The best Starfield Skills to pick first for your character build

In the wide-open universe of Starfield you can be everyone and anyone you want to be, as long as you have the Skills to back it up.

As you gain experience across your adventure, you can invest in powerful upgrades which eventually shape your character build.

Unlike previous Bethesda games, mechanics like Stealth and Pickpocketing are locked behind specific skills which require an initial investment to make use of. This means that you have to make some tough choices when crafting your build, otherwise you're left with a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none.

Here's some advice on what's good, so you can get started in the right direction.

How Skills work in Starfield

Skills in Starfield are split into five archetypes. Combat, Tech, Science, Social and Physical.

Every Skill in Starfield has a rank and a tier. You advance the rank of a Skill by investing Skill Points that you gain every time you level up. Once you have invested enough points into tier 1 Skills of a certain archetype, you can then begin to invest in tier 2 skills.

For example, Pistols and Ballistic Weapons are tier 1 combat Skills. Invest enough Skill Points into them and you will then be able to rank up Rifles, which is a tier 2 combat Skill.

You can unlock rank 1 of any Skill from an available tier just by investing a Skill Point. However, to increase it to rank 2 and beyond you must first complete a challenge geared towards practically using that Skill. For example, achieving the next rank in Weapon Engineering will ask you to craft a certain number of weapon attachments before you can rank up again.

When you complete this challenge, the Skill does not immediately rank up. You need to invest another Skill Point to receive the next set of bonuses.

When you create a character in Starfield, you choose a background which gives you one rank in three different Skills of your choice.

Then every time you level up you gain another Skill Point to spend on either a new Skill, or the next rank of a Skill you’ve already invested in, as long as it’s from an available tier and you have completed the required rank challenge.

Best Starfield Skills

Choosing the best Skills in Starfield is a careful balance of role-playing and practical considerations.

It’s all well and good to say you want to create a character who’s an out-of-work chef that turned to cargo hauling to make ends meet. But your Gastronomy skills aren’t going to come in very handy when you’re doing faction quests with the UC Vanguard or Crimson Fleet.

To experience as much of Starfield as possible on your first playthrough, you’re going to want a solid mix of combat, piloting, and supplementary skills which suit your preferred playstyle.

These are some of the best skills in Starfield to pick!

• Boost Pack Training

Grabbing at least one rank in Boost Pack Training is essential in Starfield. First and foremost, it unlocks the ability to use boost packs, which make getting around the galaxy much quicker.

Given the amount of long, flat surfaces, changes in elevation and rocky terrain you need to navigate, being able to skitter over the top of obstacles with a short burst of rocket fuel is not just a great time-saver, but a lot of fun too.

Unless you’re a real enthusiast, higher ranks aren’t a necessity, but this should be one of the first Starfield skills you unlock on just about any character.

• Persuade

Blagging your way through life as a silver-tongued scoundrel is a perennially popular way of playing Bethesda games. Being able to talk your way out of any situation is a great capability fantasy, and in Starfield, Persuade is the skill that lets you do that.

Persuading characters works a little differently now though. Every time you try to persuade someone a new mini-game starts where you choose from a suite of options with different percentage chances of successfully filling up a portion of the persuasion bar.

Ranking up the Persuade skill gives you a higher percentage chance of each dialogue choice being successful - up to a whopping +50% buff.

The Persuade skill often gives you alternative options during quests, or allows you to completely skip quest steps as you convince characters to let you skip the busywork or introductory assignments that make you show your worth.

• Ballistic Weapons (Pistols and Rifles)

Whether you have a way with words or not, sometimes combat is unavoidable in Starfield. That means it makes a lot of sense to grab at least one weapon proficiency skill.

Unlike previous Bethesda games like Fallout where laser weapons were rare in the early game - therefore making their skill less appealing - in Starfield you can lay your hands on pretty much every archetype of weapon almost immediately. This means it comes down to personal preference whether you want to invest in the retro-future “pew-pew” of space lasers or the satisfying “thunk” of conventional weaponry.

Because they’re both on the first line of combat skills, you can start to deal very high damage very quickly by investing in both Ballistic Weapons and Pistols - not to mention turning Starfield into a bonafide Han Solo simulator.

Then, as more militaristic encounters present themselves through main story and faction quests, you can start to build out rifles on the second tier of combat skills to gain access to more sustained firepower.

For more on guns, check out our page on the best weapons in Starfield.

• Security

Security is the lockpicking and hacking skill in Starfield, so if you’re finding yourself with your nose pressed up against the window of a locked door more often than you’d like, this is the skill to invest in.

Scavenging for credits and resources is a core part of Starfield’s gameplay, and there’s nothing better than uncovering that gem of an item in among the kipple. But while the Security skill lets you unlock safes and side rooms full of extra loot, it also gives you access to alternative routes during quests - often allowing you to sneak through an obscure door or vent to reach your objective.

• Piloting (and ship-based skills in general)

While much of Starfield takes place on the surface of alien worlds, the spaceflight is fantastic too.

Everything from the sense of scale while orbiting planets to the intense, zero-g dogfights add an extra level of wonder and immersion to the experience, but it’s really easy to overlook this awesome element of the game, especially in the beginning.

Grabbing the first rank of Piloting is essential to getting the most out of your ship, and you should pick that up at least on every character you make.

On top of that though, there are loads of different ship-based Skills which are worth your time, even if you don’t spend all that long in the cockpit.

If you find yourself running out of inventory space, the cargo hauling Skill in tier 2 increases your hold capacity. Whereas simple investments in the laser or ballistic weaponry systems Skills can make you a force to be reckoned with, as the big boosts to damage output give you the advantage where it counts.

It's actually really easy to get a solid upgrade to your spacecraft early on in the game. Check out our page on the best free ships in Starfield for more.

• Stealth

Stealth has always been a key component of Bethesda games, but in Starfield it’s a much more deliberate investment.

To even gain access to the stealth indicator you need to have at least one rank in the associated skill. At this early level, stealth is nowhere near as overpowered as it was in games like Skyrim, where an invisible archer was almost unstoppable.

But as you progress through the ranks and the bonuses for stealth attacks with suppressed weapons increase, you can chew through enemy health bars before they even know what hit them.

The AI is quite dumb, so it’s not the most rewarding playstyle, but slipping in and out of stealth can help with tough encounters spread across large, multistorey buildings.

• Spacesuit Design, Weapon Engineering, Outpost Engineering

A trio of systems that are easy to overlook in the early game are weapon and suit upgrades and Outpost Engineering. However, this is where you actually get to make use of all the resources you collect and assign a proper job to all of the crewmates you can hire.

Investing in the Outpost Engineering Skill grants your character access to make useful and exciting things to build, allowing you to create incredible bases on far-flung planets. These can then be turned into resource factories that generate credits to spend on collecting ships, or just pouring into buying more resources to make more stuff.

If you have a creative streak though, customising your own space-age chateau is just a lot of fun on its own too.

On the equipment front, investing in the crafting skills allows you to add useful attachments to a variety of items. You can tailor your favorite gun to perform even better, or you can add great perks to your armor that give it better resistances or increase your carry weight.