So I stole 2 ships yesterday and find it to be lots of fun.
I learned some important things and thought I’d share.
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When you steal a ship, you have to register it which costs about 9.6k. Apparently you can’t sell the ships for much more than that, but I haven’t tried yet.
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If you sit in the pilot seat of the ship, you’ll see a message about potentially making it your home ship if you take off. If you do not take off in it and just leave, it does not become one of your ships and will disappear if you leave the planet.
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if there are ecliptic mercs nearby, attempt to steal the ship before killing them. Sometimes you can, sometimes you cannot. If you kill the mercs, the ship takes off.
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If the ship is sitting there, it may be empty and ripe for the taking. If there’s a crew aboard, there may be something you can do (chat with the captain and get something), but most likely you’ll piss off your companion if you just “take care” of them.
I was severely disappointed that selling ships is so bad money wise, but I guess it makes sense as it would be pretty unbalanced.
It gets much better when the ship you’re jacking is higher level and worth more to begin with, but by then credits likely aren’t an issue anymore.
My tips:
-Unlock targeting to be able to target engines. Once you take down the engines you can board once you get close enough.
-Use an EM weapon to easily take out engines without risking destroying the ship.
-Register the ship in your Tab/menu screen because it’s much cheaper than at spaceports. Sit in the chair, go to the menu, click the ship in the lower left, there will be an option to register there. You might have to sit as your home ship first, I forget.
Do you need to take out all the weapons too for the prompt to show up?
No only the engines. Then you have to get within 500 meters I believe.
Thanks! I managed to board a few last night
I’m addicted to capturing ships. Too bad there is a 10 ship limit. There should be a mod to increase that but to add maintenance costs to each ship in your fleet.
ETA: There is a mod, basically a console command, that increases the ship limit. But the game seems likely to badly break when you do that so I’ll wait a while. https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/791
I just started playing with the ship builder last night, super cool. This game is definitely living up to my expectations so far
That would be rad. Maybe be able to set NPCs to ships as pilots and start a passive income, shipping company.
Yeah you can hire NPC pilots and crew in X4 Foundations, you can even ride along on the shipping/mining routes. It’s a complicated game but I’d love to see some of the mechanics in a game like Starfield or Elite Dangerous.
I was getting confused by your description of the mechanics until I realized you’re talking about stealing ships that are landed on planets compared to hijacking in space. I haven’t done this yet, where did you do this?
Also, registering a ship must be done before you can sell it and registering can be done from the ship menu, there is no way to sell a stolen ship without first making it your home ship and registering. Any cargo transferred from your old home ship into the new one will put the inventory overweight if there isn’t enough cargo space, but you won’t lose any items and upon sale the items will return to your original home ship.
The cost to register is always a percentage of the ship’s value, but always slightly less than the sell value, so you’ll always make a profit, but it won’t be very much compared to the ship’s total value. You can sell ships at ship service technicians by asking them to see their ships for sale, then swapping from buy to sell, you can’t do it from the “view or modify my ships” option.
When you land on a planets or moons surface, listen for another ship to land or checktthe map markers on your scanner for ship landing site. Usually it’s ecliptic or spacers, and you just clear them out and fly the ship off planet.
I went through a spate of it being a UC ship that landed for like 5-6 times in a row. It was really frustrating to walk so far out of my way only to have to leave the ship alone. Got a nice Ecliptic ship today though.
Most of the ships I find are inaccessible. The couple I have been able to board have been peaceful, and I didn’t have the heart to start a fight with them.
About the only valid target I got was one time a ship landed really close by. A solitary spacer got out and I thought “Game on!”. I dropped the spacer with a headshot, and then of course the ship raised the bay ramp and took off again. Bastards.
Ugh, yeah, that happened to me the other day too. Spacer ship landed like 70m away while I was up on a high vantage point. I dropped all 4 spacers right in their bay, then jumped down to claim the ship, only to have it take off with the bodies still inside. I didn’t get the ship or the loot!
Yeah, apparently that’s a thing: if you kill all the ground crew, the ship rabbits.
Next time I’m going to ignore the last spacer and sprint for the bay, see if I can do a Todd and have it lift off as I kill the last one on the ground :)
I took out an entire ground team of ecliptic and was still able to board, kill the rest onboard and take the ship, I was guessing that it was because they came over to where I was and engaged me first and/or they were far enough away from the ship that the onboard crew didn’t immediately rabbit. …I mean it’s Bethesda…could have been a glitch ;)
Great info, thanks!
Stealing ships is pretty pointless, which is a bummer because it’s good fun.
Yes, I’m not sure why but right now it’s really fun. It’s there a limit to your total number of ships?
You can have 10 ships max
Thanks!
I don’t know if it was a bug or not, but I accidentally stole some miners ship before. Broke in, noone aboard so I sat in the seat to examine it. It was made for cargo, nothing special so I got up and just left it. When I left I noticed some miners walking from it, thinking well now I’m really glad I didn’t steal that. Went back to my ship and the next time I went to view and modify my ships, it was there…I didn’t set it to my home ship or register it, but somehow it’s mine now. And some poor miners are wondering why their ship evaporated.
Registering scales with the value of the ship so it never actually becomes lucrative but fuck those explorers I’m taking it anyway
It is possible to board a ship, steal all the loot from the captain’s vault, then exit, blow up the ship, and salvage the scrap for more loot. You can get double credits this way, though not as much as the net from registering/selling. It’s a little faster, though.
Haha, bonus points for creativity
but most likely you’ll piss off your companion if you just “take care” of them.
This seems to cause a bug at the later stages of Sam’s quest
spoiler
You need to take a slate from a smuggling ship, but if you kill the (hostile) captain Sam hates it and you get a 15K UC bounty. You can destroy the ship and take the slate from rhe wreckage but then everybody hates you. Unfortunately you can’t do the mission alone, since Sam needs to be with you. Beth at its best 😂
