During your Starfield playthrough, you’ll find many opportunities to find ships to call your own. Interestingly, you will see just as many chances to steal other ships. Why would you ever steal a spaceship, you may ask? Well, because it’s fun to let out your wild side sometimes.
Picking and building the right ship for bounty hunting takes a bit of in-game knowledge. Luckily, we’ve put together some information further into the article that’ll tell you how to build the perfect bounty hunting ship, as well as what the best ship for bounty hunting is. To learn more, continue reading to discover how to get authorized to steal and pilot ships in Starfield, as well as how to get better at bounty hunting.
Starfield: How to Get Authorized to Pilot Class C and B Ships
After boarding a ship, eliminating any enemies still aboard, and sitting in the pilot’s seat, you may encounter a message telling you you’re not authorized to pilot the ship. There are a few reasons why this may happen:
- Your Piloting skill is too low.
- You need to register the ship.
- It’s a bounty hunter ship (Wanted trait).
There are many other ships, such as pirate ships, that you can board and pilot. Some ships are high-class, so you’ll have to rank up your Piloting skill. Upgrading Piloting to rank three allows you to take over Class B ships, while rank four lets you pilot Class C ships.
Alternatively, you can hire a crew member or companion who has high piloting skills to do everything for you. While this is expensive and time-consuming, it saves you the hassle of getting the rank-ups yourself.
However, if you have the Wanted trait and are attacked by bounty hunters, you can eliminate the enemies but can’t become authorized even if you have maxed out piloting skills.
Once you increase your piloting skills and steal a ship successfully, you must register it by visiting a Ship Services Technician and paying a hefty fee. While it may not feel worth the effort initially, you can sell the ship to break even or use it to fly around space to your heart’s content. In other words, without registering it, the game considers your actions as you commandeering a stolen ship, preventing you from flipping it to make money.
How to Build a Starfield Bounty Hunter Ship
If you’re like us, you love bounty hunting. In fact, we love bounty hunting in Starfield so much, that we’re going to teach you how to optimize your ship to be even better at it. The best way to do this is to upgrade your ship’s systems.
Let’s start with lasers. This is arguably going to be your most important upgrade in terms of bounty hunting, as lasers shut down shields and engines, allowing you to board a ship. You’ll want to use a delicate balance of lasers and electromagnetic weaponry. Use the laser to shred through shields, then EM weapons to disable the ship. Look for weapons with the Electromagnetic Damage stat. This allows you to disable ships without damaging them.
You can also use ballistics on the enemy engine after your lasers have taken the shields out. Remember, you’ll need to first have the Targeting Control Systems skill unlocked. After that, simply take the shields down, then destroy the engines to be able to board a ship.
How to Loot a Ship You Destroyed By Accident
It happens to us all. You got a little too excited and blew up the ship you were trying to pirate. Luckily, there’s an easy way to loot ships that have blown up. Keep in mind that the loot will be less, and you won’t be able to commandeer a ship this way. Look for the chest icon that will appear on the wreckage itself. Then you’ll want to get close to it and hit the “E” key for PC and “A” button for Xbox to loot it. “A” button for Xbox to loot it.
The Best Starfield Bounty Hunter Ship You Can Get
In our opinion, the single best bounty hunter ship in Starfield is the Star Eagle. It boasts many incredible features, like a large cargo capacity, ridiculously powerful weapons, strong shields, and great stats, which we have listed below:
- Fuel: 140.
- Hull: 948.
- Shields: 760.
- Grav Drive: 16 LY.
- Cargo: 2500.
- Crew: 5.
This ship is also Class A, meaning you can fly it even with low piloting skills. To acquire this ship, you’ll need to complete the entirety of the Freestar Collective quest line. To start this quest line, go to Akila City, start the quest Job Gone Wrong in Galbank, then after completing that, go to the Rock (Akila City) and talk to the Rangers to get started on the first quest.
Starfield is available on PC and Xbox Series X|S. To learn more, check out how to get the Lodge Basement spacesuit in Starfield, or click the game tag below to explore our growing article collection.
