Starfield: How to Change Home Ships

In Starfield, buying, capturing, and building space-faring vessels is essential to progression. Your starting starship will let you travel through the lowest-level systems. Eventually, though, you’ll need to upgrade. And while you can have a massive fleet, your “home ship” is the main one you’ll take out on your adventures. However, actually setting it is one of the game’s many confusing systems that should be simple. Here’s how to change home ships in Starfield.

How to Change Your Home Ship in Starfield

Starfield starts by making the Frontier your default home ship. If you go out and capture a bigger, better one later, traveling to any port or landing on a planet automatically makes that one your primary vessel. Worse, if you buy one, the one you purchased gets the designation.

Thankfully, the process to change your home ship in Starfield is a simple one.

• Go to any Ship Services vendor (who you’ll know by their ball cap and large headphones perched above their ears).
• Ask to view and modify your ships.
• From that menu, select whichever craft you want as your home ship.
• Press H on keyboard or Home/Options on Xbox/PlayStation.

There’s not really much else to it. However, selecting the right Starfield home ship actually has much larger ramifications as you gather more of them. Whether you choose the life of a pirate or bounty hunter, or just happen across a better craft in your adventures, you’re liable to change home ships often.

Why Your Home Ship Matters

Fleet vessels can serve different purposes in Starfield. Your cargo hauler (illicit or not) will have a different build than your fighter. Choosing the right one for the job — and knowing you have it selected — is a small but incredibly important detail.

Taking ships, cleaning out the loot inside, and then selling them will likely become second nature. It’s a fantastic way to make money and improve or test your dogfighting skills. If you’re the kind of pilot who likes dealing in contraband, hunting pirates, and secreting away their ill-gotten goods, you may sacrifice a captured ship for the loot inside. You’ll then (possibly) need a new home ship.

Be careful about how many times you change your home ship in Starfield. You could invest several hundred thousand credits in updating an early craft only to find something much better 10 hours later. There’s no guarantee you’ll get that money back if you decide to sell ole reliable. Still, having a bank of vessels to potentially sell at a later date can act as a nice nest egg.

How Often Should You Upgrade Your Home Ship?

When and how you upgrade depends on two factors. First, do you want to build a ship from scratch or go out and find a free upgrade? Second, how much are you willing to invest in the new ship? Will it be one you expect to use for hours of playtime, or is it a stepping stone to something greater?

Odds are, the first few ships you buy, build, or capture will fall into the latter category. As much as I loved my first ship upgrade, I still quickly found myself wanting something bigger and better. And if you plan to explore the most dangerous reaches of space, you’ll need to upgrade more quickly than you might like. Ships and star systems have levels just like your character. The more difficult the area, the more powerful the ship, both in terms of firepower and health.

The more you adventure, the more you’ll need cargo space, as well. Unless you’re willing to spend an uncomfortable number of credits upgrading your first few home ships in Starfield, I guarantee it’s easier to buy them or take them from those who no longer need them.

You can, of course, take them back to Ship Services and make some improvements or retool half the ship. But I don’t recommend getting too invested in any of your home ships until you reach around Level 50 or so. That, or you find one capable of some nutty damage and/or survivability for relatively low investment.

That’s how to change your home ship in Starfield, as well as other useful tidbits. The game is massive, befitting a new Bethesda IP, and no one’s playthrough will be the same. We’ll be covering every inch of it we can find, so stay tuned to our Starfield guides hub for more.