Basic guide to getting good ships

[Gopblin]

First, what makes a “good” ship entirely depends on what you want it to do, so I’ll break this down into a three options. Second, I’ll also give the path of least resistance for each option, although there are probably more “fun” ways of getting there.

Option A: You don’t really want much to do with space or space combat, but you want the ship to support your surface adventures with a large cargo space or possibly crafting stations (if you want more combat power or more cargo, see later options).

In this case, you can take the Frontier or whatever ship you have and slap on the largest reactor you can get ( (20 power I think, unless you level Starship Engineering or steal a ship with a good one already installed) with the most cargo holds and however many landing gears it requires to support the weight. Add max engines to actually limp places. Done, you should have a few thousand cargo hold (ask away if you’d like a basic modding tutorial).

If you want crafting stations, HAB modules named something like “workshop” have them (best to stack those on top of one another as side doors sometimes remove stations but hatches generally don’t).

Note that prebuilt ships come with decorative structural elements that do nothing other than look pretty and slow you down; you can delete those to free up weight for useful modules instead. Similarly, a lot of the larger ships come with multiple crew modules which you might not need for a long time if you don’t have a lot of crew.

Option B: You don’t want to invest 4 levels into Piloting skill (or grind ship kills), but you are unhappy with the Frontier and want something that can carry more cargo/perform better for space combat quests.

You can do quests to get better ships, but those generally are not endgame ships anyways, and the quests take a long time. To get high-level ships, you need to take over them by boarding, as that allows you to get high-level reactors and shields without leveling up Ship Engineering to be able to install those modules yourself (this is also way, way cheaper as a full setup of endgame modules can cost something like 200k+ and you can get them on a boarded ship for free).

To do this, at minimum you will need to put one level into Targeting systems skill and add a ship weapon that does only EM damage, that’s it. Then, proceed to find enemy ships (generally done by visiting high-level systems, more on this in option C) and destroy everything except the last/best one you want to board. On that one, knock down the shields, then switch to Targeting mode (this is why Targeting systems skill is needed) and knock out its engines with EM weapon only (other weapons will likely destroy it before disabling engines). Technically you can just use an EM weapon and keep shooting a ship without shields in the engine area without leveling Targeting Systems, but the skill makes it way easier to disable specific modules. Then you need to be within 500m and you get the prompt to board (if you are way too far and enemy ship keeps shooting you as you close in, use EM to knock out its weapons too).

After killing everyone on board, you can get in the pilot chair, fly the ship to somewhere (the Den is a good option since some pirate ships will have contraband on them), then the ship counts as yours. Note that flying the ship a bit without jumping, then simply getting into your old ship doesn’t let you keep the boarded ship; however if you jump out in a new ship you will keep any ships you already owned. Thus, you can fly to the Den, get out, switch your Home Ship back to your main ship, and go out again (the ship at the airlock is always your home ship). This way you can acquire several ships (if you want to compare your trophies before deciding which one to invest into making the new main ship, for example).

Note that if you don’t put levels into Piloting skill, you can only pilot class A ships (fast ships), so you won’t be able to hijack any Class B/C ones you board. Fortunately, there are some high-level ones (I found a Va’Ruun one that was like level 54 and was good enough, I’m sure there’s more to be found).

Once you capture a high-level Class A ship, you can proceed to redesign the ship with maximum cargo/workshop capacity and better weapons, only now you’ll have a much better shield and more importantly a much larger reactor to play with, meaning you can mount more weapons and more engines, which in turn will allow to move faster with more cargo. Also a better drive meaning you’ll be able to jump to faraway systems easier.

A note on weapon setup: Since you’ll need to destroy all enemy ships except one, you still want a weapon setup that kills enemies quickly, i.e. does good shield and hull damage. Also I find that messing with power allocation to systems mid-combat takes too much time, so you'd want a setup where you don't want to change power. Notably, time slows down greatly in Targeting mode and you can still allocate power (this is where you transfer power from your killing weapons to EM weapon).

Killing combination can be some lasers(anti-shield) and ballistics(anti-hull), putting equal power allocation on them, and firing them simultaneously (cheaper option since most ships already have both installed), or you can simply delete lasers and ballistics and install 3 or 4 of the same guns (rays?) that do equal shield/hull damage (easier on your fingers since you only need to hold down one button).

Another option for minimum power usage is installing 4 missile launchers and not putting much power on them, since power only affects reload rate and missile launchers have a large missile rack before they have to reload. I haven’t tried this but should work. Remember you need 100% lock before missiles start tracking target (one of the reasons I don’t use missiles as high-level enemies boost often and break lock). You can do this in addition to aforementioned gun setup, however extra weapon weight may slow your ship down.

A note on ship combat: The simplest thing is to set game difficulty on Very Easy, put all power to weapons and shields (anything leftover going to engines) - keep going pewpew at enemies and watch them explode rapidly. Press O to heal using ship parts as needed.

However, installing a bunch of engines on your ship for max speed and maneuver may allow you to actually dogfight enemy ships and dodge a lot of shots. I don’t generally bother since this way you need to dedicate a lot of power to engines (meaning you have less power to shields and guns, meaning you have less effective health and are getting shot at for longer, erasing the benefit from dodging shots), and running dogfights like this tend to spread out the ship wreckage meaning it’s a pain to pick up later.

Option C: You want a good ship and you can invest 4 levels into piloting skill. This allows you to pilot class B and C ships (these tend to be larger ships with heavier modules). Otherwise, the process will be much the same as option B.

However, leveling piloting skill requires killing a lot of ships. Simulator kills count, so you can grind it out there.

Alternatively, you can repeatedly jump to the Crimson Fleet station (the Key) and fight the pirates there, generally it spawns 4-6 ships in the 2-24 level range; then you can simply jump to another planet in the system, sleep in your bed for 6 hrs (not sure if less counts, I tried 1hr and it didn’t work), and jump back to Key. The upside of this approach is that you get a lot of XP fast, get ship loot, and you can take over the midlevel pirate ships which you can then upgrade and use to hunt high-level ships.

Unfortunately I think the best class A ship the Key spawns is the Ghost II, which is not that great (generally, how good the ship is can be seen in its level and the II or III in its name). However it does also spawn Specter II which is a level 24 class B ship, and a decent pickup once you can fly class B. It also spawns the Wraith and Wight ships which are class C, although this only spawns the base models so their reactor is not great. I prefer Wraith as I think it’s a better cargo hauler.

If you need easier combat, the Failure to Communicate questline in Aranae system has you fighting 20ish low level Spacer ships (over several encounters), so that’s a decent way to get many ship kills too.

Once you’re done leveling Piloting at the Key (or elsewhere), and presumably have a level 20-24 ship that you’ve upgraded with a better weapon setup, you can go out to highest level systems and look for random encounters with Va’Ruun, Spacer and Crimson fleet ships (this is also how you can find high-level class A ships if you didn't level Piloting). This process may take a while as encounters are essentially random, but at least I think you get 20-40XP every time you jump to a new planet, and you get to see quite a few random friendly encounters too. Generally, jumping to different planets isn’t as likely to generate encounters as simply jumping to new systems, so I recommend jumping to a system and jumping out shortly thereafter. However, check the map first as occasionally you get space activity markers and those are often worth investigating - both for combat and for fun special encounters.

Also, sometimes encounters take ~20 seconds to initiate as the enemies (or random friendly encounters) take time to warp in. If something appears as you are about to warp out, you can go to starmap and cancel the grav jump. This is also why I recommend only giving 1 point of energy to grav drive - then it takes longer to jump out, giving you time to cancel. Jumping around different systems also has the benefit of “exploring” the starmap (I believe you can only jump into systems that are adjacent to a system you already visited).

After a couple hours of jumping around the high-level systems, I believe I saw more than half of the random friendly ship encounters in the game, and accrued several 50s-60s level ships. I went with a Wraith III, which is pretty great, and would have cost me 400k+ to buy the base ship and upgrade to the same level (not to mention having to put levels into Starship engineering skill). Instead I got it for free and bolted on a bunch of cargo holds for ~9k carry capacity (I’m sure it’s possible to do far more, but 9k is enough for now).

Hope this helps and may you make the most orcish redesigns of your captured ships!

PS. I can't post this as a Guide since I own the gaem on console and not Steam, and Steam does not allow guides without purchasing through them first because it believes game purchases outside Steam are heresy.

[arcademan]

Very helpful, thanks for posting this.