Image: Bethesda Game Studios via HGG / Sarah Arnold
Sarah loves RPGs, sandboxes, and sims. She's played every expansion of World of Warcraft and WoW Classic and spent hundreds of hours modding and playing Bethesda games.
Reviewed by Ashley Johnson
Each of the five skill trees in Starfield offers perks to enhance a different part of the game. Some skills in these trees offer flat stat bonuses, while others unlock entirely new mechanics or features for your character. There isn’t currently a way to respec in Starfield, so you’ll want to put some thought into how you spend your precious skill points. To give you a good head start, we’ll go over the best Tech skills in Starfield.
Let’s get into it!
5 Best Tech Skills in Starfield
The Tech tree mostly has skills related to your ship, but there are a few other assorted skills in the mix, including two that improve your boost packs, one that allows you to open locked doors and computers, and a skill to help you fight robots and turrets.
This guide will list some of the best skills in the Tech tree and what they can bring to your game. We’ll work our way up to the best one.
Boost Pack Training
The Boost Pack Training skill is required to utilize boost packs at all. Without it, you’ll still be able to equip them and benefit from their stats, but you won’t be able to use them for their intended purpose — jumping really high and far.
Ranks 2–4 of this skill make boost packs even more useful by enhancing their fuel, allowing you to use them longer and more often. Being able to propel yourself across the battlefield or leap up to higher ground is a very useful feature in combat, and it’s also just plain fun — especially in lower gravity environments.
As an added bonus, this is a Tier 1 skill that you can start putting points in right away, which will also help you to unlock the higher tiers of the Tech tree later on.
Piloting
Here’s a skill that offers two different benefits, one for the early game and one for the late game. Rank 1 of the Piloting skill unlocks the use of ship thrusters, allowing you finer control of your ship in combat and space travel. Once you get the hang of using them, you won’t ever want to go back. Rank 2 further improves your maneuverability and control.
Ranks 3 and 4 do something altogether different: they unlock the ability to pilot Class B and C ships, the most advanced ships in the game. Without ranking up this skill, you’ll never be able to utilize these endgame vessels.
Piloting is another Tier 1 skill that can be grabbed right off the bat, and will help you unlock the higher tiers of skills in the Tech tree.
Targeting Control Systems
Here we have another skill that unlocks a new game mechanic. Targeting Control Systems allows you to target specific ship systems in space combat, which can let you take out a ship’s engines so you can board it or eliminate its deadliest weapon. Without this skill, you’ll have to just aim at the ship and hope for the best.
The higher ranks of this skill improve your ability to lock on and damage targeted systems and reduce the damage that ships do to you while target locked. The great thing about these effects is that they’re consistent regardless of the system you want to target or the type of weapon you are using on it, whereas other options for skills that increase your ship’s damage are specific to certain weapons.
This is another Tier 1 skill that you can pick up immediately and use to unlock the higher Tech tree tiers.
Boost Assault Training
Along with the Tier 1 skill Boost Pack Training, this skill will let you live your Boba Fett fantasy, jetpacking across the worlds of the Settled Systems. Where that other skill allows you to use boost packs in the first place, this one gives them some pretty cool features.
Rank 1 of this skill causes your boosts to deal area of effect damage and potentially light enemies on fire. Rank 2 adds an area knockdown effect, adding crowd control to your boosting abilities. But they’ve saved the best for last: Rank 3 allows you to hover in place and Rank 4 adds a slow time effect when you’re hovering. So you can now blast off in the middle of a crowd of enemies, knock them all down, and float above them raining down retribution from above.
This skill is all the way in Tier 4, so you won’t be doing this until later in the game, but it’s well worth putting some points into lower Tech skills to get ahold of this.
Security
The Security skill is a no-brainer in Starfield, as every place you visit will have locked doors, computers, and chests that you’ll want to be able to access. Sometimes they’ll help you complete a mission more efficiently, and other times they’ll get you some awesome loot or a convenient alternate path to take through an area.
Without this skill, you’ll only be able to open novice level locks. Ranks 1, 2, and 3 let you open advanced, expert, and master locks respectively. Each rank also allows you to bank an extra auto attempt so you can open the occasional lock without having to complete the puzzle.
You’ll also get a couple of useful features to help you solve the digipick puzzles. At Rank 2, you’ll be able to quickly see if a key will match a ring. At Rank 4, you’ll be able to expend a digipick to eliminate keys that aren’t needed. Both of these will help you narrow down your options and solve the puzzles more quickly, and they’ll be downright essential for some of the harder locks.
This is yet another Tier 1 skill as well, so you can start picking more advanced locks straight out of the gate and start unlocking the higher Tech tiers.
Join the High Ground!
That’s it for our list of the best tech skills in Starfield — thanks for reading! We hope this guide has helped you choose the best Tech skills for your character in Starfield. If you have any questions, leave a comment below, and be sure to subscribe to our newsletter for more useful guides!
Happy gaming!
You must sign in to comment.
Don't have an account? Sign up here!