not as strong as the Assurance, but 67% more efficient in H:M loosing 100 Health.

Hopefully this helps someone, and if Ship Technician doesn't see it, anyone else can feel free to pass it on.

[vincentkeith]

Why do I think that stack of Terrabrew cups is only the tip of the iceberg? Well done!

[pdexBigTeacher]

So I fitted the 3320 Neutron Turrets onto @WizeOldWizard 's Basilisk II. I have NO points in Automated Weapons Systems; went out to Serpentis and absolutely kicked. ass. Again, THANK YOU!

[jaydentaayl]

No way now i can at the same time make accurate ship recreation and specilized ship with the best module using your tool thank you Ship technician your really part of the finest of ship builders 👌

[roboticghost]

This is absolutely amazing! Thanks dude! And here I was wondering what I was going to do this evening...

[Tobascodagama]

Incredible work, dude! Thanks for creating this and sharing it with the community.

[anthonyhenderson]

This is nothing short of outstanding! I can't wait to use this in-game. Amazing work ShipTechnician

[SceGno]

Mind=blown! I cannot understand most of this as it's completely over my head, but I can certainly appreciate an epic piece of work! Well done for this. And, just so you know, I use the Vanguard Autoprojector and Hellfire weapons since watching a previous video and nobody seems to be able to get close to my ships anymore. I once fought off three Starborn Guardian VI at once and hardly got scratched! :D

[falcorusticolus]

The "Osiris 2020-B Shield Generator" is a B-class shield, your shipbuilder has it incorrectly listed as A-class. This is the only problem I've found with the shipbuilder.

Thanks for all the hard work you put into making this. It has really helped me a lot! :)

[rbutga]

If I may say "Holy Sh1@"! Amazing job putting all of this together. Thanks! You have changed the way I approach ship building and I can't gush enough. You may not be a physicist or statistician but you are genius in my book. Strong work.