Ready to conquer the vast universe of Starfield? Mastering the right skills early on can transform your journey from a struggle into a seamless adventure. Whether you’re piloting your first starship or gearing up for intense combat, unlocking essential skills like Ballistics, Boost Pack Training, and Piloting will give you the edge you need to thrive in this sprawling sci-fi RPG. Dive into our guide to discover the best skills to prioritize first on PC and Xbox, ensuring your path through the stars is as smooth and powerful as possible.
You’ll start Starfield with three predetermined skills, based on the background you choose, but the game features more than 80 skills across five trees (Physical, Social, Combat, Science, and Tech). Each skill can further be upgraded through four ranks, with each rank increasing its potency. Whether you’re unlocking a new skill or upgrading an existing one costs one skill point. Skill trees is divided into four tiers, but you need to put a certain number of points in the tree to unlock skills beyond the base tier.
In other words, you’ll want to allocate your skill points carefully. What follows is our recommendation for the best skills you should get first in Starfield – all of which are at the base tier, so you can unlock them from the get-go.
Best skills to get first in Starfield
When starting out in Starfield, prioritizing certain skills can greatly enhance your early gameplay experience. Essential skills to get first include Ballistics, which boosts the effectiveness of most early weapons like pistols and rifles, and Rifle Certification to specialize in ballistic weapons. Piloting is crucial for better ship handling and access to superior ships, while Medicine helps with healing efficiency and medpack economy. Boost Pack Training is also highly recommended early on, as it enables the use of jetpacks for easier traversal and combat mobility. Security is valuable for accessing more loot and building outposts stealthily. Focusing on these skills will prepare you for the increasing challenges of both ground and space combat, ensuring a smoother and more versatile playthrough.
When you start Starfield, you shouldn’t worry about allocating set number of points into a certain skill tree to reach the higher tiers of that skill tree. You’ll earn enough XP and skill points – particularly in the earlier levels – that you can determine a long-term strategy soon enough. But at first, you should focus on the skills that’ll make your life easier in the short term:
- Boost Pack Training (Tech)
- Medicine (Science)
- Persuasion (Social)
- Security (Tech)
- Weight-Lifting (Physical)
- Scavenging (Social)
- Fitness (Physical)
- Ballistics (Combat)
Depending on the background you choose, you might start the game with some of these skills already unlocked. Industrialist comes with Persuasion and Security, while Soldier has Fitness, Ballistics, and Boost Pack Training. Our list of the best backgrounds highlights which skills come with which backgrounds.
Boost Pack Training (Tech)
You can’t use a boost pack – that’s Starfield-speak for “jetpack” – without acquiring the Boost Pack Training skill. At first, it’s little more than a glorified double-jump, but if you’re on a boring old 1g planet, and you time it right before hitting the ground after a long fall, you’ll offset fall damage. Further investments in the skill turn your boostpack into, well, not quite a full-on jetpack, but at least something closer to what we were promised.
Medicine (Science)
It’s a hostile universe out there full of pirates and Spacers and automated security turrets and hungry alien monsters (not to mention the hazards of high gravity). You’re going to take damage. Eating something will get you a few point of health here and there, but real healing comes from med packs, trauma packs, and emergency kits.
These heal you for a percentage of your health across a period of time – like 8% health per second for four seconds. The Medicine skill makes these healing items 10% more effective and take 10% less time – meaning you get healed even faster.
Persuasion (Social)
You don’t need any skills to attempt to persuade people, but you’ll find it a lot easier with the Persuasion skill. Every rank increases your chance of success by 10%, allowing you to smooth-talk your way through (or out of) encounters before they turn violent.
Security (Tech)
As you’d expect from Fallouter Space, Starfield is full of locks – locked doors, locked crates, locked computers, locked safes. Nine times out of ten, these locks gate helpful items or important info. Anyone can hack into Novice-level locks. But if you put skill points into Security, you can attempt Advanced locks, and also make the accompanying minigame way easier. (Higher levels allow you to attempt Expert and the elusive Master locks.)
Weight-Lifting (Physical)
You begin Starfield able to lug around 135kg of loot. Between the weapons, spacesuits, resources, sandwiches, healing items, and other junk you pick up, your inventory fills up fast. Getting Weight-Lifting increases your carrying capacity by 10kg, with subsequent levels beefing that up to 25kg, 50kg, and 100kg
Scavenging (Social)
The Scavenging skill in Starfield is a Novice Social skill that significantly enhances your ability to find extra valuable items when looting containers. As you rank up Scavenging by looting more containers, you increase your chances of finding additional credits, ammo, and aid items like Med Packs or chems. At the highest rank, it even highlights tracked resources when using the hand scanner, making resource gathering more efficient. This skill is especially useful early on and complements other Social skills by boosting your overall loot and resource acquisition, which is crucial for survival and progression in the game.
Starfield, like the rest of Bethesda’s oeuvre, compels you to open literally every container in every corner of every room. The Scavenging skill increases your likelihood of finding credits in those containers – helpful early on, since you’ll want as much money as you can get. Later skills make it more likely that you’ll find ammo or med packs. And the challenges to reach those higher ranks comes second-nature: You simply have to. open a bunch of containers.-
Fitness (Physical)
In a game that’s about space exploration, you sure do spend a lot of time just hoofing it between waypoints on a planet’s surface. And when you add in the fast travel mechanic’s quirks, having the ability to sprint for extended periods of time will save you a lot of headache. The Fitness skill increases the amount of oxygen you have available – basically, it increases your stamina.
Ballistics (Combat)
You could nab Pistol Certification or Shotgun Certification, which increase your damage output for pistols and shotguns by 10% respectively. Or you could simply unlock Ballistics, which increases your damage for all ballistic weapons (y’know, like pistols and shotguns, and also rifles) by 10%.
Which skills will give me the biggest edge early in Starfield
The biggest early edge in Starfield comes from focusing on a few key skills that enhance combat, survival, and exploration efficiency. Prioritize:
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Ballistics (3 ranks): Boosts damage and effectiveness of most ballistic weapons, covering a wide range of firearms you’ll use early on.
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Rifle Certification (3 ranks): Complements Ballistics by enhancing rifle use, a common weapon type.
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Piloting (max): Enables access to better ships and parts, crucial for overcoming space combat challenges.
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Medicine (max): Improves healing efficiency with medpacks, essential for tougher fights and higher difficulties.
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Boost Pack Training: Enhances mobility by improving your jetpack, making exploration and combat more fluid.
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Commerce: Helps with better buying and selling prices, easing resource management early in the game.
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Persuasion: Useful for avoiding combat and unlocking dialogue options, saving resources and opening alternative quest paths.
These skills collectively improve your firepower, survivability, mobility, and resource economy, giving you a strong foundation for the challenges ahead in Starfield.
Which early skills will help me dominate space combat in Starfield
To dominate space combat early in Starfield, invest primarily in the Piloting skill, as rank 1 unlocks the crucial ability to use thrusters, allowing you to maneuver quickly, strafe, and maintain speed and direction during fights-giving you a significant tactical advantage. Complement this with Engine Systems skill to boost your ship’s speed and extend boost duration, enabling better positioning and escape options in combat. Additionally, the Targeting Control System skill is vital for slowing down space combat and targeting specific enemy ship subsystems, such as engines, which can disable opponents and open opportunities for boarding or escape.
Upgrading your ship’s reactor and shields early on is also essential since shields absorb damage first and a stronger reactor supports more power-intensive systems like shields and weapons. Using your boosters strategically to evade enemy missiles and employing a balanced power allocation-prioritizing shields when outnumbered and maintaining medium speed for maneuverability-further enhances your survivability and combat effectiveness.
In summary, focus on Piloting (for thrusters), Engine Systems (for speed and boost), Targeting Control System (for subsystem targeting), and ship upgrades like reactors and shields to gain the biggest edge in early Starfield space combat.
