Video Game / Starfield

♪ And I think it's gonna be a long, long time, 'Til touchdown brings me 'round again to find, I'm not the man they think I am at home, Oh, no, no, no, I'm a Rocket Man... ♪

"The wonder is, not that the field of stars is so vast, but that man has measured it."

— Anatole France, 1894

Starfield is a "single-player epic" video game from Bethesda Game Studios, the studio's first new IP since The Elder Scrolls: Arena in 1994. First announced at E3 2018, the game was released on September 6, 2023 for PC and Xbox Series X|S.

Players take the role of a rookie space miner who has an encounter with a strange alien artifact that touches their mind. They become embroiled in a search for the secrets of this artifact, joining an eclectic group of space explorers known as "Constellation" to seek out answers and solve the mysteries of outer space. Along the way, there are multiple other factions to join (or destroy), most with their own expansive questlines in classic Bethesda fashion.

Like Bethesda's other flagship properties (The Elder Scrolls and Fallout), Starfield is a Wide-Open Sandbox Western RPG/Action RPG with First-Person Shooter & Immersive Sim elements as well as meticulous Worldbuilding. Starfield distinguishes itself with an outer-space science-fiction setting in a not-too-distant future of real life. Bethesda Executive Director Todd Howard referred to it as "Skyrim in space", and has also called it a "NASA-punk space RPG". With over 1,000 explorable planets and moons, Starfield is the largest Bethesda game by playable square mileage since Daggerfall and makes heavy use of Procedural Generation to fill out those worlds.

One DLC has been announced, Shattered Space, coming in 2024.

Previews: E3 2018 Teaser Trailer, E3 2021 Official Release Date Trailer, Official Gameplay Reveal, Gameplay Deep Dive.

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"Anything goes as long as you have the tropes."

Tropes #-E

• 20 Bear Asses: There are several sidequests that involve bringing a certain amount of organic resources (typically harvested from alien species) to the quest giver, such as Dr. Lara on the Clinic requesting five units of Sedative.
• Abandoned Laboratory:
  • Several are visited during the mainquest, often holding secret technology the Xenowarfare research center on Kreet that has been overrun by pirates, NASA launchpad on Earth, grav-drive research station on the Moon, etc.)
  • These appear as a randomly generated "Point of Interest" when landing on worlds. Some are long abandoned and are being picked through by Spacers/Zealots. Others are recently "abandoned", ie via Ecliptic or Pirates showing up to kill the scientists and loot.
• Abandoned Mine:
  • Several are visited during the mainquest and companinion questlines, such as during the mission where you first meet Andreja, who is searching such a mine for an Artifact and during Barrett's companion mission to clear his deceased husband's name.
  • These appear as a randomly generated "Point of Interest" when landing on worlds. Sometimes they're overrun by Spacers/Pirates/Zealots looting the place, but sometimes it's because they Dug Too Deep and broke into a nest of alien Big Creepy-Crawlies.
• Absurdly High Level Cap: So absurdly high that it doesn't exist. You can keep leveling up indefinitely, however, you'll have enough skill points max out all of your skills at level 328. With an even remotely efficient build, you'll be able to complete the (non-New Game Plus) main quest in the 30s, while the highest leveled systems in the game max out at 75 (and they can be completed at less than half of that with an optimized build).
• Absent Aliens: While there is plenty of native alien animal and plant life to be found, plus genetically-engineered horrors, in the Settled Systems, no sapient alien life is known. However, the artifacts and their temples had to be built by someone, and all signs point to their creators not being human.
• Absurdly Long Wait: Nobody is born a United Colonies citizen and citizenship must be earned via service in one of the governmental branches. It normally takes 10 years of service to become a full citizen, though the time can be reduced depending on the level of your contributions. If you join the Vanguard, pass your orientation with flying colors, and manage to complete Tier VI in the space combat simulation (explicitly stated to be an Unwinnable Training Simulation), you'll only have to wait three years. Depending on how you handle the Vanguard questline, the wait time can be bypassed altogether, you can become a "Class One" citizen with extra perks, with a free house to boot.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • All spacesuits, not just the military assault ones, keep their pressure even when being hit by the biggest alien claws or highest penetration weapons. And while enemy boost packs can be blown up with direct hits, the player doesn't have to deal with this.
  • Firearms don't overheat in hot environments or vacuum, including laser rifles and unmodified AK-47s. Stripped of air cooling, real life weapons would rapidly seize up and stop working. Similarly, ships also don't have to manage excessive heat in any way.
• Admiring the Abomination: "Admiration" might be too strong of word, but it's clear that the UC "Red Devils" Xenowarfare unit has a healthy respect for the creatures they've worked with. Even Kaiser, the group's souped-up Robot Buddy, is found hunting down the remnants of these creatures and sounds almost pensive about it.
• Agri World: Several planets/moons are dedicated primarily to agricultural interests, like Montara Luna in the Cheyenne system where some farms have passed through generations of the same families. You may still find the odd Procedurally Generated "Point of Interest" like a Science Lab or Mining Operation, but they are still mostly farm worlds.
• All Planets Are Earthlike: Averted. Only about 10% of the planets in the game are Earth-like inasmuch as that they support complex biological lifeforms, but even they often differ greatly from Earth by having weaker or stronger gravity, different atmospheric composition, toxic oceans, extremely long/short days, or exotic weather patterns, not to mention weird and oftentimes hostile alien species. Jemison, for instance, has 91% of Earth's surface gravity, while a frozen moon called Chawla offers only 0.43g. Even stars are different; Alpha Centauri A shows the correct value of 1.10 solar masses. Whilst a higher-than-expected number of planets do hold functional biospheres and are varying degrees of habitable (the air may be breathable but the water might be full of heavy metals or alien microbes) there are only a few fully "earthlike" worlds out there.
• Adjective Animal Alehouse: The Brown Horse Tavern on Titan is one of the oldest establishments in the galaxy by the time the game starts. A tour guide lampshades that its name is a deliberate throwback to Earth naming conventions.
• Adventure Guild: Constellation is designed to be the "Space Age" equivalent. Their public mission is essentially to explore uncharted space, complete with offering missions via mission boards to survey distance planets and find planets with certain traits. As the main quest unfolds, they become the primary force in seeking out and figuring out how to use the artifacts.
• A.I. Breaker:
  • Enemy ships always shoot at the geometric center of the player ship. Meaning that if you build a ship with negative space in the middle (such as one that looks like an O or U when seen from the front), they'll be almost unable to hit you. You can also make a ship that's extremely asymmetrical for similar results.
  • While the bucket head exploit from Skyrim has been fixed, it's possible to hold a box or laundry basket in front of you, make items you want to steal fall into the basket (by nudging them with the basket or with another non-stolen item), and then walk out of sight of NPCs to steal those items. Since you're not technically touching the owned items, but rather your legitimate laundry basket, the AI thinks nothing suspicious of it.
  • Being half-decent at sneaking, especially when combined with equipment or perks that confer invisibility, confuses the AI of human enemies to the point they stop fighting you properly. In such case they'll do little more than hide behind cover and take the occasional potshot in your general direction, without a realistic chance at actually hitting you. Even melee enemies don't seem to know how to deal with you, often running around like headless chickens and failing to spot you until they literally run into you, assuming you even let them get this close.
• Airborne Mook: Quite a few alien species are capable of flight. Many have "peaceful" natures and will only attack if directly provoked, but some, like Jemison's Apex Parrothawks, will attack if you spend too much time near them or shoot at other creatures near them. They favor swooping attacks and, because of their mobility, are challenging to shoot down.
• Alien Sky: Naturally, since viewing the sky on any of the hundreds of worlds other than Earth will look different. Possibilities include multiple moons, rings, a close-up planet (in the case of landing on moon), and different views of the stars in the sky.
• All Deserts Have Cacti: Downplayed, as alien cactus-like species are a possible "Flora" to discover and harvest, and they are more common on "desert-like" worlds, but not all such worlds have them.
• The All-Seeing A.I.:
  • Zigzagged when it comes to committing crimes. Minor crimes like theft usually remain unnoticed if you were hidden while committing them, but any relevant law enforcement agency plus your Constellation companions will know immediately if you murder an innocent, no matter how far away they are at the time. While the bounty on your head is easy enough to get rid off, this system pretty much forces you to not play the game like a sociopath if you ever want to venture out with a Constellation member again.
  • In usual Bethesda fashion, every merchant and every guard can pick up on stolen items. Even if you stole them on different planets part of a different government altogether and have hundreds of identical legitimate copies of the same item in your inventory, they will know what's stolen, and refuse to trade it (unless they are specific fences) and confiscate it if you do a crime.
• Always Chaotic Evil: At least three of Starfield's factions exist to make sure you never run out of bad guys to kill. In a notable departure from previous Bethesda titles, none of them have any unique characters in their ranks, with their leaders chiming in through a few voice logs at most.
  • "Spacers" is a catch-all term for any independent pirates/thieves/smugglers/scavengers and are this game's version of bandits/raiders. Just like them, the only language they understand is violence.
  • With the exception of the ones guarding the Red Mile, any Ecliptic merc will immediately try to kill anyone and anything that isn't a part of their organization.
  • Va'ruun Zealots are mindlessly aggressive religious fanatics who can't be reasoned or negotiated with.
• Always Check Behind the Chair: As is standard for Bethesda games, useful/valuable items can be found tucked in all sorts of places throughout the game world. Things like credsticks and digipicks can be found tucked under beds, in bathrooms, beneath less valuable items, etc. The game's various stuffed animals can be randomly found placed in some downright unusual places, like in the satellite dishes of the POI comm stations.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Clothing and spacesuits representative of each of the joinable factions are common rewards for joining/advancing in those factions. Constellation, the UC Vanguard, the Crimson Fleet, and the Freestar Rangers all give you something upon joining/after a trial mission, then give you something more advanced later in the questline/upon completion. Ryujin is the only one that doesn't give you something right away, but does give you a fitted business suit (that enhances Persuasion) and later a Spy Catsuit that enhances Sneak.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Spaceflight is simplified to work intuitively, closer to how a plane flies, rather than realistically which be confusing and frustrating for most of the audience. Constant acceleration in a vacuum isn't portrayed, ships will automatically decelerate to optimal turning speed if the current thrust level exceeds and then throttle back up once flying straight again it unless you deliberately have the accelerator button pushed in, etc.
  • There is no need to scavenge for fuel or ammunition for your ship; fuel does not factor into travel within systems or maneuvering (only being used to calculate how far you can grav jump, but even then never being expended) and weapons are on a cooldown which can be changed by shifting power to the relevant weapon.
  • If you board and take over another ship, your original ship is returned to port for free and you can swap back as soon as you return in the new ship.
  • Flying and swimming animals can be scanned outside of your scanner's range. This is needed as flying animals are almost always out of range, especially at the base level, and water is frequently hazardous to swim in (and impossible to dive under).
  • Killing an animal, harvesting a plant, or mining a resource node counts as scanning it. This is helpful for "scanning" dangerous predators who would otherwise be trying to kill you while you're defenseless.
  • You will automatically equip a mining Cutter to mine mineral lodes while in Scanner Mode if you have one in your inventory, instead of rummaging through your inventory to find it. You will also automatically switch back to your previously equipped weapon once leaving Scanner Mode.
  • Several missions require that you disable and board a ship. Normally this would require the Targeting Control Systems skill to do, but in these instances simply shooting the ship until its hull is depleted is enough to get it to stop without destroying it outright so you can complete your mission. This is especially notable for the Freestar Ranger hostage rescue missions.
  • The outpost build mode allows you to switch to a top-down view at any time for ease of orientation and building placement. It's pretty janky in terms of what height the camera decides to hover at, but still a marked improvement over the otherwise similar settlement build system in Fallout 4 that was first-person only.
  • Amp, a chem that enhances mobility by increasing movement speed and jump height, is mercifully not addictive. This is helpful since exploring and surveying planets almost always requires kilometers-long hikes that Amp speeds up. Additionally, Jemison, an early-game-accessible world that also hosts the most major Hub City in the game, also has all the ingredients needed to craft it. Setting up an outpost to farm the ingredients makes you set for the rest of the game for Amp supply.
• Apocalypse How: Centuries before the events of the game, Earth suffered a complete planetary extinction due to the accelerated loss of its magnetosphere over a period of 50 years, caused by Grav-Drive research. It was just enough time to get enough humans off-planet to ensure the continuation of human civilization, but countless people and most animal species were lost when the planet died. All that's left is a barren dustball that most of mankind has essentially forgotten about, with only a few ruined landmarks remaining of Earth's major cities like London or Osaka.
• Apocalyptic Log: All over the place in doomed research stations, science centers, derelict ships, etc. You'll find your first one before wrapping up the tutorial on Kreet (with the pirates who have taken over the station laughing at the audio log of the scientists being killed by their experiments) and find many other prominent logs, such as aboard the Collander (detailing a plot very similar to the first Alien movie) or on the GalBank Legacy ship detailing the crew's descent into madness while trapped and later, Jasper Kryx's fate during the Crimson Fleet questline.
• Arbitrary Gun Power: In full effect. Switching any gun to automatic fire instead of semiauto reduces its per-shot damage proportional to the increase in its rate of fire despite still using the same ammunition, with the only justification being gameplay balance.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit:
  • You're limited to one follower at a time under normal circumstances, for no adequately explained reason. For the duration of certain missions, you can temporarily gain an additional follower.
  • Your ship's "crew" is limited by two factors - the ship's available "crew stations" and your character's "Ship Command" skill level. You can build a ship with a maximum crew as high as 10, though even with a maxed out Ship Command, you'll never reach that many.
• Armor-Piercing Attack:
  • The Armor Penetration skill allows your shots to ignore a percentage of the target's armor, up to base 50% at level three that can be increased by an additional 25% at level four after a critical hit.
  • Ballistic weapons can be upgraded with armor-piercing, penetrator, or depleted uranium rounds that each allow for differing levels of armor piercing.
• Artifact of Doom: Progressing through the main quest reveals more and more worrying side effects of using the artifacts. For example, the one found on Mars whose study unlocked the secrets of FTL travel, but which ended up causing the destruction of Earth's biosphere. Or the one that created an alternate reality that starts bleeding into the prime reality unless stopped quickly. Not to mention a bunch of superpowered humans, the Starborn, eternally hunting for the artifacts with no regard for the innocents they kill in the process.
• Artificial Stupidity: Clever NPC AI has never been Bethesda's strength, and Starfield is no exception.
  • Enemy AI has barely improved since Fallout 4, with hostiles showing basic battlefield tactics at best and routinely ignoring environmental hazards like Explosive Barrels to their detriment. Being good at sneaking, especially when invisible, is an outright A.I. Breaker because human enemies don't seem to know how to deal with a threat they can't see.
  • High-level enemies will still exit cover if you throw a grenade near them, even if they would only suffer Scratch Damage at most. This allows you to shoot them to pieces with much more powerful weapons.
  • Companion AI, however, has gotten worse since Fallout 4. Follower pathfinding is all over the place and situational weapon swapping is no longer a thing despite being present in much older titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
  • In particular the AI (both enemies and companions) seems completely unaware of how to use its boost pack outside of jumping over obstacles when going somewhere specific. It is practically incapable of using it in combat, as using its boost pack to go around cover or get a better angle of attack completely eludes it, as does using the boost pack to negate fall damage allowing for easier retreats.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Despite the lack of terraforming and the apparent lack of Earth species, planets are very good at developing "plant" vegetation. The artistic license is that humans readily fit into the food chain of this biology. Humans can grow crops in the wild and derive nutrition and drugs from at least some of the native vegetation shown by a family surviving for 20 years on a random lush world with no supplies and both hunt and are hunted by animals.
  • Overlapping with Artistic License – Physics, Heatleeches, when exposed to a specific plant, immediately turn into Terrormorphs. The transformation is instantaneous, taking not even a full second. However, a Terrormorph is easily 20+ times the size of a heatleech, and many more times more its mass, so the transformation is a violation of conservation of mass.
• Artistic License – Linguistics: In "First Contact", when you meet the crew of a 200-year-old Generation Ship, they have very distinct accents from each other (the captain has an RP accent, the security guards have Northeastern American, the doctor has vaguely BSAE, etc.) If these people had been talking to, and having children with, no-one but each other for 200 years, their accents should have all homogenized. Unless the ship is secretly segregated.
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • A little over a century before the game, Earth was rendered uninhabitable via the total collapse of its magnetic field. If such a thing were even possible in real life, it would take millions of years for the atmosphere to dissipate, considering that it would be constantly replenished by volcanic activity and the ocean's evaporation. The real danger to life on Earth in this situation would be the greatly increased solar radiation that would reach Earth's surface, which even then would kill most but probably not all life. This is handwaved somewhat by the revelation that the cause of the collapse was uncontrollable "gravity wave" emissions from early grav drive development. However, gravitational waves are a very complicated and poorly-documented process that probably don't work like that anyway. Later, the Emissary's dialogue implies that the Artifact's power and the use of it to create the first grav drives were really what did Earth in, so it's possible the NASA scientists were making assumptions based on what they observed after the signs of the collapsing magnetosphere were becoming apparent many years later.
  • It would also take a lot more than 200 years for the vast majority of Earth's structures to be wiped clean in the way it's depicted in the game, even if scavengers actively picked the ruins clean. Without an atmosphere, there would be no/greatly reduced plant life to overtake it and no rain to hasten erosion, meaning Earth should look more like it does in the Fallout series than the sandy, radioactive desert it does here. The Law of Conservation of Detail can be applied, but still, it's significant artistic license.
  • The randomly generated planets can lead to strange or impossible conditions. For example, there are planets at -150°C with chlorine gas pockets leaking to the surface (at such temperature, chlorine would be solid), or visibly frozen, snow-covered worlds with surface temperatures of 40°C and above, which would require atmospheric pressure far beyond what a human could survive.
  • Some of the behaviors for the hazards make little sense. For example, it's possible for corrosive gas to penetrate one's space suit enough to cause lung damage in the player, yet that penetration doesn't otherwise compromise the space suit's functionality and ability to retain breathable air. The game also considers argon, which is completely inert, to be a “corrosive gas”.
  • Overlapping with Artistic License – Biology, Heatleeches, when exposed to a specific plant, immediately turn into Terrormorphs. The transformation is instantaneous, taking not even a full second. However, a Terrormorphs is easily 20+ times the size of a heatleech, and many more times more its mass, so the transformation is a violation of conservation of mass.
• Ascended Meme: The "I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took an arrow to the knee..." line, repeated ad nauseum by guards in Skyrim to the point where it became a meme, gets two different shout outs here. First, randomly generated NPCs will start to say the line ("I used to be an explorer too...") but will cut themselves off by saying "...it's a long story". Second, the image for the Crippling skill shows an arrow piercing a knee, with the third and fourth tier patches clearly showing a Steel Arrow head from Skyrim as well.
• As You Know: While you can choose from a variety of backgrounds for the player character, all of them still involve a presence in the Settled Systems where you should at least be aware of major historical events. However, nearly every mission and major faction treats your character as if they're completely ignorant for the sake of filling in the player.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Starfield provides a VATS-style ability that allows for targeting specific subsystems of enemy ships during space combat, although unlike VATS it needs to be unlocked as a skill first. The upside is that it can be upgraded multiple times.
• Autosave: The game has this feature which triggers when you rest, fast travel, or when bringing up the menu screen (with adjustments available in the settings changing the frequency from as often as five minutes to as long as every hour).
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • There are very few situations where guns in the Heavy Weapons family are worth using. Several are too short ranged for open air firefights, all are inaccurate, and enemies are usually in small groups behind cover or around corners, making it far faster to hit them with a less awesome but more practical semiautomatic weapon rather than spray with a minigun.
    • The Magshot, a large-bore magnetic revolver, can be upgraded with a full-auto firing mode. While undeniably cool, its recoil is so extreme that at least four out of the six shots in its cylinder will only be hitting scenery if you fire it at anything beyond point-blank range.
    • The rare Annihilator Rounds upgrade gives the gun in question a contagious damage effect that lingers in the area for a while and infects any nearby creature with a strong DoT debuff. The "any nearby creature" part unfortunately includes yourself and your companion, making this upgrade highly impractical to use with anything that isn't a sniper rifle, but the guns that can mount it are exclusively short-to-medium ranged, like shotguns.
    • Fully automatic weapons in general fall into this, especially in the case of assault rifles that can be either full or semi-auto (either naturally or modded one way or the other). The fully automatic versions will have far lower damage-per-shot than their semi-automatic version, thus requiring much more ammo to deal the same amount of damage. In practice, ammo drops for a given ammo type wont keep up with the demands of full-auto weapons and additional ammo will need to be regularly purchased which can be surprisingly costly. Conversely modding a full auto weapon to be semi-automatic will drastically improve its ammo efficiency in addition to its damage.
  • Some Starborn powers sound much cooler than they actually are:
    • Solar Flare and Particle Beam lets you fire a projectile from your hand. This does pitiful damage (well beneath most guns), is prone to missing due to the slow casting animation and slow projectile speed, and can't easily be spammed due to how much power they consume. Even maxed out at Rank 10 (requiring the completion of nine instances of New Game Plus), this falls short of most mid and late game rifles. Their only benefits are that they don't rely on ammunition, so you always have a ranged offensive option which is vaguely useful given you're subject to the Bag of Spilling during New Game Plus and systems have fixed enemy/threat levels.
    • Create Vacuum, well, creates a vacuum in a fixed area that cuts off the oxygen of those within it. It looks and sound awesome enough, but in effect is essentially a small AOE debuff and you're better off using your power on other abilities.
    • Gravity Well creates a small black hole to draw in targets which, again, looks and sounds awesome, but doesn't deal enough damage to be worthwhile for its power cost and also doesn't discriminate, meaning your companions can be pulled in as well.
  • Piracy and smuggling:
    • With the vast majority of questlines taking place at least partially in star systems patrolled by law enforcement agencies, attacking and robbing civilian ships just isn't worth the hassle when most of your spoils go towards paying off the massive bounties you racked up in the process. That leaves it as a post-game hobby, but by that point money is the last thing you'll need.
    • Smuggling is a pretty cool system in theory, but it isn't nearly profitable enough to justify all the hoops you need to jump through in order to make it work in the first place. Trading in legal merchandise, or simply selling some more weapons and armor you looted from dead enemies, is both more profitable, easier to do, and fully legal.
• Back Stab: Much like its Bethesda sister-series, hitting a target while undetected deals additional damage. Investing in certain skills can increase the amount of extra damage done in this fashion.
• Bag of Spilling: When entering a New Game Plus, you lose all items, ships, outposts, and character relationships from before. The only things that carry over are your level, skills, and powers.
• Beef Gate: Every star system has a level recommendation ranging from 0 to 75, which serves as a rough outline of how powerful the enemies you find there will be. While it's not impossible to explore areas far above your own level, you almost certainly won't be having a good time when any random pirate or alien critter can absorb your entire ammo supply, assuming they don't kill you first in one or two hits. This works to direct your progression without violating the open world format while keeping some high-level encounters and side missions fresh for the late-game.
• Big Fancy House: The "Dream House" trait gives you a large mansion on a planet. However, it also comes with a 125,000 mortgage that you have to pay weekly installments on, or else the bank will foreclose on it.
• Bioweapon Beast: "Xenowarfare" is the term for capturing, augmenting, and training alien species for use in warfare, which was outlawed after the Colony War. The "Red Devils" company of the UC was famous for deploying such creatures, and their research was deeply classified following the Colony War. The Vanguard questline involves a lot of the UC Xenowarfare Division's legacy. Additionally, one of the forms of "contraband" includes "Xenowarfare Kits" that presumably allow this.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Life-bearing worlds in the Settled Systems host diverse collections of weird and colorful alien wildlife, much of which wouldn't be able to exist in Earth's biosphere as we understand it, such as a bird-like species with an all-enclosing bone exoskeleton instead of feathers^note which is still flight-capable because its homeworld's dense atmosphere generates enough lift. A particularly prominent example is the terrormorph, a nightmarish apex predator that takes 70 to 100 Earth-standard years to mature from its larval stage, the heatleech, to its adult form... unless exposed to the spores of a rare plant unique to its original homeworld, which makes the process instantaneous. Heatleeches themselves are another example, seeing how they feed on electrical or thermal energy instead of physical food, making them the bane of anything electric or combustion-powered while propogating them throughout settled worlds as they hitch rides on ships.
• Bleak Level: New Atlantis can be subjected to this twice. During the "High Price To Pay" questline, the Hunter's rampage causes the sky to turn cloudy, the Spaceport district to be heavily damaged, leaves numerous corpses in his wake, and all living civilians are evacuated, leaving the place barren until you leave long enough to reset it. This can also happen as a result of [[spoiler:the Terrormorph invasion during the Vanguard quest line, with similar effects.
• Blood Sport: The Red Mile, aside from being an Ecliptic stronghold, is infamous for hosting the gladiatorial event from which it draws its name. It sends voluntary "runners" on a run through a monster-infested, frigid wilderness in unbreathable atmosphere while the Red Mile's patrons bet on the outcome. Few make it back alive. Except for Andreja, the Constellation companions are universally disgusted and horrified by the practice and will all but beg you not to participate if you land there.
• Boom, Headshot!: Downplayed as, without skill bonuses, headshots deal only slightly more damage than normal. Investing into the Marksman, Sniper Certification, and Sharpshooting skills will greatly increase the effect of headshots and allow the player to play this trope straight.
• Booze-Based Buff: As is standard for Bethesda games, alcohol provides various buffs (along with some negative side effects) differing by type. Beer buffs carrying capacity, wine buffs your persuasion chances, and spirits buff damage resistance, while all carry an O₂ penalty representing your intoxication.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Weapons:
    • Semi-automatic assault rifles lose significant fire rate and the convenience of being able to hold down the fire button but their damage-per-shot and therefore damage-per-ammo increases dramatically to compensate. This gives them roughly the same damage as pistols that use the same ammo while maintaining all of the other good aspects of rifles such as higher magazine capacity, greater range and accuracy, the ability to mount scopes, etc. Such weapons will also gain the benefits of the Marksman skill, which do not apply to fully automatic weapons.
    • The Beowulf, a mid-tier ballistic rifle, is a straight upgrade over the early-game Maelstrom in every metric that matters, can be configured as an ammo-conserving single shot or burst fire battle rifle, an assault rifle, or a suppressed sniper rifle, and uses the ubiquitous 7.77mm caliber, making it cheap and easy to supply. It is also semi-automatic by default with all of the benefits that entails. It doesn't excel in anything in particular, but is a solid, well-rounded choice for ballistic-focused marksmen. That its design was clearly inspired by the near-mythical Walther WA 2000 precision rifle probably gains it some bonus points from gun enthusiasts.
  • Many of the less flashy Starborn powers you unlock prove to be the most useful:
    • Personal Atmosphere instantly refills your O₂ and removes all CO₂, effectively letting you sprint forever and/or negate the effects of being overencumbered.
    • Sense Star Stuff is essentially Detect Life from Skyrim, letting you see non robotic enemies through walls, as well as burrowing aliens. It is especially practical for stealth builds.
    • The first power unlocked, Anti-Gravity Field, lets you negate gravity in a small area around the player. It's not only fairly cheap to cast, but also basically hard counters any melee enemy in the game, from humble spacers with a knife to the mighty Terrormorphs, as all are sent flying and ragdolling if they enter the affected area while the power is active, which they naturally try to do, allowing the player to leisurely shoot them while they remain helpless. As you upgrade the area increases, allowing Anti-Gravity to lift entire swarms of enemies without needing to be aimed, effectively hard countering entire groups.
    • The Sunless Space power freezes any enemies in a modest radius around the point of impact. Whilst it's a bit trickier to use than the Anti-Gravity Field since it uses a slow-moving projectile like Solar Flare, it completely shuts down any enemies hit by it for as long as it lasts. Got a bunch of enemies tearing into you up close? Drop a Sunless Space shot into the floor and clean up!
  • Traits:
    • Terra Firma gives bonus HP and O₂ while on a planet, and a penalty in space. 95% of your fights in space will be ship battles, where HP and O₂ don't matter. This trait's not as story altering as having your own Adoring Fan, or your parents showing up, but it's by far one of the best ways to make your life easier.
    • "Extrovert" gives you a bit more Oxygen when traveling with a companion and less while traveling alone, serving as the opposite to sister-trait "Introvert". Considering how many important missions give you a mandatory companion, Extrovert is the far more useful of the two.
  • Ships:
    • HopeTech ships are an In-Universe example. The company specializes in cargo transports and thus takes pride in building nothing but "trucks in space".
    • Turret weapons on ship can't be made to target specific enemies or use the advanced targeting system to aim at subsystems. They also cannot use EM or Missile weapons. Despite this, turrets are generally considered massively overpowered. Particle weapon turrets have huge range, deal huge damage to both shields and hulls (most other weapons are better at damaging one or the other), and, with a top end reactor, you can provide fully energy to up to 8 of them at once while maintaining full speed and full shields. The turrets have insane rate of fire, and snap to new targets in range very fast, making ship mobility a non issue. Their tracking ability in turn all but negates enemy ships' attempts to use their mobility to avoid fire. A ship covered in turrets will decimate squads of enemy ships in a fraction of the time even the most nimble of dogfighters with three full weapon assignment needs to do the same.
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • Ship weapons don't consume any physical ammo and are limited only by how much power you allot them from your reactor. Fully powered weapons can often shoot without pause, but even if their reserves do run out, they'll refill on their own after a few seconds of downtime.
  • Companions can fire any weapon endlessly as long as you give them at least a single round of ammo for it. This is a marked change from previous Bethesda titles where only a companion's default weapon (which typically falls off in effectiveness rather quickly) was given this treatment.
  • The game's very first "weapon", the mining cutter, runs on an internal battery that recharges itself once you stop shooting.
• Bounty Hunter: The Tracker's Alliance is an organized, interplanetary bounty hunting guild, offering randomized quests to the player via kiosks located in taverns and bars. An Alliance Representative can usually be found in major settlements, and some have more specific quests for the player.
• Boxed Crook: If you are arrested by the UC after visiting the Lodge and haven't joined the Vanguard, you will be given an option to join them in lieu of jail time, thus starting that questline. This has served as something of a Bewildering Punishment in a few cases, such as in Zero Punctuation's review of the game in which it wasn't clear what crime he even committed to be arrested.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Finding 13 books pointing to 13 locations on Earth, Luna and Mars to collect 13 unique snowglobes award the player with the "Ancient Old Earth Spacesuit", a NASA-esque unique looking space suit that is otherwise pretty ordinary. It's not even legendary.
• Break Out the Museum Piece:
  • Even though the game takes place hundreds of years in the future, certain weapons from the modern era or older are still around. For example, the player can get their hands on an M1911 pistol (and a tacticool "modernized" variant), Ithaca model pump shotgun, Kalashnikov-style carbine/assault rifle, and VSS/VAL suppressed sniper. Each of these weapons are referred to as "Old Earth" weapons, and they work just as well in 2330 as they do in the present.
  • Exploring the NASA launch facility on Earth allows you to salvage one of the original space suits from the Mercury missions in the 1950s and 60s. Its stats, while not completely top of the line, are still startlingly high compared to spacesuits from 300 years later, and if you do the questline early it can easily be better than anything you have.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Invoked in conversation with Lieutenant Gualter in the reactivated Red Devils facility on Mars. The quartermaster describes one such daunting logistical task he had to deal with previously — finding a farmer that can regularly ship thousands of tons of feedstock to Mars for the xenoweapon specimens, "Tuesday", as if such immense challenges were normal in his line of work.
• But Thou Must!:
  • Carrying over from Fallout 4, when a character offers a quest, your dialogue options will always boil down to at least one way to accept, a prompt for extra information, and an indecisive remark that's some flavor of, "not now." With very few exceptions, you won't have the option to definitively decline the quest.
  • In the "First Contact" side quest, the player ends up having to mediate a dispute between a resort owned by the MegaCorp Paradiso and the colony ship ECS Constant. The conflict is that the Constant is a Generation Ship that was headed to colonize Porrima II, but Paradiso beat them there thanks to FTL travel. The player is essentially given three options to resolve the quest: convince the Constant crew to accept indentured servitude to Paradiso until they "earn" their right to live on the planet, pay for a new Grav-Drive out of your own pocket to let the Constant search for a new planet, or simply destroy the Constant and kill its entire crew. However, there is no choice for you to simply kill the greedy Paradiso executives or force them to hand the planet over to the Constant. The Paradiso NPCs also are immune to damage and cannot be killed, so you're railroaded into only taking paths that will ultimately benefit Paradiso and essentially screw over the Constant. Adding insult to injury, the Captain of the Constant tells you that their founder filed a claim to the planet so early that it wasn't taken seriously. Despite having 200-year-old records of the claim, there's no option to use it as leverage against Paradiso.
  • Despite the game providing nonlethal methods for subduing people, it's impossible to make use of them if a quest tells you to take someone down the hard way. This includes quests where it would really make sense, like the Freestar Rangers questline for instance where you're acting for a law enforcement agency with a clear directive of bringing perps in alive wherever possible.
  • A Crimson Fleet quest has the player try to steal a trophy. Players expecting to flex their thievery skill will be sorely disappointed. The room the safe is in has an unpickable lock. The person who has the key does not have the key in her inventory for you to pickpocket. The key is only created in game when she gives it to you after you talk to her (despite her in story having it on her). Meaning it is impossible to resolve this robbery without talking to the person you're trying to rob and convincing them to let you rob them.
  • A later quest requires you to access a VIP lounge in a bar. Like above, the lounge door cannot be picked and the person who gives you the key does not have the key in their inventory until you pay them to buy it from them so pickpocking is out of the question. The lounge also has only the one door. You have to pay for the key.
  • Certain characters are immune to all attacks, not even getting staggered by them, to prevent players from killing them. One prominent example is at the end of a Crimson Fleet quest, where an NPC will taunt the player about thwarting their hacking attempt and framing them for a murder so they'd get a bounty. The NPC is immune to all attacks to prevent the player's natural reaction to just gun him down when he finishes speaking, as he's involved in a completely different quest chain.
  • One of the Constellation quests forces you to steal an artifact from an eccentric collector, which inevitably triggers a firefight with him and his guards. You can't convince him to sell you the artifact no matter how persuasive you are, you can't pilfer it without drawing attention, and although you can end the fight without fatalities if you shoot only the collector until he surrenders, the fact of the matter is that there's no way around doing something illegal and getting a UC bounty placed on your head. In the main questline.
  • Regardless of how you handle Larry Dumbrosky in the Crimson Fleet questline, you'll always be ambushed by Ecliptic when you go to the GalBank Archives. The only difference is that if you killed him, then they were hired to avenge his murder.
  • The Ryujin quest line on Neon requires you to let your employer implant a prototype neuromod in your brain. If this wasn't enough of a line, the mission before has you scouting a competitor's version of the same device that killed 100% of those involved in human trials.
  • During the UC Vanguard questline, it's impossible not to have to fight through the abandoned mine on Mars. Either you pay off Walker's debt by helping complete the miner's science project, which involves clearing the mine. Or you just use your own money or hacking skills, and Walker's friend points you to his hideout... in the mine. There's a back entrance, with a landing pad even, but this only opens after you talk to Walker.
  • Weirdly, the New Game Plus has a case of this. In most game you'd expect the New Game Plus to force you to redo the same steps as the base game, but Starfield's is built around the idea your character has prior knowledge of all the game's events. However, how you apply this knowledge can be... spotty. For example "The Old Neighborhood" will allow you to bypass the quest entirely if you remember Moira's ship is around Neptune and go straight there. But "Delivering Devils" will require you to visit the Trade Authority and have the guy there point you to the Dust Devils' bar to find Walker, despite Starborn dialogue at said bar establishing your character remembers they are hiding Walker - showing up to the Bar without talking to the Trade Authority first does not let the quest proceed. And of course, you still require the Devils' help to find Walker, despite knowing where he is. Another Main Quest example, "The Empty Nest", won't allow you to bypass dealing with the bank robbery or Sam's dad despite your only goal being to find a certain location. If you go straight to said location, you'll find the entrance door marked as "inaccessible". Several quests like this make your character go through several intermediary steps they shouldn't have to.
• Cap: Remarkably few overall, but of the ones that do exist, the most impactful is arguably a hard limit of 80 meters on ship size, for otherwise the ship would no longer fit on most settlements' landing pads. A ship can also not have more than 150 parts, and can only have one each of a landing bay, docking port, cockpit, grav drive, reactor, and shield generator. Weapons sets and engines cannot draw more than 12 units of power in total each, and a ship can only have three weapon sets total. There's also a limit on how many objects you can place at outposts, but this is unlikely to bother you unless you really go nuts with decorations; purely industrial outposts for mining and/or manufacturing purposes will run out of building space long before coming anywhere near the objects limit.
• Capitalism Is Bad: A prominent theme in the game’s side quests. Corporations that actually do what is best for the people rather than just those at the top seem to be the exception rather than the rule in the Settled Systems, with a resort owner suggesting the player character blow up a ship of colonists around his planet because they're spoiling his customers' experience. The reason so many have their main HQ in Neon is so they can run their business without interference from anyone trying to enforce regulations or fair workplace practices.
• Captain Oblivious: The Clinic is a space station housing the best medical facilities in the Freestar Collective, if not the Settled Systems as a whole. What it also houses is one of the highest densities of criminal proceedings in the entire game. Half the staff are dealing in illegal drugs or selling medical supplies on the side, an entire wing is occupied by a shady company performing illegal tests on unwitting human volunteers with lethal results, and the VIP wing plays host to a wanted terrorist, yet the Clinic's leader, Dr. Darvish, is utterly oblivious to any of it.
• Cassette Futurism:
  • Downplayed as while computer screens and the like are more modern in appearance, the actual design of the ships draws heavy inspiration from the "Space Race" era of technology in the 1960s. Executive Director Todd Howard calls this type of design "NASA-punk".
  • Played straight on the ECS Constant, a Generation Ship that left Earth 200 years before the events of the game. By the time you make contact with its crew, all technology aboard is so woefully out of date that the ship's occupants can't even make contact with anyone outside due to incompatible comms protocols. Their computer screens in particular look like something straight out of the 60s... except for the ones you may need to interact with for quest reasons, which are exactly the same as the ones found everywhere else.
  • Played completely straight by the game's "data slates", which look like 1980s cassette recorders.
• Casual Interstellar Travel:
  • With potentially no experience flying a ship yourself, you are given command of the Constellation explorer ship Frontier in the middle of the new game tutorial. Soon after, you find that it's nothing too out-of-ordinary. Friendly space encounters throughout the game show things such as an elementary school interstellar field trip, or a couple in a rental spaceship bickering over directions, as well as a bustle of ships in orbit around populous planets.
  • An optional quest from Walter has you talking with a Stroud-Eklund employee who's department is responsible for all the software that allows this. She'll tell you flat-out that without all that work, the "Casual" part would absolutely not be possible.
• Changing Gameplay Priorities: Early on, you'll be maxing out your (and your follower's, and likely your ship's) inventory to haul back every piece of loot you can get to sell for ammo, digipicks, med packs, and, once you've scraped up enough, ship upgrades. You'll be chronically low on funds, but as higher value loot starts to appear, you invest in certain skills (Commerce, Scavanging, etc.), you get some outposts running, quest rewards increase requisite to your level, etc., the game's plentiful Money for Nothing will start to kick in. By the late game, as vendor maximum credits don't change, you can get every credit they have (plus some items in barter) by selling even a single high-level weapon or piece of equipment. You'll only bother to loot the most valuable items and you'll find yourself leaving behind items you would have killed for early in the game.
• Character Customization: The player is capable of customizing their character's facial structure, body shape, skin tone, gender, tattoos, piercings, personal background, traits, and even walking animations. Your character is open to even further customization through specializing in specific skills.
• Character Level: Starfield follows a similar model to its Fallout sister series. You gain Experience Points by completing missions, killing enemies, and via crafting. Once you've gained enough, you'll level up which rewards you with a skill point to allocate.
• The City Narrows: Every major hub city has an area like this, typically containing poverty stricken residents, criminals, and all sorts of seedy activities.
  • For New Atlantis, it's "the Well", the now-underground section of the original colony ship from which the city spread outwards and upwards.
  • Akila City has "the Stretch", the underdeveloped district near the newly-built outermost wall.
  • Neon is such a Wretched Hive that its seedy underbelly, Ebbside, has its own seedy underbelly, the... Underbelly.
• Combat Medic: The aptly titled Combat Medic background, one of the potential backgrounds you can choose for your player character. It starts you off with points in the Pistols and Medicine traits.
• Commonplace Rare:
  • Adhesive. Just as it was in Fallout 4, it's required for a vast majority of weapon and suit modifications, and it's just glue, right? Should be available anywhere? Not at all. It appears only on two planets (out of nearly 400 that the player can land on), and the largest source is easily overlooked, so if you don't go scanning everything that moves or at least grows from the ground, you're limited to buying it from merchants or hoping to find it in random buildings in the wild. This means that unless you already know where to find it, you will be forced to travel to some backwater planet and forage plants or cull wildlife just to apply basic upgrades to your guns and spacesuit elements. If you have the Botany skill, you can build a literal glue farm on planet Gagarin in the Alpha Centauri system by scanning small round cacti that grow there. If you don't, you need to travel all the way to Suvorov in the Kryx system, a planet controlled by the Crimson Fleet, as the aggressive wildlife is relatively easy to kill and usually drops Adhesive, but you'll have to start the Crimson Fleet quest to get close enough to the planet without getting attacked.
  • Lubricant is similarly annoying to obtain for most of the same reasons, but thankfully a planet in the Volii system has harmless creatures that drop it, and this process can be automated with the appropriate outpost equipment. This still takes some not-insignificant effort and resources to setup.
• The Computer Shall Taunt You: Hostile NPCs love to do this to you in combat, whether on ground or over the comms in space.
• Convenient Questing: Has the Downplayed version standard to most other Bethesda games. The main quest starts you off a small jump from New Atlantis, then sends you progressively further and further out into the Settled Systems (where the levels of enemies also happen to get higher and higher). Outside of that, as a Wide-Open Sandbox game, you are free to go wherever you want (or at least as far as your ship will take you) and can uncover much more content as you do.
• Crew of One: The Casual Interstellar Travel aspect of starship travel means that it doesn't take much training to be able to pilot a ship, and many ships (including, optionally, yours) don't have a crew beyond that. One random encounter is an elementary school teacher taking her class on a space field trip, with no other adults on board.
• Critical Encumbrance Failure: The standard Bethesda version in full effect, where encumbrance has no bearing until you go over your maximum. You can still run if you go over your weight limit, but you run out of O₂ more quickly, and you can't fast travel. However, there is an exception to the last point: if you are over-encumbered while on your ship, you can fast travel to locations on other planets.
• Critical Hit: Any hit has a small chance of resulting in one, though certain actions (like hitting an enemy while undetected), skills, and weapon enhancements can greatly increase those odds, to the point where it is possible to build a sneaky sniper Critical Hit Class.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Aceles resemble Gentle Giant Sauropod, and are slow, lumbering, harmless alien beasts (unless threatened, much like real life cattle) once used as livestock by the UC. They are also the predator to Terrormorphs - the Super-Persistent Predator species with mind control powers who can wipe out entire colonies with military garrisons. And they are somehow apparently really good at wiping out Terrormorphs too (some of that is them being really good at slurping up heatleeches, the larval stage of Terrormorphs, but explicitly not the entirety of it). The player never gets to see them at work unless you choose them as the solution at the end of the Vanguard questline, which unlocks new encounters including a 1v1 aceles vs. terrormorph.
• Crutch Character: There are two ships available for free shortly after the game opens up which are solid upgrades over the Frontier and can carry you through the game's early missions/low level exploration areas.
  • If you choose the Kid Stuff trait, your character's parents will be in the game and will offer you gifts. After some great early game gear, the final gift is a new ship - the Wanderwell. It's only a mild upgrade to the Frontier on paper, but as the Frontier is largely maxed out in terms of ship building without major (expensive) changes, the Wanderwell has more room for additional weaponry and cargo by default without extensive (and again, expensive) customization. With some updates, it can serve you well into your level 20s before falling behind.
  • The Razorleaf is available through the Mantis questline. While it carries a recommended level of 25, you can complete it at less than half of that with a decently optimized character and walk out with a major ship upgrade. It massively outguns the Frontier thanks to its particle beam weaponry (logical for the ship of a vigilante) and comes with a "shielded" cargo capacity, meaning you can use it to smuggle contraband for profit. If you have other plans for a ship, you can also sell it for a cool 20k credits, which is also a major early game advantage. It will hold up much longer than the Frontier, but still falls behind eventually, even with upgrades.
• Cyberpunk for Flavor: While the game as a whole mostly fits into the category of Post-Cyberpunk (or "NASA-Punk" as executive director Todd Howard calls it), the city of Neon is unapologetically cyberpunk. Rampant corruption, brightly-colored advertisements as far as the eye can see, futuristic technology, corporations owning just about everything... It all adds up to easily the most high-tech city in the game and, not coincidentally, the most dangerous and corrupt.
• Damage Over Time: Several "legendary" weapon effects can cause this, such as inducing Bleeding or Poison. The effects can also be inflicted on the player character, requiring specialized Aid items to stop the damage.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: In the event that the killing hit on a human enemy wearing a spacesuit is on their pack, the pack may explode. It will pop either immediately, or the pack's boost jet may go awry from the critical damage, resulting in the wearer panicking a moment before it sends them flying off to an explosive death.
• Degraded Boss: The first terrormorph you're likely to fight is rightly treated as a deadly boss encounter with an entire quest built around it. The ones you encounter in the follow-up quests or even randomly in the wilds are just as dangerous (barring their scripted Mind Control abilities), but are handled no different from the rest of the wildlife. Bear in mind that even the game's Green Hill Zone, the UC capital world of Jemison, has the occasional terrormorph roaming outside the city walls.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • You might think nothing but your skills, powers, and research carry into New Game Plus, but the game does keep track of what questlines you've done in the previous playthroughs. So if you've not done a specific faction's questline, you do not get access to any Starborn "shortcut" dialogue options with them when you first do them in a New Game Plus playthrough.
  • If you name your player character "Buzz" in the character editor during the prologue, Vasco will recognize your name and will address you accordingly.
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: One of the most heavily advertised features is the option to modify your spaceships, from making cosmetic changes to redesigning the entire vessel from the ground up. Players are also able to construct their own planetary outposts, as well as modify their weapons to their heart's content.
• Diegetic Character Creation: The game begins with the protagonist uncovering a mysterious artifact in the mine they work in, which causes them to experience a vision and pass out. Later, when they wake up in the med bay, their coworkers ask them to confirm various aspects of their identity and life history to test whether their mind is still intact, which prompts the character creation.
• Dimensional Traveler: What the Starborn are revealed to be toward the end of the main quest. Having collected all of the artifacts in another universe, they've passed through the Unity and entered another universe to search again for greater power.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: The main quest mission "High Price to Pay" turns New Atlantis into one of these and marks a major turning point in the story. Before this mission, collecting the artifacts is fairly straightforward and there remains mystery behind their purpose. This mission has the Hunter, a Starborn seeking the artifacts, go on a rampage through the city while killing one of your Constellation companions and all you can do is flee. For the rest of the main quest, you'll endure Starborn attacks in space and while completing missions on the ground.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Upon meeting Vlad in Constellation, you can learn that he retired from the Crimson Fleet and has a house way out in the far flung planets. Going there and doing an Advanced lockpick will discover his personal pistol, The Mutineer. This is a burst fire mag pistol that has late game base damage and most importantly is armor-piercing. The only downsides with using it as your only weapon are that the ammo is rare and it goes through it at an obscene rate.
  • The Vanguard quest chain unlocks ship parts after the second mission. One of these is the Obliterator Autoprojector particle cannon. This deals high and equal damage to shields and hulls and uses only two bars of ship power per gun. It's more efficient than almost anything else you can load onto a ship at any level and four of the guns will take down most shields in seconds.
  • The UC Vanguard quest line is available early in the game, and soon leads to a boss battle at the New Atlantis starport. Two security guards will offer to help you. If you accept their help they will probably die, but one of them will drop a minigun. Give the gun and at least one round of the appropriate ammo to your companion, and have them equip it. Congratulations! Your companion now has a minigun that will never run out of ammunition. If that doesn't suit you, the minigun is worth about 80,000 credits, so you can sell it and buy something you do want.
  • The Cutter combines this trope with Magikarp Power. It is the first weapon you get, but it quickly becomes obsolete in combat because its high rate of fire cannot make up for its low base damage, However, it counts as a laser, and the fourth rank of the laser skill gives a 5% chance of setting your enemies on fire. 5% x a high rate of fire = a good chance of setting multiple fires on your enemy. Fire deals percentage damage over time, and multiple fires stack. Stitch that, Terrormorphs.
  • The late-game quality "Mark One" spacesuit, helmet, and pack are all available in the basement of the Lodge from the very first time you visit. However, they're behind a Master-locked case which you won't be able to pick for quite some time. If you don't mind an exploit, you can look through the tiny space in the case's door joint to access the mannequin wearing it without unlocking the case and swipe the gear. You won't start seeing better equipment in random drops until you're past level 40, at least.
  • If you don't mind a little pickpocketing and Save Scumming, you can head to Akila City as soon as you're free to travel. Find Emma Wilcox in "the Rock", save, and pickpocket her. She carries a legendary Assassin's Advanced Grendel that comes surpressed and deals extra damage against human enemies. The odds are low of succeeding, but with enough saving and reloading, you can pickpocket it off of her. With it, you'll be set until at least the mid-game.
  • In an example lifted straight from predecessor Fallout 4, you can acquire some high-quality weapons early in the game, but ammo for them is scarce and expensive, keeping you from using them as a nuke yourself. However, companions do not consume ammo, so as long as you have at least one appropriate round, you can give them the weapon, the ammo, and let them do some nuking for you. (Just be sure to get a few hits in lest you miss out on the experience.)
• Double Unlock:
  • To put it mildly, the skill system can be seen to have have up to half a dozen layers of "unlocks" before you can actually make use of it. For instance, the skill that lets you upgrade weapons first requires investing a skill point. Then you need to go to a research station and invest a bunch of resources to unlock the various tier 1 upgrades at a weapons bench. Unlocking the next skill tier requires crafting a certain number of weapon mods, upon which the process repeats. The final tier of weapon research then demands an additional, master-level skill you can't even pick unless you've put a decent amount of skill points into the corresponding skill tree first, which in turn forces you to engage in some completely unrelated activities just to be able to allocate all these points. And of course you also need to grind enough levels to earn enough skill points to begin with. All in all, quite a bunch of hoops to jump through just to slap a Hollywood Silencer or a smart sight on your gun.
  • The Special Projects skill basically entirely exists to be a triple unlock. Rank 1 unlocks "Experimental Research" a research project that is a secondary requirement to researching the last tier of gear at the crafting table, even if you have that gear's crafting skill maxed out. The next 3 tiers meanwhile are required to craft the more complex components high tier research requires from your accumulated resources unless you want to hunt them in the world or in stores.
• The Dreaded: Terrormorphs are deadly, armored, alien apex predators with some limited Mind Control powers that tend to suddenly appear on worlds once they've been settled for around 70-100 years. No one knows how or why they suddenly appear at that point, but it typically takes an entire well-armed squad to put even a single Terrormorph down. When a group of them appeared on the planet Londinion well under 70 years since its settlement, they completely overran the capital city and the UC had to bomb the spaceport to trap them there while barring all future landings. If you complete the UC Vanguard questline, you learn that Terrormorphs are actually the grown form of Heatleeches, small larval pests that are more annoying to spaceport workers as they damage ship systems than actually dangerous. However, this is how they easily travel throughout the Settled Systems and then it takes them 70-100 years to grow. A particular plant on their native world can cause them to change into Terrormorphs instantly, and solving this massive problem is part of the questline.
• Dual-World Gameplay: One of the most unique Bethesda quests ever, "Entangled", takes place in a science station that, while experimenting on an Artifact, unwittingly created an alternate yet still-linked reality where the lab was destroyed in an accident and all but one of the staff were killed. This starts an intensely creepy Marathon Level that switches seamlessly between the prime reality full of people (and hostile robots), and a world where the lab was overrun by nasty Big Creepy-Crawlies and turned into a giant Meat Moss hive, with the facility's chief engineer being the Sole Survivor. It's up to you to navigate both realities to the subterranean research levels and shut down the malfunctioning experiment before the effect can spread. There you also need to decide which reality they want to save at the cost of the other, although there is a way to save both, if you find out how.
• Dude, Where's My Reward?: Just like Starfield's Bethesda sister series, the direct monetary rewards for completing missions are far too low to be worthwhile, rarely even covering the cost of ammo, aid items, digipicks, etc. used in the process. The real reward tends to be the loot you pick up in the process of completing it, especially late in the game where selling a single high-level weapon can get you two or three times as many credits as the actual mission reward.
• Dug Too Deep:
  • One random planetary event, usually triggered at Abandoned Mining Platform locations, is about an oil drilling operation accidentally punching through into an underground lair of Big Creepy-Crawlies. By the time you arrive, all the miners are dead and the platform is overrun by a veritable army of alien monsters.
  • A similar random event has the black crystalline spires commonly around anomalies and temples bursting from the ground at the drillsite with the crew nowhere to be found.
• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • The Hunter can be found and even conversed with at the Viewport Lounge in New Atlantis long before his proper introduction as a villainous Starborn.
  • They "Mysterious Captain" is a random encounter while flying between planets and, the first time you meet her, she merely wishes you luck and says that she's rooting for you. In a New Game Plus, she reveals that she's a Starborn and offers to trade, making her one of the best merchants in the entire game.
• Early Game Hell:
  • The earliest portion of the game is by far the most difficult under most circumstances. You'll be low on money, most types of ammo are scarce/expensive, you'll be lacking Skill investment (including some quality of life features that past Bethesda games gave you for free like "detection" notice while sneaking), and your starting ship, the Frontier, is underwhelming, especially when it comes to weapons, and will be outgunned quickly. As you gain a few levels and figure out the most efficient ways of making money, a snowballing Unstable Equilibrium effect kicks in, making everything far easier as long as you don't stray to places too far above your level. Once you get past level 60 (where the final Level Scaled items unlock and become available), the game will be almost laughable easy on everything but the highest difficulties.
  • This turns out to be cyclical when it comes to the New Game Plus. As you pass through the Unity, becoming Starborn and entering another universe, you get to keep your level, skills, and powers, but lose everything else - weapons, equipment, items, outposts, ships, relationships... Starting over largely from scratch can be challenging and, on top of it, all enemies will get damage and damage resistance boosts each time you do this. (And nowhere in the game does it tell you this.)
• Earth That Was: The game takes place centuries after the Earth has become uninhabitable, as it began losing its atmosphere thanks to its magnetosphere having been destroyed as an inadvertent side effect of early Grav Drive technology, causing all of humanity to have to leave within 50 years under the leadership of the newly-formed United Colonies. By the time of the game, Earth is a featureless desert, covered in sand and rocks, with only a handful of famous landmarks inexplicably standing mostly undamaged in the otherwise empty wasteland. Tragically, it's also implied many things from Earth didn't make it into space — Labrador retrievers, for example, are now extinct. Items made on Earth before it was abandoned (labeled with "Old Earth" in their names) now fetch high prices from certain collectors in the game world.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • Going on a mass murder spree in a city and then surrendering to law enforcement when they stop trying to kill you will earn the player a damning punishment... of only a few days in jail and some experience loss.
  • Committing heinous crimes while no law enforcement is around to engage you immediately slaps you with a hefty bounty, which you can just pay off at any of the self-service bounty clearance boards found in civilian settlements. In other words, no matter how many innocent civilians you murder, Screw the Rules, I Have Money! is in full effect in the Settled Systems.
  • Constellation companions will immediately stop following you if they witness you murdering an innocent, followed by them reading you the riot act over what you just did. Apologizing and promising to not do it again (which might require passing a Persuasion check) makes them forget about the whole thing instantly, but they'll only believe you so many times before they leave you permanently.
• Easy Level Trick: After putting a point into the first level of a skill to unlock it, unlocking the higher levels typically requires performing an action relevant to that skill a given number of times. Some of these are hilariously easy to abuse:
  • Multiple skills (Piloting, Targeting, Ship Command, Aneutronic Fusion, etc.) require destroying a certain number of enemy ships to unlock. This can be tricky and even downright dangerous, especially early in the game when you'll have your weakest ships. However, ships shot down in the UC Vanguard simulator count toward these totals. You can play through the simulator levels until you lose (the last is an Unwinnable Training Simulation that will eventually bring you down unless you cheat), destroying several ships in the process, then simply restart again and again until you've hit the number needed for the skill.
  • Other ship-related skills require grav-jumping x number of times, sometimes with certain caveats like having your cargo hold 75% full (Payloads). You can simply jump back and forth between two nearby, low-level systems with minimal risk or effort.
  • The Sneak skill requires hitting on successful sneak attacks, but doesn't require sneak kills. You can take a very weak gun, add a surpressor, then go to a high-level world with life. Find a big "peaceful" alien creature with lots of health, enter sneak mode, and start shooting. Done right and you can easily unlock the next level simply firing on the same creature repeatedly.
• Emergency Weapon: The Cutter mining laser you're given for the tutorial is rather heavy, deals pitiful damage past the early game, has a maximum range of ten meters, and can't be upgraded at all. What it does have going for it is a self-replenishing battery, and since you'll be lugging one around for resource acquisition purposes anyway most of the time, the Cutter can serve as a last resort backup piece in case you completely run out of ammo for your other guns. Because it counts as a laser, the max-level perk for Laser weapons can make the mining laser have a bit of a Magikarp Power, as the max-tier perk makes every laser shot have a chance to ignite opponente for fire damage-over-time, and the mining laser rapidly tics laser hits on an opponent if fire is sustained.
• Energy Weapons:
  • Your weapon of choice for zero-G combat because, unlike ballistic or magnetic guns, they have no recoil and thus won't launch you all over the place every time you pull the trigger. They are even capable of firing through glass, since they shoot waves of light rather than bullets or magnets.
  • On ships, energy weapons are great at taking down target shields, but much worse at damaging hulls. Ballistic weapons are the exact opposite.
• Evil Sounds Deep:
  • The Ecliptic Mercenaries are equipped with voice modulators in their helmets that give them deep and intimidating voices.
  • The Hunter uses a similar modulator in his helmet and is arguably even more unhinged, being a Starborn who follows the "personal glory" mindset of artifact collecting.
• Experience Booster: Like Skyrim and Fallout 4, sleeping in a bed grants you the "Well-Rested" status for 25 real life minutes during which you'll gain +10% experience. Sleep with a romanced companion nearby and you'll instead get "Emotional Security", a +15% bonus.
• Extinct in the Future: Every Earth animal besides humans, as far as can be told. Not even cats, dogs, or cockroaches are seen. A few Earth plants. such as oranges, do appear.
• Extreme Omnivore: Alien species with "Geophage" in their names can consume minerals, which you can find on their corpses in addition to their biological parts. This can even include metals as extreme as gold, lead, and uranium.
• Extremophile Lifeforms:
  • Several worlds harbor their own complex life but lack traits needed for human habitation. Tau Ceti VIII-B, for example, is lush with plentiful animal life but lacks oxygen, has high chlorine in the air, and has water high in chemicals harmful to humans. Other life-bearing worlds may be too iradiated for humans to live or contain microorganisms that cause infections in humans.
  • Xenogrubs, Heat Leeches, and Terrormorphs can survive on any type of world, from blasted "Inferno" rocks to habitable planets to "Deep Freeze" hunks of ice. The latter two turn out to be the same species, with Heat Leeches being larval Terrormorphs.

Tropes F-J

• Fake Longevity: As is standard for Bethesda games, Starfield has hundreds of hours of content available and director Todd Howard is on record stating that it "was intentionally made to be played for years". However, much of the gameworld not directly tied to a specific quest is Procedurally Generated and can get repetitive quickly. Further padding the time, the game has tons of loading screens, foot travel is slow across most worlds which pads exploration, Double Unlocks (up to sextuple in a few cases) draws out skill leveling and item crafting, the Lockpicking Minigame is far slower paced than previous Bethesda games, and more. One final source of padding the play time is the nature of the New Game Plus mechanic. Passing through the Unity to enter another universe and become Starborn, you essentially start over without any of your prior equipment, ships, or outposts. Building all of that back up takes time, meanwhile enemies get bonuses to damage and damage resistance (that isn't noted anywhere in the game itself) that increase with each NG+ you play, meaning it is more difficult each time. Add it all up and Starfield offers the highest potential play time of any Bethesda game to date... but also has the most "fake" elements to pad it out.
• Fantastic Drug:
  • The game has a wide variety of stat-boosting drugs, some stated to be addictive, others with undisclosed side effects. For example, Heart+ briefly improves health and damage resistance, but if you take too much, then your carrying capacity drops.
  • Aurora is a special psychotropic drug only legal in Neon and is harvested from the planet's native fish species. If you manage to take some off-world (or find it elsewhere), you can only sell it to the same "fences" as explicit contraband.
• Fantastic Firearms: While traditional ballistic firearms are in the game, and remain viable options, there are several other types of weapons that function differently. On top of the aforementioned laser beam weapons, there are also weapons that fire particle beams to similar effect. There are even weapons that are essentially miniaturized rail guns that fire bullet-sized magnets at incredible speeds.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: Interstellar civilization is made possible via a piece of spacecraft hardware called the Graviton Loop Array, or "Grav-Drive" colloquially. It is of the "Jump" variety of FTL engine, instantly disappearing and reappearing between departure and destination. Starships (spacecraft fitted with a Grav-Drive) are common and easily operated enough that Casual Interstellar Travel is possible. Whilst this works great for ships, faster-than-light communication has yet to be invented, resulting in the Warfare Regression to interstellar combat being closer to Wooden Ships and Iron Men than modern naval combat. Even between planets in peacetime, instant long-distance communication doesn't appear to be commonplace (if it's possible at all), as several instances in the game mention runners/messengers/couriers delivering information instead.
• Food Pills: Chunks is a fast food style chain, found on nearly every settled world, that has made an industry out of selling artificial cubed food items in compact, sealed packaging. They are not at liberty to discuss what the food is actually made of, but considering we never see any livestock, the options are not appealing...
• Force and Finesse: Among ballistic weapons, this is the main distinction between Magnetic Weapons and regular firearms. Mag guns bring brutal firepower to bear but can't be suppressed, making them the Force to the weaker but more subtle regular guns' Finesse.
• Foreshadowing: The UC Vanguard missions have a few.
  • It's a mystery how Terrormorphs spread from planet to planet. However, you can overhear ship technicians talking about inspecting your ship for heatleeches, parasites that attach to ships and travel across worlds (and can be encountered all over). It's later discovered Heatleeches are the larval form of Terrormorphs.
  • Vae Victis is pretty insistent you shouldn't bother trying to arrest Orlase and should just blow up his ship. It later turns out that Orlase is both Victis' accomplice and patsy for the Terrormorph attacks, and him turning out alive would reveal Victis' involvement. Thankfully for Victis, even if you do manage to disable his ship and kick in his docker hatch, he kills himself before you can reach him in the cockpit.
• Fragile Speedster: A-class starships generally have the fastest top speeds out of any ship class but they balance this by having the least amount of hull hitpoints and the inability to mount turrets, forcing pilots to perform Old-School Dogfighting in space combat. Some can be outfitted with some particularly powerful weaponry like particle beam guns, potentially turning them into speedy Glass Cannons.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • The teaser trailer is viewed through a camera lens, on which you can see flecks of ice and/or dust. As the sun catches the camera, a word written on the view device is reflected on the lens: "Constellation".
  • Some weathering on a dashboard in the E3 2021 trailer appears to be in the shape of the provinces of Tamriel, the setting for Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls series.
• FTL Test Blunder: The destruction of Earth was caused by the use of prototype grav drives, which emitted powerful gravitational waves that disrupted Earth's magnetosphere, resulting in the loss of its atmosphere and ultimate sterilization of the planet. This outcome is known in advance by its creator, Victor Ainza, who was shown the loss of Earth and colonization of the stars by a Starborn version of himself from another universe.
• Future Food Is Artificial: Agriculture still exists, but the majority of food products you find seem to be lab-grown or heavily processed. In particular, you often see synthetic meat products, but never any livestock. The three major food companies are Advanced Nutrition ("Formulated for health!"), Centauri Mills ("Synthetic by nature!"), and Chunks ("Better than the real thing. That's the Chunks guarantee.") Chunks is notable for being based entirely around cube-shaped, pre-packaged versions of various classic foods: beef, poached eggs, apples, even high-quality red wine. Clerks in the Chunks restaurants are rather cagey about what the food actually contains if asked...
• Game-Breaking Bug: Wouldn't be a Bethesda game without them. Aside from the usual fare like quest flags not triggering properly or plot-critical NPCs glitching to where they aren't accessible, a particular widespread bug keeps part of the crew of a ship called the Dumas flagged as innocent civilians despite them shooting at you. The planet the Dumas orbits may be critical for advancing the main story, and you can't make planetfall while there are hostile ships around, leaving you no choice but to face the social and legal consequences of committing murder if you want to keep playing the main quest.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Going through the ship simulator in MAST level up your piloting ranks as though you were going through real enemies. It also serves as an Anti-Frustration Feature, since the enemies start out relatively easy and dying only stops the simulation, giving a place to grind for players that aren’t use to ship-to-ship combat yet.
  • If you choose to install the Armillary on your ship, it gets integrated into its grav drive and can actually be observed by the player, provided the drive is accessible from the outside.
  • Among the contraband you can choose to smuggle, aside from the usual stuff like illegal drugs or harvested organs, are pieces of mechs and xenowarfare technology, both of which were outlawed by the Armistice that ended the Colony War.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Ships provide several examples of segregation:
    • Much is made about how each starship manufacturer have different areas of specialization. Deimos supposedly makes powerful warships, while HopeTech makes reliable cargo carriers, Taiyo is the luxury brand, Nova Galactic is a defunct manufacturer whose parts are so well-engineered that they're still in use, and Stroud-Eklund is the new company with cutting-edge tech. In practice, there's no real difference. First of all, all the modules who impact a ship's performance, besides cockpits, docking modules, and landing gear, are not made by any of the big manufacturers but by third parties. This means all ships are using the same pool of reactors, grav drives, engines, weapons, shield and cargo modules. All the big manufacturers have are various cockpits, landing gears, dockers, and entry modules. The rest is all structural blocks (who are purely aesthetic) and habs. In practice all a manufacturer affects is the aesthetics of a ship, inside and out. A Nova ship and a Stroud-Eklund ship with the same mass, engines, grav drive, and reactor will behave the exact same despite the fact that their companies use vastly different angles. Also, several habs are identical or nearly identical. For example, the Taiyo and Hopetech 2 x 1 Captain's Quarters are identical (down to the same clutter on the bed) save for the color of the walls and bedsheets, the posters, and the fact the Hopetech one has a light in the bathroom. Again this is despite the fact that Taiyo and Hopetech are supposedly polar opposites.
    • Taiyo is described as making luxury starships that some compare to works of arts. But Taiyo interior modules are the only ones to come with dirt stains and scuff marks all over the floors, making them look worn out, old and poorly maintained.
    • Related to the above, several ships include parts from other manufacturer than their designated creator. The Freestar Eagle, ship of the Freestar Rangers, for example, uses Deimos wings segment on its hull, despite Deimos being the UC's supplier.
    • The Freestar Rangers quest line has the player explore a ship called the Fortuna. Its interior is gorgeous, more akin to a luxury reading room or cocktail bar. No ship that the player can build is anywhere close to the Fortuna...whose cockpit is also completely inaccessible from any entrance, so the player can't steal it, either.
  • After the colony of Londinion was abandoned due to being overrun by Terrormorphs, the UC banned civilians from landing on the planet and actively keeps ships in orbit to enforce this. However, once you gain clearance to land there, you can find the same randomly generated "Points of Interest" as any other planet, including Civilian Outposts and landings by civilian ships at "Ship Landing" sites.
• Geniuses Have Multiple PhDs: During the "Sabotage" quest, a pair of corporate scientists claim that they have six PHDs between them.
• Getting High on Their Own Supply: The Trackers' Alliance agent in Akila City regales a bounty hunting tale of an Aurora smuggler that he was hired by Benjamin Bayu, the governor of Neon himself, to track. After learning that the quarry made a fool of him with false leads he chased across the Settled Systems, he heads back to Volii Prime (the water-covered planet that Neon is on) to find his mark on a floating base out some ways from Neon. There, he found his quarry high as a kite on his own Aurora supply. After the frustrating lead astray, the actual capture was easy because the smuggler thought the bounty hunter was an angel sent to take him to heaven.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: You can spec your character around unarmed melee combat with requisite skill investment, which can result in semi-armored enemies being Punched Across the Room.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • The United Colonies signed a resolution that allowed anyone to create their own colony in the Settled Systems in an effort to speed humanity's disapora. Within twenty years, the Freestar Collective established itself as a superpower to rival the United Colonies by collecting the people that chafed under UC control. And then the UC and Freestar went to war against each other.
  • In one particularly memorable questline, it turns out that Vae Victus, long thought dead but kept alive in captivity by the UC, engineered a Terrormorph outbreak in an effort to turn his clone daughter into a hero and restore the honor and glory of his name. He succeeds: his daughter becomes a hero for stopping the Terrormorph outbreak, destroying his research that enabled it, and reducing the Terrormorph threat from a Sword of Damocles to a minor nuisance. And she does it all while denouncing his name and relying on the work of others to make it happen. And, depending on the player's choices, he may possibly end up dead (for real this time) at the end of it.
• Gravity Screw: Considering Starfield's semi-hard sci-fi setting, this was to be expected.
  • Boarding spaceships or exploring derelict space stations often exposes you to zero-G environments that make navigation and combat trickier than usual. Ballistic and magnetic weapons in particular are disadvantaged in these cases due to their recoil pushing you backwards with every shot.
  • One derelict is a massive freighter whose Artificial Gravity has gone haywire, switching on and off every 15 seconds or so.
  • Partway through the main quest you encounter artifact temples left behind by Precursors that house minor zero-G puzzles inside.
  • Some of the Starborn abilities let you manipulate gravity in various ways, like spawning a zero-G environment in a small area around you, or pushing enemies away with a blast of force.
  • Some planets have significantly more or less gravity than the standard 1G of Earth. Planets with more gravity cause you to use up more oxygen when sprinting, limit your jump and boost pack height, and inflict Fall Damage at much lower heights. Planets with less gravity are the exact opposite.
• Grenade Launcher: Weirdly subverted. The game features two explosive weapons that look like grenade launchers^note the Bridger is a simple pump-action launcher with a tubular underbarrel magazine, while the more advanced Negotiator feeds from a drum magazine, but behave like rocket launchers instead. This was probably intended as an Anti-Frustration Feature so players don't need to account for the constantly varying gravity while hopping between planets.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • You want to acquire a house or apartment in any of the hub cities? Good luck figuring out who to talk to on your own. The only city that gives you some pointers is New Atlantis as part of the UC Vanguard questline, and even that hint is vague enough to be confusing. Fortunately, listening to the random conversations from NPCs will eventually give you directions, but not for every hub city (Neon conspicuously avoids all mentions of getting a house there). You can also set up an outpost to call home, but that requires no small investment of effort and resources, and can come with its own poorly explained elements.
  • The systems for building spaceships and outposts are just as obtuse as the settlement building mechanic in Fallout 4, from which the latter clearly drew a lot of inspiration. While the spaceship example mostly suffers from badly explained stat calculations, setting up supply links between outposts to get an automated manufacturing chain going may induce a Rage Quit or two even after doing exhaustive online research.
  • The "Burden of Proof" quest from the Crimson Fleet questline asks you to collect evidence on the Fleet's shenanigans and hand it over to SysDef. At no point does it state how many items there are (a whopping 20 in total) nor where you're supposed to look for them. Only a handful are found more or less out in the open during the CF questline, but the rest is often hidden in locations completely unrelated to this quest, and some are permanently missable if you fail to pick them up during specific quests. Failing to hand over enough evidence reduces the UC military support you receive for the final battle and also screws you out of a legendary weapon, so you may want to have a guide handy while going through this particular questline.
  • Starfield continues the skill magazine feature introduced in Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, but here they blend in so well with the background clutter that many players are surprised to learn they even exist. Some only found out after scrolling through the list of achievements/trophies they're still missing. And there's hundreds of them!
  • The effects of "Crew" skills are not documented anywhere in game and as such most players will initially assume they work the same as their player equivalents. Unfortunately this is not always the case. Some notable examples:
    • Sarah Morgan's Leadership skill actually increases the player's crew limit from the Ship Command skill by 1, effectively making her a free pick against this limit, though she still counts against the ship's own max crew. Related, Vasco doesn't count against a ship's max crew but does count against the Ship Command limit; having both Sarah and Vasco on the crew effectively allows 1 additional crew member regardless of either the Ship Command or max crew limits.^note There are three limiting factors that determine how many crew members can be assigned to the player's ship: the player's Ship Command rank, the ship's crew capacity, and its crew stations, the lesser of the latter two is displayed as the ship's "max crew". The player can only have as many crew as the least of these three values. In practice Ship Command will limit the player to 3 (4 if Sarah is among them) crew members for most of the game as it is a master-level Social skill and thus requires 12 levels in Social skills before it can even begin to rank up.
    • Speaking of Vasco, his Rank 2 Shield Systems skill only provides a 20% shield bonus, whereas the player version provides 40% at Rank 2.
    • Sam Coe's Rank 4 Piloting skill does not allow the player to fly B or C-class ships without the requisite Piloting rank themselves. Instead Sam's bonus is a 30% increase in ship speed and 1 bonus unit of power in the engines.
    • Crew members with skills such as Geology and Botany do not increase the player's own gathering abilities, instead crew members with these skills will occasionally gift related items to the player.
  • The game neglects to mention that unlocking new spaceship parts is tied not only to advanced Piloting and Spaceship Design perks, but also to your level. So far it seems that you must be at least level 60 in order to unlock all standard parts. Additionally, some parts require the completion of certain quests in specific ways before they become available for purchase. Others can only be found at the shipyards or showrooms of their respective manufacturer. Futher, you will likely see many tooltips about smuggling and shielded cargo bays before you're able to buy them. Shielded cargo bays can only be obtained from the Crimson Fleet and the Red Mile as parts, though there is one place you can buy ships with shielded cargo pods; the seller just doesn't sell them as individual parts.
  • While the effects of the Persuade skill are straightforward, getting better chances at succeeding at speech checks, what the game neglects to tell the player is that other skills in the Social tree can give options that can lead to easier checks, such as the Negotiation skill giving options to bribe characters, Manipulation to bend them to the player’s opinion, or Diplomacy, which is usually a +3 or +4 that rarely fails.
  • The "Entangled" quest can be confusing enough to navigate to the end where you're faced with a Sadistic Choice, most likely unaware of the fact that a third option exists that leads to this quest's Golden Ending. The instructions to achieve this are both extremely easy to miss in the first place and extremely specific to carry out, though the latter is the lesser problem once you've actually found what you need to get started.
  • The game never explains that sneaking is affected by your gear and that unequipping your spacesuit, pack, and helmet considerably increase your chances of avoiding detection.^note You have to manually unequip the pieces. Toggling the "Hide spacesuit/helmet" options on does not count. This is especially baffling as such information would make missions that require sneaking (such as in Ryujin quests) much easier to handle without needing to max out the stealth skill.
  • Although the game provides a basic tutorial for the scanner, it fails to mention that you can scan the icons of undiscovered POI to reveal their nature from afar. You still need to approach and investigate from up close for the survey to officially register, but if you're searching for something specific, like a structure or a natural phenomenon for a survey quest, this can save you a whole lot of tedious walking (and potentially fighting).
  • Nothing in the game hints at one of the artifact temples, Temple Sigma, which unlocks the Parallel Self power, being tied to a companion's personal quest; specifically, to Barrett's. This quest has a lot of dependencies and bugs, giving it a fairly high chance to not trigger properly and leave players wondering how they're supposed to complete their powers collection after Vladimir stops handing out coordinates. Further, Barrett is the only companion with such a quest, despite it being logical and even beneficial if other companions could learn powers as well.
  • If you know that you can significantly increase the cutter's mining speed by holding down the aim button while mining, which focuses the beam. You probably found out by accident or from an outside source because the game sure doesn't mention it.
  • You can get a powerful C-class ship with all the bells and whistles for free if you accept a job from Walter after a certain point in the main story, which is very easy to miss because you get no prompt to do so and have little reason to talk to him of your own volition. The quest itself is another Guide Dang It! example on its own because it can yield different ship designs, and getting the best outcome requires specific decisions to be made.
  • The "Clear Terrain" function for the outpost build mode is a weird inverted example - it's mentioned in the help menu but doesn't actually exist in-game.
  • Ship weapons, on top of range, damage, and rate of fire, have varying capacity (How many shots they can get off before they need recharging while at max power). That last stat is not visible to the player, so you may install what you think is an awesome gun on your ship only to find out it enters recharge after 2 volleys.
  • Environmental hazards and suit protection is never explained beyond "bigger number is better" and "seek shelter if you run out". But it's never clear how much protection you need for a given hazard (For example, how much thermal protection does -150 celsius need?). It's also not clear how much time a given protection level gives you. It's even worst with hazards that don't have numerical values in the planet scan (Like corrosive or toxic atmospheres).
  • Several Perks do not work the way their description implies. For example, Pain Tolerance doesnt cause you to suffer less physical damage, but rather debuff the damage outputs of enemies. So Pain Tolerance will do nothing about self inflicted damage from explosions, or falling damage. It also means it doesn't affect a player's max damage resistance of 85%. Energy Dissipation works the same way. The 4th rank of Heavy Weapon Certification implies you get 25% damage resistance when in fact it increases your existing damage resistance (if any) by 25%. The various ship weapons perk last rank say that they "reduce the cost to use your weapons in targeting mode". By that they mean how much of the targeting mode meter gets consumed, not how much of the weapon energy bar each shot takes.
  • Each subsequent New Game Plus adds invisible buffs to enemy damage and enemy damage resistances. The game does not tell you this in any way.
• Guns Do Not Work That Way:
  • Most ballistic weapons in the game use caseless ammunition. Whereas the casing of standard ammunition acts like a heat sink whose ejection after firing removes a large portion of the heat generated by the exploding propellent, all the heat generated by firing caseless ammo stays in the weapon. This has made overheating the most major problem for all real-life guns built around caseless ammo, to the point that several prototypes all but exploded in the operator's face when the heat inside the gun cooked off the remaining ammo in the magazine, and that was in-atmosphere. With heat management in a vacuum already being a big engineering issue in space, switching guns to caseless ammo would only make this problem worse. Even if the gun doesn't melt into slag from its own waste heat, the stress imposed on the parts and materials from the extreme temperature gradients would result in almost constant jams and a severely reduced lifespan for the gun. For using traditional firearms for space combat, redesigning existing platforms so their ejection systems work properly in zero-G would be a lot simpler, cheaper, and overall more reliable. Unfortunately, cartridge weapons such as the Old Earth Pistol, Shotgun, Assault Rifle, and the XM-2311 wouldn't work properly in a vacuum because they lack these modifications.
  • The Old Earth Pistol is a 1911 / 1911A1 (it has features from both), but missing several parts crucial to its functioning, such as the safety and the slide stop. Funnily, they actually modelled on the gun the holes where those parts should be mounted. This is likely due to a combination of not wanting to make the gun's model too close to the real thing for legal reasons and due to using an airsoft gun as the base for the in-game model.
  • There's actually so much wrong with Starfield's ballistic guns that entire hour-long videos were made about the topic. Highlights include a wildly inconsistent use of the Universal Ammunition trope, guns having no visibly moving parts that would enable their function (like the Eon pistol), other guns having too many moving parts, guns lacking a trigger, guns being weird combinations of normally distinct classes (the Lawgiver rifle is basically a magazine-fed revolver), six-shooters alternating between just two of their cylinder's six chambers instead of firing all of them, and the general problem of magazines containing far more rounds of a given caliber than they realistically should (or, alternatively, less than what's printed on the magazine). And that's not even getting into the unholy abomination that is the Tombstone assault rifle.
• Hard Mode Perks: Similar to Fallout 4, playing on higher difficulty modes improves the quality of loot drops in the world. On Very Hard, almost every Elite Mook drops at least a rare item on death, many drop uniques, and the bosses and boss chests have a very decent chance to drop a legendary item.
• Hero-Worshipper: Selecting the "Hero Worshipped" trait during character creation gives you one in the form of the Adoring Fan, lifted straight out of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. He gives you items, sings your praises, and, in a case of meta awareness, is fully killable.
• Hollywood Silencer: Every single ballistic gun in the game can accept one. Yes, even the shotguns and miniguns. Nothing like hiding in a corner and hosing down an entire room with gatling fire that none of the enemies can trace back to its source.
• A Homeowner Is You: There are several options in the game for acquring a pre-built player home. Choosing the "Dream Home" trait during character creation gives you one automatically, though you must make mortgage payments on it as you play. Completing the UC Vanguard questline earns you a "luxury apartment" in New Atlantis. You can also buy various homes ranging from a converted shipping container (Neon), a subterranean apartment (The Well), and a crumbling older house (Akila). You can also construct an outpost to set up as a player home.
• Hub City: New Atlantis, capital of the United Colonies, is the largest city in the game, has the most merchants, tons of sidequests, and includes the headquarters for Constellation so you'll be visiting very frequently.
• Hub Under Attack: Happens twice to New Atlantis, both during the main quest mission "High Price to Pay" which sees the Hunter trash the Lodge and go on a rampage through the city and the UC Vanguard mission "Eyewitness" which sees Terrormorphs attack the spaceport.
• Humongous Mecha: Towering, bipedal, heavily armed mechs played an important part in the Colony War between the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective, where they seem to have served in roles equivalent to modern-day main battle tanks. They came in various models and configurations that ranged in size from roughly 8 to 12 meters tall and wielded an assortment of heavy artillery guns on their arms and shoulders. Many old battlefields are still littered with mech wrecks, some of which are the target of extensive salvaging operations. However despite a few mechs in the game world looking almost pristine, they can't be piloted by the player, nor can any active ones be encountered — the Armistice that ended the Colony War outlawed mechs.
• Hyperspeed Escape: Although will get the usual "you cannot fast travel when enemies are near" when trying to flee a bad-odds space battle in-system, the game permits and even recommends using the Grav-Drive to jump out-of-system to flee a bad situation. In certain situations, enemy ships might even do this to flee from you. Note, you must actually go to a different system, which requires the Grav-Drive. You will not be able to travel to another planet in the same system to escape combat.
• Improvised Weapon: Three "guns" - the Cutter, the Arc Welder, and the Auto-Rivet - are actually industrial power tools repurposed into ranged weapons of various levels of effectiveness. They constitute a unique category, "tool-grip weapons", that can be buffed slightly by collecting Mining Monthly skill magazines.
• Incredibly Durable Enemies: Aside from the standard HP bonus granted from leveling up, enemies gain an additional 20 hitpoints per level. Combine this with increasingly powerful armor and even basic mooks quickly end up tanking multiple assault rifle clips or point-blank shotgun blasts to the face while still asking for more. This becomes a particular problem once you reach a high enough level for superior equipment to spawn, which marks the point where the player's item-dependent stats can't be improved any further while the enemies continue to grow tankier and tankier.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The Kepler R, a C-class ship that can be acquired through a fairly obscure sidequest, provides excellent performance in almost every metric that matters, making it equally suitable for exploration, combat, and cargo hauling right off the assembly line. Its design is also easy to upgrade with stronger components as you level up your ship design perks, potentially turning it into a bona fide Infinity +1 Sword. Personal taste in aesthetics notwithstanding, this ship can easily carry you through the rest of the game, and you can get it for free.
• Info Dump: Joining the United Colonies Vanguard is the first major sidequest chain you can start after the tutorial, and it just so happens to kick off with an optional visit to a museum exhibit that provides a comprehensive overview of the game's backstory, its factions, and their relations with each other.
• Initiation Quest:
  • Upon arriving at the Lodge for the first time and agreeing to join Constellation, you'll be given an initiation mission to retrieve another artifact while accompanied by Sarah, the group's leader, before becoming a full member.
  • Upon joining the UC Vanguard, you'll be given a "probationary" mission you must complete before getting access to their improved gear and ship parts.
  • After impressing the head of the Freestar Rangers by defusing the hostage situation at the bank when you first arrive in Akila City, you're welcomed in as a deputy should you choose to join. The first mission they give you, aptly named "Deputized", has you escorted by a veteran ranger for what seems like a low-risk mission before you're considered a full member.
  • In order to be accepted into the Crimson Fleet, you're tasked by the group's second-in-command to hunt down and kill a traitor. You have a few options on how to proceed, but once he's dealt with, you're welcomed in.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • One of the earliest Artifact abilities you can acquire mentions "Starborn" in its description long before you encounter them for the first time.
  • Speaking of Artifact abilities, the upper spot on the radial character menu is suspiciously empty when you start a new game. It's where the abilities menu will be placed once you gain access further along in the main quest.
• Item Crafting: There are five types of crafting station — Weapons, Spacesuits, Industrial, Pharmaceutical, and Cooking — each of which uses raw resources to create upgrades and/or new items. Each also has associated Skills, which enable you to craft higher-level items and recipes.
• Jack of All Stats: B-class starships usually strike a middle ground between the Fragile Speedster A-class starships and somewhat (with a few exceptions) Mighty Glacier C-class starships, combining the former's high top speeds with the latter's high amount of hull and shield hitpoints at above average levels of performance.
• Jump Scare: The tutorial level has a nice one if you get too close to a certain set of lockers, which makes a harmless heatleech jump out of one, accompanied by an appropriate Scare Chord (and possibly you wasting a few rounds of ammo). This could also be considered Foreshadowing, considering that the harmless heatleech will be revealed to be the genesis of the far less harmless Terrormorph, a creature heavily discussed during this tutorial.

Tropes K-O

• Karl Marx Hates Your Guts:
  • The standard Bethesda version is in effect. Buying prices are heavily marked up while Selling prices are very low to start, so you can never "flip" bought items for a profit. Investing in the Commerce skill will get you better buying and selling prices, but it'll never even out. Most of your money will come from selling loot, even if you'll never get even half of what the merchant then turns around and sells it for. Starfield also has Bethesda's standard caps on the amount of money merchants have to trade with in a given time period, so even if you do bring back an incredible haul of loot, you'll spend an hour going from merchant to merchant trying to unload it all.
  • Crafting and selling certain items presents a mild exception, but it's not really worth the effort involved to get it set up compared to how much you make selling loot. You can, for example, set up an outpost to mine Cobalt and Nickel (combined worth a base 22 credits per unit) and craft them into Isocentered Magnets, worth 36 credits. Cranking out a few thousand of them nets you a good amount of experience and can be sold, but will likely max out your ship's cargo inventory quickly and you'll be lucky to get a few thousand credits for the effort. Certain high-level crafting items, especially Pharmaceuticals, can net you even higher profits but requires a greater investment in the requisite skills.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: In classic Bethesda tradition, you can loot everything not nailed down and are generally encouraged to do so, especially early in the game when money is the tightest. As soon as you become a member of Constellation, you're free to take everything from the Lodge and the Eye, which can be flipped for some early game funding. The only hangup is that actual stolen goods (marked in red in your inventory) can only be sold to fences, like the Trade Authority or the merchants on the Key.
• Landfill Beyond the Stars:
  • The planet Niira was a major battlefield during the Colony War, seeing the deployment of Mechs and Xenowarfare creatures by both sides. The planet is wracked by mech hulls, crashed ships, and now-feral descendants of the original Xenoweapon creatures. It does have some of the most prized salvage in the Settled Systems, but comes at great risk.
  • Several other planets include much smaller "Mech Graveyards" as Points of Interest, including salvage and the "trashed planet" aesthetic.
• Laser-Guided Karma: During your first visit to New Atlantis, you can pass a group of survivors from a nearby space station that was attacked by Va'ruun Zealots. The station chief, Helena Blake, is one of the survivors, and makes all sorts of demands of the UC officials there to greet them, only to basically be told she's the one who they're holding responsible on account of poor adherence to evacuation procedure resulting in deaths. You can later find her working in TerraBrew, griping about not even being a manager. If you go to the station and wade through the hostile zealots, you can find a number of terminals detailing how she's a boss from hell, one in particular detailing how Blake threatens one of her subordinates with not only termination, but black-listing them from the industry- in her words, turning them into the Settled Systems' most over-qualified barista. Exactly what happens to her!
• Last Disc Magic: Phased Time is a special Starborn power only acquired at the end of your first play through and usable in the New Game Plus. It essentially causes Bullet Time and is every bit as powerful as it seems.
• Late to the Tragedy: As per usual in Bethesda games, there are a lot of abandoned facilities where the inhabitants have already been dispatched by alien monsters/pirates/each other/etc. The tutorial dungeon even has two pirates listening to an Apocalyptic Log for entertainment. One random space encounter features a subversion — it has all the hallmarks of the usual Bethesda take on this, with logs you find as you explore the broken ship having the crew losing more and more hope of getting rescued… and then at the end you discover a log that reveals that just as they had lost all hope, a patrol ship stumbled upon the ship and rescued the crew.
• The Law of Conservation of Detail: Enforced with the ruins of Earth. Having been rendered uninhabitable and abandoned 125 years before the start of the game, it is mostly a barren, irradiated dust ball with only a few recognizable landmarks.^note The Empire State Building in New York City, a launch tower at Cape Canaveral, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles, The Shard in London, two of the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong, the Shanghai Tower, and Abeno Harukas in Osaka. You can also use the command console to find an eleventh which was Dummied Out: the Leaning Tower of Piza.
• Level-Up at Intimacy 5: If you Romance a companion and then sleep in a bed with them nearby, the usual "Well-Rested" 10% to experience becomes "Emotional Security", granting 15% instead.
• Libertarians IN SPACE!:
  • This theme is explored via the Freestar Collective, whose members pride themselves on minimal government control over people compared to their more bureaucratic rival, the United Colonies. However, the realization of this ideal can be quite complicated. The laissez-faire economy encourages corporate investment disproportionate to the Collective's apparently smaller population... but some settlements are either utterly dominated by said corporations (Neon) or owned outright (Hopetown). Akila City presents a purer, frontier-style version of this trope in which independence and personal liberty are heralded, but those who can't make it end up in a slum or the belly of an Ashta.
  • LIST, the League of Independent Settlers, takes this ideal to an extreme. Families might have a whole planet to themselves, with only their own familial hierarchy to govern them and to save them in a disaster - unless some adventurer happens to be passing through.
• Lighter and Softer: While the entire game has a desaturated atmospheric filter and does have its fair share of dark moments, Starfield as a whole is far more optimistic about the future of mankind than Fallout, Bethesda's other, relentlessly bleak sci-fi franchise. Starfield is about exploring the universe and expanding humanity's horizon rather than just fighting for survival, the bad guys are somewhat less psychotic overall, most people you encounter are decent folks, and the standard of living is generally on the better side. The level of Gorn is also vastly reduced, there's no dismemberment mechanic, barely any blood splatters from weapon hits, and none of the factions make a habit of decorating their outposts with strung-up corpses. Also, it's the first Bethesda game, or one of a few in videogames in general, where you can play as a member of a happy family instead of a dysfunctional one.
• Lightning Bruiser: C-class starships start off fitting the mold of Might Glaciers, being the biggest, toughest, and having the most power out of the ship classes while being inherently slower and less agile than smaller ones. However, it is very possible, even easy, to design a fairly large C-class ship that has perfect or near-perfect Mobility while crew and skill bonuses can push its top speed over 200. The Bruiser part comes from access to C-class weapons and shield generators which are the most powerful in the game, and even after those are accounted for the ship should have enough spare maneuvering thrust to add large capacities for fuel and cargo before Mobility starts dropping below 100.^note All of this assumes that C-class engines are used, which have the lowest top speed of 130 but provide by far the most maneuvering thrust. Using lower-grade engines would result in slightly higher top speed but very poor mobility due to less maneuvering thrust.
• Lightning Gun: The Arc Welder fires a short-ranged lightning discharge that deals moderate energy damage.
• Lightspeed Leapfrog: In the "First Contact" side quest, a slower-than-light generation ship left Earth 200 years prior to the current day, and about a decade before the invention of Grav Drive. They eventually arrived at a planet where a MegaCorp had already built a resort. It is up to the player to settle the dispute between the two parties.
• Loads and Loads of Sidequests: There are over 300 sidequests in the base game, including those of the four joinable factions (each of which has its own full Sidequest Sidestory), plus repeatable "Radiant Quests". There are also nearly 200 "Activities", some of which lead you to sidequests, others instead point you toward something of interest (such as a landmark on Earth).
• Lockpicking Minigame: Instead of Bethesda's standard-issue lockpicks, lockpicking in Starfield requires digipicks, electronic devices that let you peek inside a lock and rearrange its mechanism. This is done by matching lines to holes in a series of concentric circles, with more difficult locks featuring more layers and more complex patterns to match. Some of the patterns are often not required for the solution, just to make it a little more interesting. Also unlike lockpicks, which could be used to open multiple locks if you were good enough, opening a lock in Starfield always consumes at least one digipick.
• Magic by Any Other Name: One of the more extreme examples in science fiction, the Starborn powers don't even have a name, much less an actual explanation as to how they work, so calling them space magic is as good a description as any.
• Magnetic Weapons: One of four available weapon categories, complimenting the game's Energy Weapons and plain old ballistic slugthrowers. They deal significantly more damage than most other weapon classes, but they're heavy and their ammo is as rare as it is expensive. They also don't spawn until the player reaches a mid-to-high level, making them somewhat similar in function to Fallout's plasma weapons. What makes them fairly unique is that, instead of launching powerful singular projectiles that may be able to punch through multiple enemies or even walls, this incarnation goes the Death of a Thousand Cuts route by firing huge amounts of low-damage bullets from as many separate barrels (like a handheld magnetic Mitrailleuse, as also denoted by "MI" in their ammo type label). Their handgun and rifle equivalents do so in tightly-grouped clusters similar to a shotgun while their assault rifle and minigun versions fire up to 81 barrels sequentially for an awesome display of More Dakka. Only the MagSniper works like a stereotypical railgun/coilgun, albeit without the exaggerated penetration power.
• Manual Leader, A.I. Party: In contrast to Bethesda's past several titles where you could give commands to companions (for example, directing them to attack a certain enemy or pick up an item directly), they are exclusively controlled by the AI here, with mixed results. The most you can do is have them wait and the only way you can have them acquire items is to access their inventory via conversation.
• Mass Monster-Slaughter Sidequest: After completing the UC Vanguard questline, you gain access to the Apex Predator radiant quests from Percival. These entain collecting samples from hostile, carnivorous species on far-flung worlds. You have the option of harvesting the samples non-lethally for a slightly better reward, but considering you're dealing with vicious, often high-level predators, it's much easier to simply kill them and collect the samples off their corpses.
• Maximum HP Reduction: Prolonged exposure to hostile environments or getting shot by electromagneticc stun weapons wielded by enemies will gradually accumulate as this, and can be purged simply by entering an airlocked compartment (usually your own ship). The stamina meter, referred to in-game as the O2 meter, can also accumulate this after depletion with the CO 2 meter capping the maximum O2 for a time. Though both regenerate/recede at appreciable rates, the CO 2 meter will recede slower than the O2 meter will replenish and will go right back to accumulating if you run your O2 meter out again.
• Minmaxer's Delight: Of all the Traits available to select during character creation, "Kid Stuff" is one of the best and comes with very little downside. Selecting it adds the Player Characters parents into the game who will give you gifts, at the cost of 2% of your total credits each in-game week. That may give some players pause, however, it caps at a measly 500 credits (roughly the price of a single Med-Pack). In exchange, your parents give you gifts including a decent early game ship (it's a mild upgrade over the Frontier and is easier to expand with additional cargo space at a lower cost), as well as a Disc-One Nuke pistol and set of armor. Further, once you've received all of the gifts, you can remove the trait with a simple conversation.
• Mirror Boss:
  • One of the nastiest surprises in the endgame is running into a room and being confronted by eight copies of yourself, with your same suit, helmet, pack, clothes, and weapon. As you're generally well-geared at that point, you'll likely find yourself cut down very quickly. You can unequip your weapon, which will result in eight copies trying to punch you, but the second you kill one, another will spawn with whatever you have currently equipped, only delaying the inevitable. The goal is to instead find the Starborn Guardian creating the copies and kill them.
  • A rather unique twist on the game's implementation of New Game Plus is that you gradually grow into this role for your Starborn enemies. The first time you fight them, you're just a normal human with a few low-level artifact abilities at most, while they keep spamming heavily upgraded abilities towad you. Visit enough Temples and go through the Unity a few times yourself, however, and your powers will eventually match then exceed theirs, forcing them to fight someone who uses their own tricks against them even more effectively.
• The Missing Faction:
  • House Va'ruun proper. House Va'ruun Zealots are a fairly common sight as an Always Chaotic Evil group, but they are a Renegade Splinter Faction that split off when the main House made peace with the rest of Settled Space, while the House withdrew into such deep isolation between the end of the Colony War and the start of the game that the rest of humanity doesn't seem certain they're even still around. They are, but they have gone so far into isolationism that their only contact with others is through undercover agents that don't know where Va'ruun space is and mostly are tasked with arranging smuggling of supplies Va'ruun aren't self-sufficient on to locations where they can be picked up.
  • Trident Starline is the only ship manufacturer who offers no option to buy or modify ships, or buy their ship parts. You can visit their star yard, but they turn you down saying that their ships are on back order, and they do not allow buyers to mix and match parts with those of other manufacturers. You only see one of their ships in the entire game, for a Crimson Fleet quest.
• Modern Day/Sci-Fi RPG Class Equivalents: A number of the "backgrounds" you can select during character generation qualify. "Soldier" is a pretty classic warrior, "Cyber Runner" is a thief, "Space Scroundrel" is a rogue, "Combat Medic" is a healer, etc.
• Money for Nothing: It isn't hard to accrue hundreds of thousands of credits without actively grinding for cash: many quests have a cash reward, there is loads of sellable loot, and most expensive things are not essential. Houses are expensive and offer some benefits, but you can live on your ship without issue and you get a very nice house for free by completing the UC Vanguard questline. New ships are also expensive, but there are several quests where you can acquire a good-to-great ship for free (Mantis, the Freestar Rangers questline, "Overdesigned", etc.) Even building a completely new ship from scratch with all top-of-the-line maxes out around 400,000 credits, which is not a hard total to reach. Finally, the game world is full of loot, and even a single excursion to acquire some high-level loot can earn the credits of every single vendor on even the most populous worlds. In short, it's very easy to end up with more money than you could reasonably ever spend.
• Monumental Damage Resistance: Apart from the NASA facility, the other nine buildings still standing on Earth are all either cultural symbols (Pyramids of Giza, Gateway Arch, Empire State Building) or super-tall skyscrapers (Burj Khalifa, The Shard, Abeno Harukas, Shanghai Tower, U.S. Bank Tower, International Commerce Center).
• Moose and Maple Syrup: "Can-uck!" (a play on Canuck) is a brand of food items with a stereotypical Canadian theme, their packaging featuring giant maple leaves. They sell mundane items like coffee but also more stereotypically Canadian items like poutine, bacon, tourtière, pouding chômeur, and maple syrup flavored soda.
• More Criminals Than Targets:
  • Spacers are a loosely organized group looking for easy raids, but they have multiple lore quests (not randomly generated) where they throw military-scale manpower and even multiple ships into targets that shouldn't be able to return on the investment. One group is besieging a research outpost that has been reinforced with UC Marines. Another has committed wings of ships to trying to take out four settler compounds in a large star system.
  • Ecliptic mercenaries and Va'ruun zealots seem like they would be other offenders, but are strongly hinted to have reasons though. Eliptic is openly rumored to be tolerated as being so powerful because they get a lot of work, including from both major governments when they want deniabliity. For the Zealots there are several indications that House Va'ruun proper knows a lot more about their activities than is let on and directs at least some of them.
• More Dakka:
  • In addition to various trigger and internal mods available for ballistic weapons (allowing such things as firing two bullets with every trigger pull, or just increased fire rate in general), Magnetic Weapons specialize in this. It's notable that they require their own special magazines, and can empty them in seconds. The Magstorm, the heavy weapon version, can fire a 150 round magazine in less than 3 seconds!
  • The Skip Shot unique modification available to Rare, Epic, and Legendary weapons makes every fourth shot fire two rounds, and the extra round is free (doesn't deplete your ammunition). It's only available for dedicated single-shot weapons, so you won't see it on an assault rifle or submachine gun. But the Bridger grenade launcher is a single shot weapon...
• Multiple-Choice Past: Players can determine what kind of background they have prior to the start of the game. This includes both your past employment, which determines your starting skills (including Chef, Cyber Runner, Explorer, Ronin, etc.), and traits, which can further affect your stats and capabilities (Extrovert/Introvert, United Colonies Native, Empath, etc.)
• Multiple Endings: Faction sidequests aside, the game has four endings to its main story, determined by whose side, if any, you chose in the Starborn internal conflict. Three of them lead into New Game Plus, allowing the player to go for different endings with the same character if they so choose.
  • Emissary: The player decides to help the Emissaries seize control of the Armillary, driving out the Hunters and ensuring that only those the Emissaries deem "worthy" of the power and responsibilities of being Starborn can ascend to the Unity. As a reward, the player is offered the choice to become Starborn, leaving their world behind to explore the multiverse.
  • Hunter: The player decides to help the Hunters seize control of the Armillary instead, preventing the Emissaries from enforcing any kind of order upon access to the Unity in this universe, meaning that only those strong enough to defeat the Hunters can ascend. As before, the player is offered the choice to become Starborn.
  • Constellation: The player refuses to aid either Starborn faction, driving both factions out of their universe. Without any major group of Starborn gatekeeping access to the Unity, the people of the Settled Systems are left to choose their own destiny. After passing into the Unity, the player is greeted by a mysterious vision of themselves who provides some Cryptically Unhelpful Answers about who created the artifacts and why, along with the opportunity to become Starborn.
  • Rejection: In any of the above endings, the player can choose to refuse to become Starborn, walking away from the Unity and its power. Rather than the standard New Game Plus that more or less resets the state of the game world, the player simply returns to the world as they left it to continue their adventures.
• The Multiverse: Called the "Unity" by those in the know, assembling all the Artifacts scattered across the Settled Systems opens a gateway to an infinite number of alternate realities. Those who pass through are called "Starborn" and leave the current universe behind to start anew in the next one, which forms the in-game justification for New Game Plus once you yourself reach this point at the end of the main quest.
• Mundane Utility: Artifact abilities allow you to perform incredible feats like manipulating gravity, throwing plasma balls with the heat of a star, resurrecting dead animals, detect living beings from hundreds of meters away, or... instantly mine all minerals in a small radius around you. One of the most useful of these "bending reality to your will" abilities, "Personal Atmosphere", puts you into into a bubble of pure Oxygen. Sure, it negates the effects of toxic gases and the like, but it lets you sprint indefinitely through repeated uses. It makes exploring much faster.
• Mythology Gag: Fans of the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls franchises will recognize a lot of familiar elements and/or references in Starfield.
  • One of the possible backgrounds you can choose is "Hero Worshipped", which means that the player can have the Adoring Fan as a potential follower, complete with the same voice actor and a (relatively) more realistic version of his Tamriel counterpart's haircut.
  • Delvin Mallory is registered as a prisoner in the Lock prison on Suvorov.
  • The various artifact abilities are, for all intents and purposes, the Dragon Shouts from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with futuristic/multiverse-themed descriptions.
  • The level-up jingle is lifted straight from Fallout 4.
  • Most of the factions have counterparts in previous Bethesda games:
    • Spacers are Raiders/Bandits.
    • Ecliptic, a psychotically ruthless and violent mercenary organization, are more or less a carbon copy of the Talon Company or the Gunners.
    • The Freestar Collective has a lot in common with the New California Republic, including their Freestar Rangers as their version of the NCR Rangers (with some traits of the Commonwealth Minutemen as well).
    • The Va'ruun are a violent religious cult akin to the Children of Atom and most Daedric Prince cultists (i.e., the Mythic Dawn).
    • Ryujin Industries is Skyrim's Thieves' Guild. Most of their missions involve stealth, stealing, or planting things. You get penalized for using violence. Their focus is exclusively on making more money. They have close ties to a ridiculously corrupt politician who has a stranglehold over an entire city. There's even a traitor among their leadership, like in Skyrim.
  • Neon is basically sci-fi Riften, seeing how both cities are crime-ridden and run by a hyper-corrupt business(wo)man/politician who use the local police force as their personal enforcers. And as mentioned above, Neon hosts the HQ of Ryujin Industries, Starfield's Thieves Guild equivalent. Both also have a thriving fishing industry.
  • The icon for maxing the Crippling skill is an arrow in the knee.
  • Terrormorphs are essentially Deathclaws in space, complete with stealth subtypes and a general, well-earned reputation as The Dreaded (though their burrowing ability is closer to the Radscorpions in Fallout 4).
  • Just like in Fallout 4, you get to take up the mantle of a self-styled vigilante superhero, including a unique outfit and a spiffy hidden lair. Starfield's version is called the Mantis and the most comically blatant Batman Expy by Bethesda to date.
  • Neon is home to a psychotic gang called the Disciples that likes to dress in garish colors, just like the similarly named raider gang in Fallout 4's Nuka-World DLC.
  • The "Burden of Proof" quest from the Crimson Fleet questline is essentially the much-maligned "No Stone Unturned" quest from the Thieves Guild questline in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Both task you with collecting a set of about two dozen easy-to-miss items without telling you how many there are or where you're supposed to look for them. Some are found near important NPCs during the questline, but most are hidden in locations with a tangential connection, if any. In either case you're unlikely to find the full set without consulting a guide, and a handful of the items in question are Permanently Missable Content, at least in the release version of the game. Unfortunately, "Burden of Proof" is somehow even worse than its predecessor because its rewards aren't nearly as useful and powerful.
• Named Weapons: There are a number of unique weapons that carry appropriate names and unique models, such as the "Deadeye" revolver given to Freestar Rangers. Some can be looted from unique enemies as well. There's also unique ships, which can be based on a standard design but have a unique look or feature to differentiate them from the countless "Crimson Fleet Wraiths", for example.
• Neglected Sidequest Consequence:
  • Just before entering the Unity, you can see several scenes showing the impact you had during your playthrough. Not engaging in the faction questlines or, worse, choosing the selfish/evil paths during them, leads to some seriously negative consequences for the Settled Systems.
  • A secondary objective during the Sysdef/Crimson Fleet questline is to collect evidence of the Fleet's activity. Some of it is easily acquired just by following the questline, but others are a serious Guide Dang It!, being in completely unrelated locations. If you don't find enough of it during the questline, the UC Navy will deny Commander Ikande's request for backup when attacking the Fleet's HQ, making it much more challenging.
• News Travels Fast: Despite being a setting explicitly without FTL communications, your newsworthy actions may be playing on SSN updates or be being discussed in NPC chatter just minutes after you completed them. Additionally, your Constellation companions will want to speak to you about your decisions at the end of every major faction questline right after completing it, even if they were on a remote outpost on the other side of the Settled Systems.
• Never Bring A Knife To A Gunfight: Melee combat in Starfield is practically suicide. 90+% of humanoid enemies wield firearms, and the various alien critters that attack in melee are much better at it than you can ever hope to be. To make matters worse, melee weapons can't be upgraded at all and only have a single basic tier, giving them pathetic damage output compared to anything but the most basic starter guns. And to put icing on the cake, the Spacefarer's very slow, non-improvable movement speed while sneaking (slower than NPCs' walking speed) makes sneak melee attacks highly impractical despite the potentially massive damage multiplier granted by the associated perk.
• New Game Plus: In a major first for any Bethesda game, finishing Starfield's main story lets you start over with all the skills you acquired, but your worldly possessions stay behind in the universe you came from, together with all the events and social bonds you built there. You also get a nifty Starborn ship and space suit for free, can skip most of the main questline if you wish, and may witness some minor changes in dialogue here and there… unless random chance has you enter a variant universe^note there is a 15% chance of doing so on each NG+; none of them let you pursue the main questline as the changes you encounter when first visiting the Lodge are too large.
• N.G.O. Superpower:
  • The mercenary organization Ecliptic fields enough men, ships, and combined firepower to give the setting's major navies constant headaches. They even have their own battleship, and Ecliptic's top brass isn't afraid at all of attacking and occupying active military garrisons if there's something there that they want. Their strength at arms doesn't really factor into any questline, but it sure makes you wonder if the UC's or Collective's military could stand up to them for long if push comes to shove. They also don't even seem to flinch at throwing their forces away if the pay is good enough.
  • The Crimson Fleet can reach a similar power level, depending on how you resolve their questline. Completing it in their favor makes them massively wealthy, deals a crippling blow to UC Sysdef, and all but establishes them as a third major power in the Settled Systems after the UC and Freestar Collective.
• No Hero Discount: The case for most merchants, but there are a few exceptions. If you complete the UC Vanguard questline and become a UC citizen, you'll get discounts from UC merchants. However, these discounts are given to all citizens and your heroism merely excelerated your path to that status. There are also a number of merchants who offer missions and, once complete, will give you a discount, such as Jane Weller on Mars.
• Nominal Importance: The vast majority of NPCs in the game are reffered to generically, like "Citizen", "Miner", "Colonist", etc. The odds are good that if an NPC has a name, they will be involved with a mission somewhere at some point.
• Noob Cave: After completing the tutorial and creating your character on Vectera, you'll find yourself accosted by pirates when you try to leave the system. In order to stop their attacks, you'll need to kill the pirate captain in an abandoned research station on the nearby moon of Kreet. All of the pirates within are low-level enough that Vasco can handle them mostly on his own and it serves to ease you into combat, looting, and picking locks, while the pirate captain at the end serves as a Warm-Up Boss.
• No OSHA Compliance: Cydonia, a major United Colonies mining facility on Mars, falls under this - its "X days since last accident" display isn't actually measured in days but hours, and its resident doctor is clearly exasperated by all the avoidable work-related injuries she has to treat day by day. They also play a periodic warning over the loudspeaker acknowledging that, despite Mars' only having about 40% of Earth's gravity, trying to jump from the top platform to the mine area down below will still hurt.
• Nothing Is Scarier: With the Pale Lady derelict ship, an example of Type 2. Throughout it, you hear a woman laughing in the background, and notes revealing terrible things happening to the people there, but in the end, nothing actually happens to the player, jump scare or otherwise.
• Not Hyperbole: You get stopped in Ebbside by a guy warning you about the Disciples. He says that they'll stab you and take bets on how long it will take for you to bleed out and that's not "hyper-whatchamacallit". That literally happened to a friend of his.
• Notice This:
  • Lootable containers usually have glowing green highlights, which stop glowing if you empty the container. There are a couple of exceptions: for example, space suits are found in metal boxes with rounded corners. The shape is distinctive, but no glow.
  • If a "slate" is worth reading (it starts or continues a mission, for example), it will probably be propped upright on a desk instead of lying flat where it can be mistaken for a junk item notepad or tablet.
• Not Now, Kiddo: As you pass the survivors of the Va'ruun Zealot attack on Starstation RE-939 in the New Atlantis Spaceport, a boy named Bobby insists his parents aren't dead but just got on a different evac shuttle seemingly in denial of their deaths, to the disbelief of the bureaucrat sorting out their arrival. He's to be set up with foster parents. In a later encounter in the city proper, you see Bobby again, with his parents very much alive having done exactly what Bobby said they did. Bobby gets indignant at you being just another incorrectly assuming adult if you call them his foster parents.
• Planetville:
  • No planet has more than one major settlement. While you can explore outside of that settlement, it's all wilderness and things like outposts, mines, labs, etc.
  • Lopez in the "Failure to Communicate" quest is a farmer who's unhappy with getting some new neighbors. The neighbors in question: other farms on other moons in the solar system. Lopez has only occupied a tiny part of his own moon, and he still complains that "this was my system first!"
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • "Registering" a ship costs 90% of a ship's purchase or building cost, for no discernable reason. Yet if you want to sell a ship, you need to have it registered, even if you're trying to sell it to actual space pirates (Who apparently are sticklers for paperwork?). You can still pilot and use the ship, you just can't modify or sell it until it is registered. This clearly exists to stop players from just boarding every hostile vessel they encounter and flipping those over for hundreds of thousands of creds at the closest ship technician. What makes this even funnier however is that several ships you can acquire somehow don't require you to register them, despite no reason being ever given why. For example, the Mantis' ship is found abandoned, its owner and her heir both dead. Yet this ship somehow auto-registers to the player. Same thing happens with the abandoned UC Shuttle acquired with the Crimson Fleet.
  • In previous Bethesda games that allow inventory sharing with companions, you could get past their encumbrance limit by ordering them to pick up items from the ground or loot containers/dead bodies directly. Here, that option no longer exists. You can only give your companions items by opening their inventory via dialogue and are unable to go past their encumbrance limit.
• Old-School Dogfight: The vast majority of space combat consists of a handful of small to medium-sized, individually piloted spaceships duking it out with Fixed Forward-Facing Weapons at close range like old-school combat aircraft. Auto-targeting gun turrets exist, but the fact that they can only shoot at random targets in range without any prioritization or other tactical settings means most ship designers prefer to focus their firepower forwards regardless.
• One-Hit Polykill: Some ballistic guns can be upgraded with Penetrator rounds that, aside from providing a very decent damage bonus, can punch through any number of lined-up targets without losing velocity. Granted, the chances to actually benefit from this trait are low at best, but it's always satisfying in the rare event you do manage to take out two or three bad guys with one shot.
• One Riot, One Ranger: A trait of the aptly named Freestar Rangers. One of their missions even has this as its title. It's mostly out of necessity due to the limited size of the organization relative to what they're responsible for: there's never been more than twelve full-rank Rangers covering three entire star systems with additional duties at Freestar outposts across much of explored space. For understandable reasons, the Rangers tend to limit whatever they're sending in to "one Ranger, possibly a Deputy learning the ropes to become a full Ranger, and whatever crew and associates they have outside the Rangers".
• One Size Fits All: Any spacesuit or clothing item you buy, loot off of a corpse, or find out in the world will fit you or any companion you give it to. It will even change shape if you take it from a male character and give it to a female character, or vice versa.
• Only Shop in Town: Averted by the larger settlements which have numerous merchants, often specializing in one type of good (weapons, aid, resources, etc.) However, smaller settlements and the random "Civilian Outpost" points of interest you can find while exploring generally only have a single merchant with a limited inventory.
• Opening the Sandbox: After completing the tutorial, creating your character, fighting off the pirates on Vectera, and then killing the pirate captain at the research station on Kreet, "Protocol Indigo" causes Vasco to lock down the Frontier and prevent you from going anywhere other than the Lodge in New Atlantis to bring the artifact to Constellation. Once done, the sandbox opens and you're free to go where you want. It actually happens a little later than in most other Bethesda titles, taking a couple of hours unless you're really rushing through.
• Organ Drops: Organic resources harvested from alien fauna typically take this form, with the resource listing the part of the creature it came from. For example, "Sedative (Carapace)", "Structural (Bone)", "Metabolic Agent (Gland)", etc.
• Orphaned Setup: A random space encounter involves a geologist from UC MAST on an expedition who asks if you have any rock samples. Regardless if you give her any, she says farewell, and then her ship's Grav Drive takes its sweet time to spin up. She passes the time asking about hobbies, and then goes on to start telling a geology joke. Right when the punchline is imminent, her ship's grav-drive finally activates.
• Our Weapons Will Be Boxy in the Future:
  • Zigzagged the available firearms, as there are several manufacturers each with different aesthetics; once you recognize them you can reliably guess which company makes which weapons. Several energy weapons that fire lasers, particles, and magnets are very boxy in their design, like the Equinox laser rifle which is essentially a big metal rectangle with iron sights. Combatech ballistic weapons (Beowulf, Hard Target, etc.) Downplay it, looking futuristic with some boxiness that wouldn't be out of place in the Mass Effect series. However, other weapons, particularly traditional ballistic ones, are less boxy in their design. On the other hand Laredo's distinctive offerings (like the Lawgiver rifle and Rattler pistol) are the exact opposite, having a mix of metal parts with wooden (or faux-wood) furniture. The one that takes the crown is the Big Bang particle shotgun; with its only "curves" being varying levels of beveled edges, and even the reflex sight has a square frame. It resembles some manner of handheld scanner gadget with its flat predominantly white-colored casing, belying its status as one of the most horrifically damaging shotguns in the game.
  • Played straight by many particle beam ship weapons, which are literally just rectangular boxes with next to no embellishments bolted to the hull.
  • Played straight by "mag" weapons, who all have rectangular barrels. The Magstorm and Magshear in particular employ multiple barrels set in a grid inside a rectangular components, with the rest of the game made of square and rectangular industrial-looking tubing.

Tropes P-T

• Pamphlet Shelf: Quite common. If you see a bookshelf, odds are you will only be able to actually pick up and read a few of the books at most. The library at the Lodge is a prominent case, as several characters will comment positively on it, but you cannot actually read any of the books.
• Party of Representatives: The members of Constellation respresent most groups in the Settled Systems. Sarah is a former UC officer, Sam is a former Freestar Ranger (and descendent of the founder of the Freestar Collective), Andreja is a member of House Va'ruun, Vlad is former Crimson Fleet, Matteo is a member of the Sanctum Universum, and Vasco is a Robot Buddy. Barrett's background is a little less clear, but he's been a lifelong explorer who mentions one point as having earned UC citizenship.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling:
  • One of the easiest/fastest methods of Level Grinding entails going to a planet with alien life and then killing everything you come across. It's especially effective early in the game on lower level worlds, where you can even use the unlimited ammo mining cutter to kill with ease. After enough slaughter, you'll gain the level-ups you need to unlock all of the early game "quality of life" skills and/or minmax in a particular tree to unlock powerful/useful high-level skills early.
  • Numerous ship-related skills require shooting down other ships in order to unlock the next level. The game counts ships defeated in the UC Vanguard training simulator toward that total, meaning you can use it for Stat Grinding those skills at no risk. (Unlike a real ship battle that results in a game over if you die, the simulator simply resets.)
• Penny Shaving: One scheme in New Atlantis that siphons .0001 credits per transaction at GalBank also siphoned enough power from The Well to cause constant brownouts. It has accumulated over 300,000 credits by the time the player finds it.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • If you don't finish a Constellation companion's personal quest before the "High Price To Pay" quest, then there is a chance that it will be rendered inaccessible going forward. One of your companions will die during this mission, depending on your personal affinity with them and who you go to help. If you haven't finished their quest before then, and they're the unlucky one to die, then it's over.
  • Unsurprisingly, if you side with UC SysDef against the Crimson Fleet in the CF questline, all the traders and their unique merchandise aboard the Key go down with the rest of the pirates and become inaccessible going forward. Depending on how you finish the final quest, the Key itself can be destroyed as well. Similarly, the US Sysdef sidequest "Burden of Proof" that runs simultaneously with that questline has permanently missable pieces of evidence that will make it impossible to complete.
• Pistol-Whipping: Any ranged weapon can be used to perform a quick melee attack for negligible damage and potentially a brief staggering effect. One possible property of rare weapons doubles the damage dealt this way, but it still doesn't make it a particularly useful combat feature unless you're completely out of ammo.
• Plot Tunnel:
  • Downplayed midway through the main quest, where the missions "Short-Sighted", "No Sudden Moves", and "High Price to Pay" will occur back-to-back. The first has all of your Constellation companions except one go to the Eye to perform upgrades, preventing you from traveling with them or completing their personal missions. You and the remaining companion will then complete "No Sudden Moves" to retrieve another artifact. When you return with it to the Lodge, "High Price to Pay" will automatically trigger, causing the Hunter to attack both the Eye and the Lodge, killing one companion, and forcing you to flee with the artifacts. Downplayed in that you can still go do things away from the main quest in this span, but the main questline and each of your companions are "tunneled" until this stretch is completed.
  • Also downplayed once you reach a high enough affinity with each of your Constellation companions, as they will ask you to help with a personal sidequest. Once you agree to start it, they will be locked in as your active companion until it is completed, preventing you from traveling with any other companion. You can still do other content, but will be in a "tunnel" in terms of companions.
• Plunder: By far the most lucrative and quickest way to raise money is to loot everything you (and your companion, and your ship) can carry from your enemies and their bases, then take it back to civilization to sell it. Monetary quest rewards have serious Dude Wheres My Money issues and, while you can set up mining/farming outposts to turn a profit, it's much more tedious and time-consuming than good old-fashioned looting. You can take it the logical extreme by joining the Crimson Fleet, outright Space Pirates, and "plunder" non-hostile ships and settlements.
• Point Build System: The game uses a system reminiscent of the Fallout franchise's Perk system, with Character Level also playing a factor. After gaining enough Experience Points, you'll gain a level which automatically increases certain attributes like Hit Points. You also gain a Skill Point, which can be applied to one of the dozens of "Skills" in the game, enhancing your competency in that skill.
• Point of Divergence: The Hunter explains that in every other one of the universes he's been through, enough to have lost count, the player character always dies between finding the first artifact on Vectera and the Hunter's rampage on New Atlantis. By reaching your ship during the latter event, you've made it farther than he's ever seen before, meaning this universe is different. He muses about whether this simply the product of infinite universes or if the Unity is finally doing something about him.
• Pop-Star Composer: Imagine Dragons wrote and performed "Children of the Sky" as a tie-in song to the game.
• Power Up Letdown: In the New Game Plus after entering the Unity, you become Starborn and emerge in another universe with your own Starborn ship and suit. For the first NG+ run, both are worse than the best standard ships and armor you can obtain, leading to serious letdown. It takes playing through multiple new game plusses until they're upgraded enough to surpass the best standard equipment, all while enemies get hidden bonuses to damage and damage resistance, making it harder to reach that point.
• Precursors: Whoever built the artifacts and everything related to them certainly wasn't human. The Constellation ending simply calls them "Creators", but that's all we ever learn about them — in fact, in a surprise Bait-and-Switch, the story actually removes one thing that had been thought certain as it suggests they may or may not have originated as humans, with it turning out that the Starborn are actually just as in the dark as Constellation is about where the hell the Artifacts come from.
• Press Start to Game Over: You can lose health during the prologue by either exhausting your stamina or jumping from a high place. The game doesn't let you save until after you touch the artifact and create your character. Guess what happens if your health drops to zero from a high jump.
• Procedural Generation: Used to fill out much the vast game world including its 1,000+ explorable planets/moons. Large settlements and quest-related areas are hand-crafted, while the surrounding landscape is procedurally generated, then pulls level-appropriate enemies, creatures, loot, resources, etc. from set lists to populate them, adding a dash of Randomly Generated Levels.
• Ragnarök Proofing:
  • Despite the company being defunct and dating back before the death of Earth (~200 years ago), Nova Galactic starship parts are still in use due to their hardiness and heavy use of redundant components. This is because Nova Galactic existed in a time without Casual Interstellar Travel, so unlike modern designers, they couldn't just assume that their customers will be able to call for help or reach a shipyard if needed. Stylistically, Nova Galactic looks the most "NASA-Punk" of the five brands available to the Player. The starter starship, the Frontier is a Nova Galactic model.
  • During the quest "Unearthed", you explore the abandoned NASA headquarters and have to fight their fully functional, 200-year-old security robots.
• Rainbow Pimp Gear: Downplayed in that there are only three elements of your suit you can switch out (plus "Attire", but that isn't visible if your suit is on), but you can still make for some colorful combinations, such as wearing a red and black "pirate" helmet with a lime green and white "Cydonia" space suit plus a silvery "Star Roamer" pack.
• Rare Random Drop: Enemies and chests have a small chance to spawn "Rare", "Epic", and "Legendary" tier weapons and equipment that have bonus effects built into them. Like its predecessor Fallout 4, the odds of them dropping increase if you play on higher difficulty levels. Additionally, "Boss" enemies and "Boss Chests" are more likely to spawn them as well.
• Rat Stomp: In a sci-fi variant, a sidequest available early on Mars has a merchant ask you to clear a crashed ship of vermin to an extraction team can acquire his shipment. The vermin in question are Heatleeches, level one critters who only pose a danger via Zerg Rushing you.
• Relationship Values: Each Constellation companion has a hidden set and taking certain actions/conversation options can increase or decrease them similar to Fallout 4. Once the value gets high enough, that companion will ask you to help them with a personal mission, after which they become romanceable and can even be married.
• Required Party Member: Several main quest missions require that you team up with a certain member of Constellation, who can't be switched out until that mission is completed. Similarly, each companion's personal mission, given once you've reached high enough Relationship Values with them, pairs you up with that companion until it is complete.
• Resting Recovery: As is a staple of Bethesda games, resting in a bed fully restores your health and even grants you a temporary "Well-Rested" Experience Booster. However, it cannot be done when enemies are nearby and doesn't heal ailments, which require the passage of real time or the use of specific items.
• Romance Sidequest: Each of the four Constellation companions is romanceable once you've gotten their Relationship Values high enough and have completed their personal mission. You can take it a step further by marrying them, which involves a small sidequest. Doing so upgrades the "Well-Rested" 10% Experience Booster to an "Emotional Security" 15% boost if you sleep with them nearby.
• Recurring Element: Starfield has many of the classic elements of Bethesda games. Beyond the similar game genres (a Wide-Open Sandbox world with Western RPG elements veering into Action RPG territory), there are the requisite Loads and Loads of Sidequests, plus full blown Sidequest Sidestories in the form of the "Faction" questlines, which are nearly as expansive as the main quest itself.
• Refusal of the Call: If you get arrested by the UC Vanguard after entering the Lodge for the first time, you'll be brought to Commander Ikande, who will give you the choice of either working for UC SysDef to take down the Crimson Fleet or being thrown in jail (with a fine tacked on for good measure.) You can still refuse, much to his disappointment.
  Commander Ikande: Suit yourself. You know, I have to admit, I'm a bit surprised. My instincts told me you were the right person, but I suppose I was wrong.
• Religion of Evil: House Va'ruun is essentially an Apocalypse Cult, worshipping a mystical entity called the Great Serpent and is violent, xenophobic, and Nineteen Eighty-Four-levels of oppressive even against its own congregation. Outsiders are universally considered heathens to be killed on sight. The Great Serpent itself is described as a wrathful, destructive deity whose prophesied arrival will wipe all nonbelievers from the face of the galaxy, so there's really not much leeway for the cultists to be anything but homicidal lunatics. They waged the "Serpent's Crusade" against the Settled Systems decades before the game started and still have that reputation even after the house proper retreated into seclusion, leaving only pillaging "Zealots" to remain of the order.
• Remember When You Blew Up a Sun?: If you choose the "Kid Stuff" background at character creation that adds your character's parents to the game, they will bring up your exploits in conversation. It ranges from the notable-if-mundane events like joining Constellation to things like stopping a bank robbery or bringing down the Crimson Fleet.
• Riddle for the Ages: The actual source of the Artifacts is never truly given, aside from the general assumption that they were created by the hyper-advanced Creators. Even the Starborn will admit that they don't really know where the Artifacts come from — they just know how to manipulate them to their advantage. In the "Constellation" ending, the alternate version of your character who speaks for the Unity states that you may one day meet them, but not now, and no matter how many times you play through the New Game Plus, you never get to.
• Robot Buddy: One of the companions is Vasco, a very vaguely humanoid bipedal robot that serves Constellation. Several other characters and factions are accompanied by similar bots.
• Running Gag: Sweetrolls are one of the prepared food items that can be found or purchased. They got their start way back in Bethesda's first new IP, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, where they were part of a question in the Player Personality Quiz. They've reappeared in every Elder Scrolls game since and made the jump to the Fallout series once Bethesda acquired it, putting them into every major Bethesda property.
• Save Scumming: Much like its Fallout sister series, this can be used to get around mechanics with Random Number God elements like Persuasion and Pickpocketing. In the case of Persuasion, you can put points in the relevant skill, wear certain persuasion boosting clothing, and take certain drugs, but there's still a chance you will even the easiest (green labeled +1) persuasion attempts. Since you only get one persuasion attempt, it's better to save and reload if you get bitten by random failure.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty:
  • As you level up, so do enemies. While this makes sense as classic Level Scaling, and you do unlock, find, or buy better gear to handle the greater threats, the space combat also gets more difficult. While your starting ship, the Frontier, is decent at taking on targets bigger than itself and coming out on top, unless you upgrade the ship, adding new modules and weapons, or get a new ship, you're going to be rapidly outgunned and losing space battles constantly, even when you're decimating your foes in ground combat. This is accentuated by the fact that while you can loot new personal gear, ship modules and upgrades must be purchased, and they're a massive Money Sink across the board.
  • New Game Plus applies an attack and damage resistence buff to all enemies that increases based on how many times the player has finished the game. This means each playthrough becomes significantly more difficult, but the player will never find out why as the game keeps these effects hidden.
  • The perk leveling system also falls under this trope. While some perks are ridiculously easy to level up, often passively just by playing the game normally (for example, killing enemies, shooting down ships, looting containers, etc.), others require an inordinate amount of grinding. Some like the Concealment stealth perk are so hampered by their associated mechanics that you're all but forced to cheese them one way or another. This is compounded by Double Unlock factors like higher-tier perks only unlocking once you've invested a minimum number of points in their respective skill tree, so you want to decide carefully which other perks you start leveling up for this purpose. And to add insult to injury, you can't even see what you'll be required to do to level a perk unless you've put at least one point in it first.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale:
  • The randomly generated asteroids and space debris orbiting their parent moons/planets are perilously too close in distance with them, meaning that they run the risk of impact events that can affect their moons/planets at an alarmingly high frequency rate and most likely will cause a Class 6 or Class X Apocalypse How event as far as both distance and energy are involved.
  • Writing printed on the standard fragmentation grenade states that it uses an "8.8oz Matter/Anti-Matter Charge." Even if we assume the 8.8 figure means that it's 4.4 each of matter and anti-matter, the energy released by such a reaction would total 5.3 megatons, meaning a single grenade could level an entire city.
  • A lot of quests seem to not realize just how big individual planets are. "First Contact" has a generational ship arrive to a planet only to find the planet has since had a single hotel built on it. Everyone involved acts like the colonists' only options are to join the hotel settlement or move on, not like there are several continents free for their use.^note Which you can actually bring up in dialogue, but the pioneers are so ambitious that they apparently foresee their society growing to encompass the whole planet. While the hotel owners legally own the whole planet and are selfish pricks, so they won't share. But on the other hand the planet is in free space, which means the only party to enforce their ownership is the hotel itself, which clearly can't do that hence their hiring you.. Another quest, "Failure to Communicate", has a farmer feuding with some neighbours whom he views as encroaching on his turf. Who are these claim-jumpers? Three other families on different bodies in the solar system. On Gagarin, the pollution from one mine somehow rendered the entire planet unlivable. In yet another quest, there's a CEO trying to do a land grab scheme involving farmland he's applied a chemical to, in the guise of being a fertilizer, but it in fact makes the soil rich with minerals. It seems the fact that the planet in question is mostly uninhabited, so he could just use his technology in some random spot and harvest there without trouble, never occurred to him. Or use one of the dozens of uninhabited-but-hospitable planets.
  • The Freestar Collective's Rangers, of which there are only twelve Rangers for the whole of Freestar space. Granted, the Collective is far more hands off than the UC, but it's little wonder crime and corruption are so rampant. They also have the Freestar Militia which act as more of a police force, defending against outside threats and things like pirates, but don't seem to deal with the internal corruption either.
• "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: Hilariously, the player-character can take part in one at the settlement of New Homestead. However, rather than covering up a crime, the goal is to cause tourists to stop coming so the colony's only doctor can focus on the colonists rather than tourists injuring themselves while exploring the colony.
• Secret Test of Character: During Vanguard recruitment, when doing the piloting simulator, there's a debug terminal right out in the open in the simulator room the player can access to give themselves an advantage. The recruiter compliments the player if they use it. Resourcefulness and creativity are useful traits in a Vanguard member, and the highest difficulty challenges of the simulator are designed around the "debug" options being exploited.
• Sequel Hook: Several plot points are left unexplained, suggesting they may appear in a future sequel/DLC.
  • None of the endings explain who/what the "Creators" are, why they placed the artifacts/temples in the multiverse, or anything else about them. In the "Constellation" ending, the alternate version of the player character mentions that you may get to meet them one day, but not now, implying they may show up in the future.
  • We never learn the identity of the Pilgrim, a Starborn who came into the current universe centuries prior seeking an understanding of the Unity and impacting the setting's three major religions (Sanctum Universum, Enlightened, and Va'ruun).
  • Sebastian Banks, the founder of Constellation who mysteriously disappeared long before the time of the game, is never encountered and his disappearance is never explained.
  • House Va'ruun space is never explored (or even found), leaving it primed as a setting for future adventures.
  • If you side with UC Sysdef at the end of the Crimson Fleet questline, Naeva, second-in-command of the fleet, escapes and is nowhere to be found after. Given that bringing down the fleet and killing her partner are involved with that decision, she surely harbors a grudge against the player character.
• Sequence Breaking: In New Game Plus, you can bypass most, if not all of the main story by simply telling Constellation that you're a Starborn and the purpose of the Relics. On the other hand, you could keep mum and simply replay the main story all over again, which elicits new dialogue from the Emissary and the Hunter who chew you out and defend your choice respectively. Note that if you get a rare NG+ start (about 15% chance of happening) where the status of Constellation is shaken up (such as the members being missing, retired, or deceased), this trope is in effect by default since the "replay the main quest" option is off the table as a result.
• Shiny-Looking Spaceships: Averted. Even the most elegant ship designs you can come up with are still very visibly utilitarian both inside and out, with almost all components looking like something today's real-world space agencies would build if they had the technology for Casual Interplanetary Travel. (Director Todd Howard has called this stye "NASA-punk".) Even the unobtainable Trident "luxury" modules are externally practical, despite their elegant interiors. The only ship model that plays the trope completely straight is the Starborn Guardian, the standard vessel used by all Starborn including the Player Character upon starting a New Game Plus run. This one's all rounded shapes, polished surfaces, and a spotless interior that looks downright celestial.
• Shout-Out: Many examples:
  • Two books appear on a shelf in the Release Date trailer: Sailing Alone Around the World and Omega: The Last Days of the World.
  • One of the ads for the game pays homage to an ad for Mass Effect.
  • A dialogue option in one encounter is to say: "Bah weep graaanagh wheep ni ni bong?"
  • The whitelist for Vasco includes such names as Morpheus, Kirk, Picard, Plissken, and Weyland and Yutani.
  • The United Colonies questline, which revolves almost entirely around the Terrormorphs, feels like one long homage to the Dead Space franchise, particularly the third game. Not only do Terrormorphs and Necromorphs sound similar, you also spend most of your time in frigid environments trying to figure out where the monsters originally came from and how to stop them from wiping out humanity. The lead terrormorph even looks almost exactly like the Recurring Boss necromorph in Dead Space 3, minus the glowy bits. They also share a biologically impossible Transformation Sequence as you learn about halfway through the questline.
  • Cowboy Bebop gets a few:
    • One of the potential lines you can give at Sam Coe's funeral is "See you, space cowboy".
    • You learn through the main quest that in the backstory of the game, research into FTL travel caused a disaster that forced Earth to be rapidly evacuated and left the planet a barren hulk. This is also very reminiscent of Cowboy Bebop's setting.
  • The UC questline features an Unwinnable Training Simulation that you can manipulate to your advantage by hacking into the simulation from the outside, which is exactly what James Kirk did with the Kobayashi-Maru Test in Star Trek.
  • The backstory of the colonies of Earth (which has been abandoned) ending up in a war between the sleek, authoritarian "core" colonies versus the ragtag, Western-flavored independent outer worlds is essentially the Unification War from Firefly. Admittedly, the parallels aren't just one-for-one in that the Freestar Collective won not one, but two wars against the United Colonies whereas the Independents ultimately lost to the Alliance.
  • In one of the random New Game Plus scenarios where an alternate version of you has murdered everyone in Constellation, one of the lines you can deliver to the evil version of you is "You're not me. You're nothing like me!"
  • The appearance of Amelia Earhart and many other Historical Domain Characters on an isolated interstellar backwater calls to mind the Star Trek: Voyager episode "The 37s" (though in Starfield, Earhart and the other historical figures are here thanks to advanced human cloning technology and not just Sufficiently Advanced Aliens).
  • The Ruyjin plotline basically is an extended shout out to Syndicate, with you working for a corporation as an operative doing illegal things in a cyberpunk setting (which Neon comes the closest to), and features a piece of technology that allows you to compel people to do things for you, much like Syndicate's Persuadotron.
  • The quest "Juno's Gambit" features a NASA probe who became sentient after it was upgraded by third parties, now trying to understand its own purpose and what do with this sentience. The same happens to Nomad in Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Changeling" and to V'ger (The Voyager probe) Star Trek: The Motion Picture.^note The Motion Picture is very much a Recycled Script of The Changeling.
  • The mercenary army Ecliptic feels like an amalgamation of two merc organizations from the Mass Effect franchise, taking the name and psychotic sadism from Eclipse and combining it with the blue color scheme and rigid military command structure of the Blue Suns.
  • The Alien franchise:
    • The first Alien film gets a Whole-Plot Reference aboard the derelict ship, the Collander, found in orbit above Schrodinger III. Via Apocalyptic Logs scattered throughout, you find out that the ship had a stowaway alien after landing on a planet that started killing its way through the crew. By the time you arrive, the crew is dead and the (very strong) arachnoid alien is still very much alive...
    • Aliens naturally gets a few. First, the Old World Shotgun is very reminiscent of Hicks' Ithaca Model 37, particularly the MP40-esque pistol grip. Additionally, killing terrormorphs during the UC Vanguard questline is referred to several times as a "bug hunt", the same term applied to the situation in the movie by Hudson.
  • The description text for a potato reads "Can be prepared in many ways. Boiled, mashed, used in a stew - the recipes are nearly limitless."
  • The Reliant Medical doctor on Neon might greet the player with "Please state the nature of the medical emergency".
  • Names of star systems include Verne, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Zelazny, in addition to several of the most important figures in physics and space exploration.
  • When speaking to wannabe pilot Altagracia in the Well for the first time, one of the possible responses is "You know, I'm something of a pilot myself".
• Sidequest Sidestory: In classic Bethesda fashion, each of the four joinable "factions" includes a full questline, unique characters, and major rewards for completing it. Some other groups also offer multiple sidequests that form a story, like the "Groundpounder" questline in the Altair system, the Eleos Retreat, or the Paradiso/Colony Ship situation.
• Single-Biome Planet:
  • Played straight by the vast majority of inhospitable worlds, such as those labeled "Inferno" or "Deep Freeze". Regardless of where you land, they environment will be the same across the planet with perhaps a few purely cosmetic differences ("Craters" vs. "Rocky Hills", for instance.)
  • Downplayed by most human habitable worlds. Most have some oceans, most have "frozen" versions of their biomes near the poles, and they tend to have 2-3 total biomes that can contain different types of Flora and Fauna. However, these differences are small and mostly cosmetic, still largely fitting the spirit of the trope. Don't expect to find other worlds nearly as diverse as real life Earth.
• Skill Scores and Perks: Starfield takes a few elements of its Bethesda Fallout sister series Perk system with some alterations. After you gain enough experience, you level up and earn a Skill Point that can be applied in one of five different skill trees. Once initially unlocked, you'll need to perform a certain number of specific tasks related to that skill (ex. killing enemies with a rifle to increase Rifle, picking pockets to increase Theft, shooting down ships to increase Piloting, etc.) in order to unlock it for additional increases. Each tree also has a four tiers, and you must spend so many points in the lower tiers in order to unlock the skills in the higher tiers.
• Sniper Rifle: Although most assault rifles and even some shotguns can be modified to act as sniper rifles, only the late-game Hard Target and even later-game Mag Sniper are specifically designed as one. The former is a .50cal anti-materiel rifle that takes up half the screen and can eliminate all but the toughest enemies with a single headshot, if not even with a single hit to any body part. The latter is even more powerful but, unlike the Hard Target, can't mount a Hollywood Silencer.
• So Long, and Thanks for All the Gear: Averted as the gear of whichever companion dies at the hands of the Hunter in "High Price to Pay" will be placed into a chest in the Lodge basement for you to recover, including their unique, otherwise inaccessible outfits.
• Space Age Stasis: A story mission in which you visit a ruined NASA facility on the remains of Earth reveals that humanity's technology and even fashion have barely changed at all since the exodus from Earth roughly 150 years ago. The turrets, computers, robots, and lab uniforms are all identical to the ones produced and used in the modern day, the only real difference being that they're covered in grime and have NASA logos on them.
• Space Amish: The people of New Homestead on Titan pride themselves on using the bare minimum of technology necessary to survive the moon's hostile climate. They also put a lot of emphasis on old Earth traditions, strong bonds among family and friends, and their distrust of outsiders. Needless to say that theirs is a much harder life than most citizens on the core worlds'.
• Space Is Air: In full effect for ship mechanics and battles. Ships bank into turns, they stop accelerating as if there is gravity/air resistance, fighting is done via Old-School Dogfighting using primarily Fixed Forward-Facing Weapons, etc. Note that much of it is an Acceptable Break from Reality since the way actual space battles would likely play out would be foreign and unfun to players used to the Hollywood version.
• Space Is an Ocean: The lack of FTL communications resulting in most interstellar navies operating closer in mind to the seafaring navies of the Age of Sail more than anything else, the proliferation of Space Pirates thanks to Casual Interplanetary Travel, planets being treated more like islands to hop between than entire contiguous governments... in short, Starfield invokes this trope and then some.
• Space Is Cold: It's a plot point that a particular supercomputer was built on the moon because it is "colder" there, making for better cooling; and they mention building it in space if that didn't work. This isn't, of course, how temperatures work; with no air to carry away heat, their supercomputer ought to have more heat problems on the moon, not less.
• Space Compression: At work as usual for a Bethesda games. Starfield features the largest cities seen since Morrowind and feature generic citizens to pad the civilian numbers. That said, each city is still positively minuscule for how big they should be in the lore. Even New Atlantis, the setting's largest city, feature maybe at most 5 skyscrapers in which civilians resides, far from a metropolis home to the largest population in the Settled Systems. UC as a whole counts 4 major settlements^note New Atlantis, Cydonia, Gagarin, New Homestead. And the last three are explicitly smaller and on the downslide. yet somehow makes up about a third to half of the human race. Akila City meanwhile, the capital of the Freestar Collective counts maybe two dozen one or two story buildings and is moderately larger than a major city in Skyrim.
• Space Is Cold:
  • At one point, it's a plot point that a supercomputer was built on a moon with essentially no atmosphere because it is "colder" there, making cooling easier; they mention that if that didn't work, they'd have to build it in space. This isn't actually how heat dissipation works - heat needs to be transferred to a medium; cold air or water, especially in motion, is good for cooling because it can carry away heat, but a vacuum cannot carry away heat at all.
  • Companions occasionally complain about the cold, like Andreja wishing she could layer spacesuits like sweaters. While mostly reserved for frozen planets, these lines can also be heard on airless moons where the real problem would be getting too hot instead.
• Space Is Noisy: Everything that happens in space, from combat to simply moving around, makes atmosphere-level noise. Witnessing a ship landing from the ground produces a sonic boom and a loud engine roar, even on planets or moons without atmosphere. Unlike many examples of the trope, this is not purely aesthetic or for the player's benefit— NPCs can hear unsuppressed gun shots and footsteps even when in vacuum.
• Space Marine: Both the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective have their own divisions of space marines for their armed forces, and this is what a player character with the "Soldier" background served in.
• Space Pirates: One of the in-game factions is the Crimson Fleet, a group of space freebooters who serve as common enemies. The protagonist can potentially end up joining them. Not just as a straight pirate either; you also have the option to join them as The Mole, as part of a United Colonies operation to take the Fleet down from the inside. This gives 'do-gooder' characters and players a convenient way/excuse to experience the Crimson Fleet storyline content. Their missions give you plenty of opportunities to find less lethal solutions to the situations placed in front of you, though you may wish to brush up on your persuasion, hacking, and pickpocketing skills first.
• Space Trucker: Shipmaker Hope Tech's entire premise is producing inexpensive, utilitarian cargo ships for blue collar haulers and its headquarters resembles a truck stop; there are multiple pieces of trucker-themed apparel, including a "Space Trucker Spacesuit" and an outfit with a red-and-black flannel shirt; and the player can choose "Long Hauler" as a character background during character creation.
• Space Western: Parts of the game world have this vibe. The Freestar Collective as a whole have built their entire visual style around it, and their capital Akila City looks like it was lifted straight from Firefly. One of the possible companions is essentially a space cowboy, incidentally hailing from the aforementioned city. The Collective have their own Rangers as well, drawing inspiration from old west law enforcement, with virtually unlimited authority to deal with whatever situations they may come across. Further, the Laredo firearm company, based in Akila City, produces almost entirely retro-futuristic versions of classic old west guns like revolvers and double barrel shotguns.
• Standard RPG Items: Medpacks and their more advanced versions are Hit Points restoring potions, each of the game's Status Effects has a specific item to cure them (ex. Bandages for Lacerations), Panacea as a drug that cures all status effects, and Quantum Essence, dropped from defeated Starborn, which works similar to an MP potion speeding up the rate at which you can use your powers.
• Starter Equipment:
  • During the opening on Vectera, you'll receive a basic set of miner's equipment and can pick up an Eon pistol by the launch pad when the pirates attack. Almost anything else you pick up will be an upgrade over it, though the Eon can hang around in your inventory a bit longer thanks to using the common/cheap 7.77mm ammo, letting your save your rarer/more expensive ammo for tougher foes.
  • The Frontier is your starter ship, implied to be so old ("a classic") that it was built by the defunct Nova Galactic before Earth was abandoned (125 years prior to the game). It will get you around for the first couple missions of the main quest well enough, but it's a liability in combat without upgrades and you'll overwhelm its meager cargo capacity quickly. Because of the ship's layout, it's harder to add additional cargo capacity without extending the ship... which increases its mass forcing you to add more engines, upgrade the reactor to power it all, and upgrade the Grav-drive to move it all through space. By that time, it's much cheaper to find a better ship (and several quests available fairly early offer you free ships).
  • In a New Game Plus, after passing through the Unity into another universe, you'll lose all of your former equipment and start off with a set of Starborn armor as well as a Starborn ship. If you were diligent about getting the best options and keeping them upgraded, both will feel like a major downgrade compared to what you had before.
• Status Effects: The game has sci-fi versions of most of the classic RPG options. For example, Bleeding causes damage over time for its duration, Infection can be caused via exposure to alien microbial life, contusions/sprains/dislocated limbs can be the results of big melee hits or fall damage that can cause added O₂ use/carry weight reductions/painful sneaking depending on the type of injury, and more.
• Stat Grinding: With the game's hybrid Skill Scores and Perks style system, you unlock skills by spending a skill point, which is earned after leveling up. Once a skill has a point in it, you'll need to perform a certain action related to that skill so many times (for example, the Rifle skill requiring you to kill 25 enemies with a rifle) before you can unlock its next level, which requires the investment of another skill point. Calling it a Double Unlock barely scratches the surface...
• Static Stun Gun:
  • Particle weapons such as the Novalight and Novablast inflict special 'EM' damage. When used against living creatures, it instead causes a new bar to appear above the target's health bar, slowly building up with multiple shots; when filled, the target will be paralyzed. When used against you, these weapons instead inflict Maximum HP Reduction as well as some serious Interface Screw.
  • EM weapons can also be applied to ships, where they disable target systems and can shut them down entirely, leaving them open to being boarded. They're notably used by law enforcement (like the Freestar Rangers) for non-lethal apprehension... and by pirates to capture ships.
• Subspace Ansible: Conspicuously absent. Several mentions are made to sending runners/messengers/couriers instead and, since Casual Interstellar Travel is in effect, it's not too big a hinderance to interstellar civilization in this setting.
• Subsystem Damage: Each spaceship component is an individual unit that can be damaged or destroyed, reducing the ship's capabilities accordingly. This can be used to disable enemy ships instead of destroying them to, for instance, initiate a boarding assault.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • The player will learn very early on that just because something is locked doesn't mean anything of objectively high value is behind it.
  • An emotionally and physically distant relative leaves a surprising and rich legacy to their heirs, both explaining some of their behavior and reconciling across the grave. Many stories begin that way and, in Starfield, that story belongs to the Mantis, a legendary bounty hunter, passing the mantle to her son. Unfortunately someone who is now a regular civilian has little chance of completing all the deadly traps defending the Mantis' base. And with her brain feeling end-of-life haze and medical treatment, the Mantis herself opts for theatrical rather than specific directions. Her son is unceremoniously shot and killed by an automated turret.
  • The Player Character is a rookie space miner, a nobody quite possibly with no combat experience, who is suddenly launched into an adventure involving starship duels, gunfights against well-armed opponents, and traversing hazardous worlds. Turns out your self in most universes isn't capable of this, like a normal person who isn't an RPG protagonist wouldn't be. They always die at some point between the initial fighting around Vectera and the Hunter's rampage in New Atlantis. The Hunter muses on if your version is merely a product of infinite universes or if the Unity is actively doing something about him.
  • While the dialogue doesn't always reflect the severity of what you did, "stealth" missions have as much tolerence for "just a little murder" as real life does. UC Sysdef and Ryujin aren't impressed with only three unnecessary casualties or "yeah I was burglarizing the place but it was self-defense."
• Take a Third Option: Numerous quests offer you alternatives to otherwise binary choices.
  • In "Entangled", you can save both universes if you manage to find Rafael's dead body in the prime universe and follow the very specific instructions he left behind, which allows you to reap all possible rewards from this quest.
  • Instead of picking a side in the Starborn civil war, you can tell both factions to bugger off, which results in a Villain Team-Up against you but rewards you with what is arguably the game's Golden Ending.
  • During the New Game Plus mode, it is possible to circumvent one of the nastiest choices in the game if you opt to play the full story again: You can tell Vladmir to move the Artifacts during Further Into The Unknown, which results in your team not splitting up and thus avoiding the otherwise inevitable companion death.
  • When it's time to appoint a new leader for the Crucible clone colony, you can pick either one of the two survivors, neither of them, or you can just kill off the entire colony with the press of a button.
• Take Your Time: In standard Bethesda fashions, despite it being known after the introductory missions that the artifacts Constellation is seeking are falling into the hands of others, you're free to take as much time as you want between their missions, even going off to do full faction questlines if you choose. This continues to hold true even after the Hunter and the Emissary reveal themselves and their intent to go after the artifacts.
• Talk to Everyone: The majority of the game's sidequests require you to seek them out by speaking to NPCs. A good rule to follow is to speak to everyone of Nominal Importance, as it's a good indicator of their involvement with a quest at some point.
• Teaser Equipment: Quite a few of the merchants in New Atlantis sell high-level weapons and equipment that you won't be able to afford for quite a while. A prominent example is Wen Tseng at UC Distribution who sells an N67 Smartgun with a base value of nearly 40k credits.
• Technicolor Eyes: If one lives on Mars for long enough, the iris of the eye takes on the same shade as Mars dust. This happens especially fast for miners (taking about a year), as they're exposed to even more of the dust through their occupation.
• Tempting Fate: One radiant event found on barren planets is about a meteorite impact site under investigation by a bunch of scientists. The planet is still being bombarded by occasional small impacts, but one of the researchers just couldn't resist the temptation to dismiss the danger of being hit by one as negligible. Take a wild guess in what condition you find him in near the base's perimeter.
• Theme Naming: Invoked at the New Homestead colony on Titan, where citizens adopt as their family name the name of the Earth city their ancestors originally came from. With New Homestead being primarily a museum dedicated to Earth's history, it's one of their methods to keep mankind's heritage alive.
• There Are No Bedsheets: While most beds are modeled with bedding on top, any characters you encounter sleeping simply lay on top of it all.
• There Are No Tents: Without setting up a full-blown outpost, there's no way to set up a place to rest while out exploring. You need to either return to your ship or find a useable bed in a random Point of Interest.
• Thriving Ghost Town: Going hand-in-hand with Space Compression, the major settlements are depicted as far too small compared to their reputation in-universe. For example, New Atlantis is said to be home to about 1/3 of humanity's population, but has maybe 100 NPCs of Nominal Importance throughout its districts with about twice that of generic "Citizens" at a given time.
• Tiered by Name: Rather than being entirely unlevelled or having specific item levels, equipment comes in softer tiers somewhat similar to the system used in Fallout 76. Most items starts out blank (e.g. just "Equinox" for the laser rifle), then get Calibrated -> Refined -> Advanced -> Superior, and possibly higher, as a prefix (a Refined Equinox would be two tiers up over the basic version). For weapons it's a straight damage/power increase, and for armour/clothes it increases the damage resistance provided. You can 'make do' with lower tier gear for a while, but as you get into higher level areas you will want to find, steal, or buy better gear to deal with more dangerous opponents.
• Title Drop: NPCs, especially Constellation-affiliated ones, occasionally use "the starfield" as a flowery synonym for space.
• Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup: The "Overdesigned" quest has you help Walter's employees design a new starship. They're all quite competent, but bicker so much over design specifications that the whole project has stalled. You can help break the stalemate in a number of ways, possibly resulting in you getting one of the game's best (if ugliest) overall ships.

Tropes U-Z

• Underground Monkey: A number of the alien fauna species can be found on multiple worlds and are virtually identical, save for being at higher levels the further out you go. For example, Tau Ceti VIII-B has Hunting Ankylosaurs, Polvo has Flocking Ankylosaurus Geophages, while Schrodinger III has Apex Ankylosaurs, all of which use very similar models and behaviors.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay: Most RPG/shooter players have become so accustomed to windows being treated as impenetrable cover that finding out that laser weapons can actually shoot through transparent surfaces in Starfield can come as quite a surprise to many.
• Universal Ammunition: Zigzagged. There's a wide range of calibers, but many weapons do share the same ammo despite being radically different in their design and function. For instance, the Maelstrom assault rifle and the Kraken machine pistol both fire 6.5mm caseless rounds, but in the former they're full-sized rifle cartridges while in the latter they morph into handgun ammo less than half the overall length. The Kraken also deals much higher per-shot damage than the Maelstrom although it should be the other way around, but that's a different trope entirely. Another, even weirder example is the Kodama, a submachine gun that fires flechette ammunition. However, the ammo you load into it is 7.77mm caseless, a round that normally contains a standard rifle bullet, but magically turns into three flechette darts in each round when put in a Kodama magazine.
• Universal Poison: There is only one type of "poison" in the game, with numerous alien species capable of inflicting it despite evolving on entirely different worlds. It also has a universal antidote in the "Injector" item.
• The Un-Reveal: When the Starborn are first encountered, it seems like the origin of the artifacts and the temples, as well as their purpose, will be explained. It's later revealed that while the Starborn do know what the artifacts do, they are equally in the dark about who made them (other than calling them "the Creators"), or what the purpose behind them and the temples is. One line in the "Constellation" ending suggests that you may get to meet them one day, but "not now".
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
  • In New Game Plus, if you choose not to reveal that you are Starborn, thus replaying the campaign, Constellation members will basically ignore all signs of you being a Starborn, and will not add two and two together no matter how unsubtle you are. They won't point out during the first meeting with the Emissary that the Emissary's mysterious physics-defying ship is the same one they are standing in right now. They'll use the same reactions to your powers as they did in the first playthrough, even if you've not visited a temple yet - meaning they aren't at all curious why you have super powers, just mildly shocked when you use them. The only exception is Walter during the first meeting with the Emissary, if you pick the Starborn dialogue options, he'll realize something is up with you, and unless you decide to mislead him (at which point he buys your deception), will just automatically agree to not push it further or mention it to anyone else.
  • Downplayed by some other characters, such as the military ship scanners and ship technicians, who will comment on your Starborn ship the first time through.
• Unwinnable Training Simulation: Beating Tier VI in the combat simulator of the UC Vanguard entrance exam is supposed to be impossible. The recruiter and companions are in complete disbelief if the player manages to beat it, and this includes hacking into the Debug Tools of the simulator for a supposed edge (which the recruiter will call you out on if you do so, but pay no mind otherwise).
• Uranus Is Showing: A random space encounter has another spacefarer hail you, then ask for directions to Uranus. Regardless of your response, he completes the joke and then immediately Grav-jumps out after the punchline to whichever answer you give.
• Used Future: While not as extreme as Fallout, the tech of Starfield's "NASA-punk" future has seen its share of abuse. The exteriors of ships show burns and weathering from reentry, while many weapons are covered in chips and scratches.
• Useless Useful Spell: Barring a grand total of two sidequests and a power-level exploit for sneak melee kills, EM damage serves next to no practical purpose in ground combat, making one specialized gun (the Disruptor rifle) and a whole lot of weapon mods virtually useless. Successfully stunning a target takes it out of commission for a long time, but it will get back up eventually, forcing you to kill it anyway, so you might as well shoot to kill from the outset. Stun mods are also universally weak in their effect, meaning you'll waste a lot of ammo trying to fill the stun bar where a few bullets would've sufficed to empty the target's health bar instead. It's even less useful against robots because, although their stun bar is quicker to max, the stun only lasts for a few seconds instead of multiple minutes like it does with organics.
• The Usual Adversaries: There are four hostile factions you will most commonly encounter in your starfaring:
  • Spacers: Pirate rabble, unorganized yet still a problem to starfaring civilization.
  • Ecliptic: A ruthless amoral outfit of mercenary cutthroats that get jobs under the table from the greater powers.
  • Va'ruun Zealots: Dogmatic exiles from the isolationist House Va'ruun that consider any not subscribing to their religion to be worthy of death.
  • Crimson Fleet: A more organized bandit group aspiring to be a pirate nation. The Crimson Fleet may be joined and become friendly to the player, but may once again turn hostile depending on the outcome of their faction quest line.
• Very Fake Résumé: To start the Ryujin Industries questline, you need to fill out a job application at one of their kiosks which asks basic questions about level of education and relevant job experience. You can claim to have a Ph D with years of experience (or the exact opposite, limited education with no experience) and still land an interview. The interviewer will call you out on your ridiculous answers, but since the previous jobholder vanished and someone needs to make a coffee run, you'll still be Hired on the Spot.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • Arguably the easiest and fastest way to power-level combat skills is to land on a life-bearing world and start shooting up the local wildlife. If the world is low level, few to none of the critters will pose a threat to the player, and most will go down in one or two hits from all but the weakest weapons. Combine this with a Disruptor rifle and you can even level sneak melee kills incredibly quickly.
  • You can choose to permanently kill off the entire Crucible clone colony for no practical reason other than you being a colossal dick. Doing so is actually detrimental to the player as well because it deprives them of a potential companion.
  • Similarly, you can blow up a 200-year old Generation Ship, the ECS Constant, along with its entire innocent crew, just so a greedy corporation doesn't need to waste any more time worrying about a minor inconvenience in their day-to-day operations. Alternatively, you can turn the Constant's crew into the corporation's indentured servants for an indeterminate amount of time, which isn't a whole lot better.
  • Andromeda Kepler is a hirable crew member who explicity wants to travel the stars with other people and then write a book about it. You can promise her that sort of adventure when hiring her... then immediately assign her alone to an outpost on a far-flung world.
• Video Game Delegation Penalty: Inverted when it comes to mining/harvesting resources by using an outpost. If you only need a few of a certain resource, you can simply mine surface nodes of minerals or run around hunting/harvesting animal/plant life to get what you need. However, if there is something you're going to want in large quantities, it's worth the time/resource investment to set up an outpost to generate them. A mineral extracter can pull up hundreds of a given resource in just a few minutes while farming will generate far more in the same amount of time as it would take you to seek out and harvest them manually.
• Video Game Perversity Potential: You can steal "swimwear" from hotel rooms on Paradiso and equip it onto your companions, which includes bikinis for the women.
• Violence Is Not an Option:
  • Ironically, the bulk of the Crimson Fleet pirates questline. "Breaking the Bank," "The Best There Is", and "Absolute Power" are all strongly skewed to completing with no "unscripted" gunplay. This is an absolute requirement if you're working undercover for UC Sysdef; you'll be fired and jailed. But even if you're a pure marauder, the immediate area-wide alarms from shooting just one NPC lock out bonus objectives, can result in massive movement-restricting bounties, and bring enough enemy firepower to greatly complicate the primary objective.
  • Most of the quests for Ryujin encourage not using violence, with the player's reward being reduced for unnecessary killing alongside the various NPCs complaining about your lack of subtlety. About the only mission where the player is free to use violence with no opposition is one where they come across Ecliptic Mercs having already slaughtered all the locals - your employer will actually approve of punishing Ecliptic in turn.
• The War Just Before: There have been three major interstellar wars since humanity reached Mars in 2050:
  • The Narion War, from whose treaty came the title "Settled Systems".
  • The Serpent's Crusade, which saw House Va'Ruun take on all the major factions, before signing a peace treaty and retreating into deep space.
  • The Colony War, which effectively ended 19 years before the start of the game and has the biggest overall impact on the game world.
• Weaponized Exhaust: The first two tiers of the high-level "Boost Assault Training" perk focus on enabling and then enhancing your boost pack jumps to do this. Inflicting this is also how grinding that perk for advancement is done. In an Acceptable Break from Reality, non-hostiles are Friendly Fireproof.
• Weirdness Censor: On New Game Plus, if you choose to replay through the story and thus don't tell anyone you're starborn, none of the Constellation members will ever pick up on that fact, no matter how blatant you are about it. They'll remark on individual things (your powers, your spacesuit, your ship) as being weird and fantastic, but they'll never point out these are all things the Starborn they are fighting have or ask about their origins. The only exception is Walter, where during the first meeting with The Emissary, depending on dialogue chosen by the player, implies he's made the connection but won't mention it since clearly the player isn't willing to talk about it.
• We Buy Anything: Downplayed in that there are certain stores which only buy items related to their business, such as doctors only buying medicinal items or bartenders only buying food/drink. However, the majority of other stores (Trade Authority, UC Distribution, independent traders like Jemison Mercantile, random ships in orbit, etc.) will buy almost anything you can sell them.
• We Will Spend Credits in the Future: The Credit is a digital cryptocurrency issued by the neutral corporation GalBank and used by everyone across the Settled Systems, from governments to independent settlers. While Credits are digital, they can also be encoded into physical mediums called CredSticks (which are legal tender) and CredTanks (which are used by GalBank to transport vast sums between star systems as the setting averts Subspace Ansible).
• Welcome to Corneria: Downplayed in comparison to past Bethesda games and most other sandbox RPGs in general, but still present. Most NPCs like guards only have a few possible lines of chatter, so you will hear them all repeatedly as you pass by enough times. There are also enough companions who each have a number of lines that you can go a while without hearing repeats, but they will eventually get repetitive, especially for the non-Constellation companions who have more limited lines.
• Wham Episode: The "High Price To Pay" quest. The Hunter, a member of the Starborn, attacks the Eye and the Lodge. You have to choose whether you go to help those who are on the Eye, or get the Artifacts somewhere safe in the Lodge. The catch is, the member you have the highest affinity with in the location you don't go to dies, permanently.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: In certain randomly generated missions, of which the most common is to kill a target in a facility after fighting through their troops, it's possible for the target enemy to be of a different faction than the other enemies in the facility. The target will then attack the other faction once you step into the building, and generally lose, thus completing the mission and letting you leave without a problem.
• X Days Since: Cydonia has an "[X] Hours Without Incident" sign hanging from the ceiling. A local doctor will tell you they do get mining accidents that frequently. If you decide to attack a civilian standing around, the sign will update on the spot to "0 Hours Without Incident".
• Zip Mode: Reaching the outermost star systems can be quite the hassle, requiring numerous ship upgrades to make the necessary leaps and hopping through each star system along the way. However, you can return anywhere you've previously visited via fast travel, even if you're on the other side of the settled systems, significantly cutting down on return travel time.

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