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Starfield: How to sell ships

Commandeered a ship and want to sell it? Want to now how to sell the Frontier now you’ve got something better? Here’s how you do it.

Dom Peppiatt avatar
Guide by Dom Peppiatt Editor-in-chief
Published on

So, you’ve got a new ship in Starfield – cool right? I managed to nab my first non-gifted ship when I saw a load of House Va’ruun heretics touch down on a planet, assumedly to make repairs. A couple of sneak attacks and headshots later and I had a brand new vessel under my command. Thing is, I didn’t want to get rid of my Mantis ship, or the Frontier – so it was off to my nearest Ship Services Technician to offload my pilfered starship for some easy credits… or so I thought. It turns out this space piracy lark isn’t as cut-and-dry as you’d first think.

Liquidating your interstellar assets and turning a hulking collection of hull, engine and reactor into lovely, spendable credits is a little obscure – a long-running problem with Starfield’s UI, if you ask me. So here’s everything you need to know about selling ships that the game won’t outright tell you.

How to sell ships in Starfield

Never gonna give you up. | Image credit: Bethesda/VG247

To sell a ship in Starfield, you will need to start by finding a Ship Services Technician vendor. You can locate one of these in any of the major ports and cities dotted across the galaxy, but I’m going to list a couple of the most obvious (read: earliest) vendors for you below. You will land here whenever you arrive at a planet from orbit, but if you’re already in a city, you just need to look outside the city walls and you’ll spot it in no time.

  • Ship Services Technician - Neon (Volii Alpha, Volii system)
  • Ship Services Technician - Cydonia, (Mars, Sol system)
  • Ship Services Technician - Akila City (Akila, Cheyenne)
  • Ship Services Technician - New Atlantis, (Jemison, Alpha Centauri)
  • Ship Services Technician - Red Mile (Porrima III, Porrima – found inside the Red Mile in an office off the main bar floor)

Interact with your chosen vendor, and select the “Let me see what ships you have for sale” option to open the buy/sell menu. Note: you will not be able to sell ships from the “Manage my ships” section of the menu, even though that would be the logical place to put the option…

Hit Y on this screen.

From the buy/sell menus, you will see a prompt at the bottom-right of your screen, asking you to toggle between buy and sell (R on PC, Y on Xbox controller).

From here, you can sell. However, if you’ve been up to some illicit space pirate-ry, it’s worth noting there are a few additional steps.

  • Firstly, you cannot sell your home ship. This means if you have only one ship, it cannot be sold.
  • Secondly, all ships must be registered before selling – and, you guessed it, this comes with a pretty significant fee. As far as I can tell right now, the more valuable the ship, the more the fee is. The rate seems to be about 85-90% fee of a ship’s value on a new character (this may be modified with Commerce skills, etc).

If you'd rather play things on the straight-and-narrow, here's where to find the best free ships in Starfield.

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