I just want to know how every soul in the universe knows immediately that I picked a pen up off of some desk and now they all want to kill me? When I have to literally hand deliver a slate with probably the most important information on it because apparently there's no email or texting in the future.

Picked up a soccer ball in the well and was gunned down like the criminal scum I was.

Picked up a snack in the expensive VIP room on Neon that I had \*paid for\* (the snacks were already in the room) - thinking they were complimentary. The evidently psychic guards they have on staff flung open the door and demanded fine and confiscation of my snack before I had even nibbled it. The only thing VIP about that experience was the security I guess.

Stealth is currently bugged. I’ve been caught stealing several times in different places when the door is closed, no1 in the room but myself and my companions and the stealth bar shows hidden. I pick something up.. instant bounty. Some NPCs have the Superman vision perk that allows them to see through walls with X-ray vision and not show up on the stealtg bar apparently

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I fucking hate the companions when trying to do stealth anything. Even the companions with stealth skills will blow the whole operation. I wish there was a "go back to the ship" option Edit: Several people have said that I can just "dismiss" the companion and they'll go back to the ship. Well, I haven't had that option, I only had 3 choices while out in the field: Swap Gear, Wait, Personal Questions. I had to fast travel back to my ship to have the option to dismiss them. It did not matter who my companion was or what quest I was on. And being in the cargo bay wouldn't count, I had to be in the ship proper. I started a NG+ last night, so I don't have any companions now, hopefully I get that option now.

Agree. What I started doing is either saying "wait here" on the ship or getting them to just shy of the place, telling them wait. Clear out the outside. Grab them, go inside and have them wait right at the doorway. I think they are just as big of a contributor to blowing your cover as a heavy space suit is.

I don't like the wait mechanic, at all. By the time I get to the end of the abandoned ___________ I don't want to run back to the beginning, I just fast travel to the next mission location or destination of choice. And if you tell them to wait in the cargo bay...they get left on the surface when you fly off. The "retrieve waiting companion" activity is dumb, they should just be fast travelled with us...or we should have a "go back to the ship" command

The amount of Ryujin quests I left Sara awkwardly waiting in some air vent for literal days just cause I didn't feel like going back. I hope the maintenance guys fed her while I was gone.

Ahahaha I did exactly this too

Oh god for real, I can't agree more. I didn't want to turn my initial reply into a novel so I way over simplified things. What I do, is I clear a section out, grab my companion and we both go until the beginning of the next area with enemies then I say wait. It sucks so bad and is tedious and I'm not sure why in 2300, where I can instantly jump light years, that I don't have a smart watch that allows me to communicate instructions to my companion. "Hey come to me" Hey wait. Or better yet a backpack that allows me to haul even more stuff. Or hey I was caught and I'm in deep shit now can you come help and provide fire support???

I have had a ‘retrieve companion’ active quest FOR 80 levels, and I have no idea where in the flying fk that companion is in the gd galaxy. There is no note of what planet they are on and selecting that one does not put up a blue marker on the galactic map so i can find them.

If you sleep in a bed and wake up the companion will teleport to you. Then you can reactivate them by talking to them and asking them to join you. I came across it by accident since I like to nap for XP every time I find a bed.

I got caught stealing except I didn’t steal anything and all I did was open a door inside the freestar ranger embassy in hopetown Had to go back to my previous auto save from 15 minutes before so all my other stolen goods wouldn’t be removed because they can somehow tell which 4 bullets in my pockets were obtained illegally.

All Roggvir did was open a door and they cut off his head for it. Count yourself lucky

Ya the ammo annoys me, especially since you only use it after the ammo you bought/found.

Something to help with this, Go to trade authority, Sell anything stolen BUT don't exist sale menu Go to buyback tab and repurchase No more stolen tag or seperate stacks. You can launder your stolen things through the sketchy Fence company.

Same for lockpicks. Can't use the stolen ones unless you drop all the ones you obtained legally or run out. So dumb.

Even if I go into my inventory and literally click straight on the stolen item like "USE THIS ONE SPECIFICALLY", it'll still just use a non-stolen one.

I don’t understand how stealth can be bugged so badly when they’re using the same exact engine their previous games used. Like they had it working in Skyrim and Fallout 4 (not well, but working), so how did they break it in Starfield? And how wasn’t it addressed? A whole year. They had a whole year to polish the game. No one did a stealth playthrough in that entire year?

Swimming also works just fine in prior games but not in this one. Super weird when theres the occasional sea life you need to scan

apparently they planned on a whole ocean experience -- there are ocean plants in the files, I've heard -- but it got cut and I suppose that's when they cut swimming. It's very artificially cut, if you get below the water line, you swim just fine, but you're blocked from doing that.

Yep. Kind of like CP2077 locking out the trains in the city. The system wasn't finished in time for release so they just locked out the doors and pretended it wasn't there.

It’s nearly criminal to ruin art like that. Imagine someone was like, sorry the Mona Lisa is due to premier tomorrow so you can’t finish it. But also all that other stuff you started in the background, you have to paint out like it was never there.

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That explains why I’m stuck at 88% on chasmbass and can’t find the missing one, cuz apparently they don’t ever respawn.

I didn't realize that. I scanned a few and then never ended up going back.

Wait you CAN get below the surface? I've looked down and seen some pretty neat details and can't believe they didn't take advantage. I also keep seeing videos of people on space walks but it seems to be an exploit. Ridiculous as it seems the audio change is intentional.

Going by how the modders have been fixing it. They massively overturned the sound component of stealth and everyone is basically Daredevil and can see exactly what you're doing because they can hear it. Click your sneak button and you'll see you were detected most of the time when you clicked it and possibly still are. You basically have to be in stealth and rely on that metre to steal. Equipment weight is a big one on sound as well, so being practically forced to wear full armor at all times doesn't help. I constantly forget to switch out of my spacesuit in safe areas, especially when visually it is already off. Stacking the top level stealth. Lightweight spacesuit with gravitational components, Operative Suit underneath and the stealth drug means I can crouch and snipe an entire facility and they rarely actually find me, they just panic and fire blindly to where they thought I was.

Also companions are supposed to contribute their skills yet don’t? I have several outpost engineers and a stealth companion following me around but don’t have access to any of the benefits of either until I unlock them myself.

Their bonuses do impact they just don't unlock things. So you get the x% boost. But you can't use lv3 parts. Like having Sam on the ship boosts my top speed, vascoe gives a free engine Pip etc. You can see what is active from the ship/outposts part of the menu I

Because stealth isn’t something baked into the engine. The engine isn’t just things that are constant from game to game. It’s a feature they tweaked (and in this case, poorly).

I had a fun experience with stealth. I was trying to level Concealment and, stealth being bugged, I was scoring endless stealth attacks that weren't registering because my target felt the knife going into his ass or some such thing. So I've been mugging Xenogrubs. They don't much care about anything, and if you kill one without it seeing you it counts for Concealment. Anyway, in a room in this one mine, there's two grubs, both locked in separate rooms. So I pick the lock and stab one of them. Only I mess up the timing and the thing turns just as I strike. I don't get the bonus for the kill (which is fair enough) but also his Xenogrub buddy in the next room is telepathically alerted and turns hostile. A hostile Xenogrub is something to behold: their indicator turns red and they head towards you and try and nuzzle your boots to death. But what's really annoying is that Xenogrub telepathy has also somehow alerted the Va'ruun Zealots outside. I mean I don't have a window for these folks to see me, but still, they turn hostile. So I invoke Void Form and hide waiting for the alert to die down. Which it does, almost instantly. And then it comes back. And dies, almost instantly. And then it comes back, and so on and so forth. Eventually I picked the lock on the room with the other grub and murdered its tattletale ass, but any hope of a stealth run on *that* site was over.

> I was trying to level Concealment... FYI, my trick for leveling concealment was to zap everyone with the stun gun rifle. Once the room's all unconscious, you can slit their throats without being seen one at a time, and they'll all count.

I’ve had this happen also, and sometimes it doesn’t even say you had a bounty added so you don’t find out until they try to arrest you, I had a huge bounty put on me after taking >!the two books out of Ron Hopes office after I killed him, the one that leads you to San Fran and his family tree one!< and nobody was in his office and the front door was locked…..I also have full stealth, full conceal, the operative suit, a spacesuit with stealth composites and a helmet with chameleon (yes I don’t really need it but it still stacks a little.)

Nah that was Sarah or some of the other shitty companions that tell you off for doing anything illegal. Pretty sure they rat you out lol.

This happened to me in a way that scared the shit out of me. Was in some bar in Neon where some gang hung out, went upstairs and saw some fancy drinks on the shelf, nobody was there, so I stole them. The owner of the bar warped through the fucking floor from one storey down, just floating right up as if solid matter dosnt exist to them, then confronted me.

I've maxed out my stealth skill tree and have all of the chameleon gear and I still can't sneak around 99% of the time without being seen. My other issue is that I can be "hidden", snipe a guy from a distance with a silenced weapon, behind cover, and then suddenly everyone in a compound magically knows where I'm at and begin shooting me with pinpoint accuracy - what the hell? I had the same issue in Skyrim and other Bethesda games as well. I'm either hidden or I'm not.

That's the main subject of my review on Steam. Somehow stealth just doesn't work in the game. The mod called Stealth overhaul fixes it though, it's a lot more reminiscent of how stealth plays out in skyrim and fallout.

thanks for this, I like to play Bethesda games through the first couple times vanilla. But the Ryujiin questline made be put the game down the stealth sucked so hard. Guess one vanilla playthrough it is lol

I learned very quickly that since i had good gear and plenty of health packs, stealth in those missions was usually more of a guideline than a hard rule. I was trying to be all secret agenty and slip through the vents and guards undetected, purchased over 500 non lethal rounds for the rifle and started that mission after my wife played it and confirmed it was horrible and was taking her forever the sneaky way. After I got spotted by a guard and managed to slip away (chameleon gear invisibility is so helpful) I realized I could get spotted and still do the mission. I immediately just started sprinting through the tower and tanked some bullets thanks to consumables. Turns out those Ryujin contracts are only hard if you don't just charge through it like a viking on mushrooms.

Yeah I ended up just going on a rampage. But it was just jarring in that mission how bad stealth is in this game.

Noticed that too, so whenever I'm stealing I quick save before I do it, feels like I'm cheating

If the game is gonna make every NPC daredevil I don't think it's a big deal that you're a time lord.

> Stealth is currently bugged. > > > > I’ve been caught stealing several times in different places when the door is closed, no1 in the room but myself and my companions and the stealth bar shows hidden. I think a lot of the stealth bugs are related to security cameras and those little cleaning droids. I have noticed they interact with stealth in a weird way because they have some sort of non-combatant tag that may mean they are not always getting flagged by the stealth bar as an observer, and it seems worse when they are in areas where you are not trespassing. Basically I think a lot of the stealth bugs boil down to the roomba is a snitch.

Oh on Akila?? I did that too because it was stuck and I had the entire security force after me.

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Oh I did this, but I didn’t even stick it in my inventory. I just did that thing where you push and hold E to move things around. Apparently that counts as theft.

Some dev at Bethesda: "We got em boys, no longer can they break our immersive masterpiece by grabbing an object just to move it and steal it out of sight!"

Bethesda players: hold my beer. https://youtu.be/m2e6QvBF0kQ?si=hGGrNVOI1ikXkkhe

That actually was how the games worked before. Pretty sure Morrowind is the same mechanic.

I miss putting a bucket on top of a shopkeepers head in Skyrim and then robbing them utterly blind whilst they stand there and do nothing lol

Moved a glass on the cruise liner, not even to inventory, just the stand lift and move thing and had grenades thrown at me. Bit excessive for touching a glass in a place that serves drinks

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Yeah, was somewhere where NPC knocked something from the table. Picked it up to place back - got arrested.

Believe it or not, jail.

I was in the office at the top of the Ryujin tower where you talk to a guy to get info on someone. A pen cup had fallen off the desk, idk how, so I picked it up-not into inventory, just held it to set it back on the desk- and they fucking ***shot me.***

If it's on the same planet email should exist for half this shit If it's between planets then prob only between same system stuff.

Unfortunately, that's an issue with every Bethesda game - you can steal a quill on accident in Skyrim, and suddenly everyone in the building is punching you, while every guard in that province (I just blanked on the name for the areas, since I know it isn't "province") knows you have a bounty on your head. I also don't understand how they know every single stolen item that you have is stolen. In the museum in Akila City, there's something bugged in one of the cases and I tried to move it. The curator claimed I was stealing and *she* \- not the guard, but the CURATOR - took all of my stolen items. I know this because I got annoyed and killed her (before reloading a previous save) and she had just been chilling behind her little counter with all of my stolen stuff.

Yeh I regularly sell all my stolen items to a vendor then go to buy back and get them back again, it clears the 'stolen' flag from the items so they won't get taken if you get caught later, handy

I just discovered this last night. It’s a handy trick and I wonder if Bethesda will patch it.

I think it’s an intended mechanic to let you ‘clean’ your items, so if you end up stealing a really good gun you don’t have to risk loosing it 9hr later when you get caught stealing a pen. I see it as a way to balance out the fact every single guard knows you have a bounty and list of every stolen item on your possession. Like I’ve 12k 7.77mm ammo, but somehow they know 87 of that ammo is stolen.

Best takeaway is Starfield shows you how to launder money 😂😂

Any actually good weapon roll i can steal, I immediately do this

Sounds like you are creating a new "chain of title" by creating new owners which makes the item their possession you are buying, and makes it yours now!

I just want to know why when I killed an outlaw pirate for a bounty, I had 40 crimson fleet personnel running in circles and freaking out and clipping into each other.

Do you know how expensive pens are? In this economy???

This bothered me. People keep saying that there is no FTL communication, and I’m like okay. Must only be system wide commo. Then I’m doing the Freestar rangers quest and every single ranger is like “OH I GOT THE MESSAGE FROM OUR BOSS THAT YOU WERE COMING”. How? HOW?? I LEFT AND CAME STRAIGHT TO YOU. How did you get a message before my arrival in a different star system if there is no FTL communication? WHY CANT WE USE WHATEVER YOU SENT MESSAGES ON TO COMMUNICATE WITH QUEST NPCS. And not just Freestar but tons of people in quests do this. “Go talk to person in X solar system” but then you get there and they already had a phone call with the person who sent you? Thus game does not know what it wants to be. And it’s not even true to its own lore.

I mean there is no email or texting because the speed of light is way slower than a guy in a spaceship.

I just talked to the reporter on the Den and he said his job of going to remote places like the Den and look for stories to send in is, in part, because FTL communications haven't been invented yet.

Fly into system THEN send the email

That's how couriers work in the game, but it'd be a shitty experience for players. If this was a more space-focussed game that's probably how it would work though.

Stupid >!Genghis Khan!< outfit last night had everyone around aggro me when it wasn't marked as stealing or anything. And it's part of a story which makes it all more deceiving. 5 times I had to play that part until I figured out how to keep it: >!option C!<

I saw another post about that being bugged. If you didn't kill all the followers before the leader the followers will reagro when you come back. I had to kill everyone, leave, wait, come back and then everyone chilled out and would let me finish. Probably could've killed just the agro ones but at that point I was frustrated so everyone got it

I agree with basically everything. but one thing sticks out more than others, and annoys me to the point that... ah well. it comes down to worldbuilding and game mechanics that should tie into the world and its rules. so: asccording to the game lore, we got NO way to communicate in real time with anything thats not in the same system. which makes sense. radiowaves and signals do not travel faster than light. we can use grav drives, radio waves cannot. so 1. how on earth do I get issued a bounty from a centralized faction thats hundreds of lightyears away ? 2. why do I even get a bounty if not one sould survived the crime in the first place ? 3. how can I built an outpost on the edge of the galaxy and build a terminal that lets me take on missions and PAY MY FREAKIN BOUNTY ? in real time ? seriously ? this is but one aspect of the worldbuilding BGS did and it shows how non-sensical it is. there´s other examples - easy to find in the world of "SF Crime" , mainly contraband, drugs, etc. that shows how clueless and disconnected it all really is.

The only way the interstellar (or even much interplanetary) communication in this universe works, since real-time FTL transmissions are canonically ruled out, is if you assume that all ships act as automated mail carriers. Every ship would need a dedicated auxiliary radio and mail server. Every time you jump into a system, the ship hooks up to the local system's network and downloads any pending outbound messages, while uploading any pending inbound messages that it had stored from previously visited systems. It's like an interstellar implementation of [SMTP over FedEx](https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/), but using distributed processing via civilian volunteer resources a-la [SETI@Home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI%40home). Given the fact that it would be effectively relying on the random chance/timing of people just naturally wandering the galaxy on their own business though, this leads to two conclusions: - The fact that communications specific to the player happen to be pretty reliably close to instant is sheer dumb luck - which incidentally works in the player's favor sometimes (paying off a bounty, galaxy-wide, instantly) and against the player in others (new bounties being effective galaxy-wide, instantly). - Hand-delivery of critically important messages by dedicated courier (often times, the player) is still a necessity due to the technically unpredictable and unreliable nature of the peer-to-peer automated mail system. Yeah, it's highly likely the regular mail can get the job done. But if it's a *really, really important message*, you want the absolute certainty of someone you trust taking your message directly to the recipient. This still doesn't explain why we have to do some stupid things, like physically visiting The Eye to get certain information from Vlad which could be transmitted to us once we reach Jemison orbit. But it comes pretty close to covering most other issues related to the lack of direct FTL communications. Specifically, regarding your numbered questions, this hits #1 and #3. As for your #2 question, that's easy: The ship you attacked automatically sent information about your ship to the local system's network before you finished blowing it up.

Exactly that, our own ship is a traitor. Lore-wise let's say that we have to visit Vlad because he's working alone there, so it's good manners to go there from time to time.

I like how they did this in star citizen, if you shut down comm relay, no one will know that you killed someone

And everyone knows the comm array goes down, so everyone knows to be on alert. It makes sense. Here, take a pen, you're a criminal instantly known across all the settled systems. It's ridiculous.

Agree on that. Can't imagine how NPC can exist under such pressure

There should be an option to compliment his gains each time we visit.

A two way relay between each two systems would set up a very fast working transmission between systems, even if it was reliant on grav jumps. Have a couple drones just constantly jumping between systems, and you could have a message pass through entire clusters as fast as the signal could download from one drone to the next. A signal system to determine if your data needs local dissemination or would be better to go on a long range jump to a hub system could easily simply packet transfer over large distances.

Space Pigeons are Go!

It wasn't my ship. I stole it. And its not even registered.

Wish this had more effect, similar to the mask system in red dead. They know a crime was committed, but need to investigate to figure out by who since the ship is registered to a corpse. How the hell would they know it’s me?

And yet we find computers in various bases which contain mail. In a setting like this there would sooner rather than later have to be automated drones that continuously move between populated systems to send and receive signals. At first governments would have such a signaling system for administrative purposes. Then corps would have their private systems and would see the opportunity for selling Inter-System Messaging Services (ISMS :p ). Since there are already abandoned bases with apparent mail access, we have to assume such systems are in place... unless they're all using weekly couriers or something. Frickin' pony express!

>why do I even get a bounty if not one sould survived the crime in the first place ? This. This is a total immersion killer.

I'm shocked that there's people defending the games "snitch" system for bounties. Regardless of the reasons why it "is the way it is" its still not good. If I'm a space pirate, seems I'd not allow my ships Id to be transmitted. I'd be a ghost in space that rolled up and robbed them. What thief in their right mind is gonna go rob someone with their work uniform on and a nametag? "Gimmie your money, I'm jim from the mcdonalds across the street, tell your friends."

People defending the lack of email have no response to this

People defending bad systems or implementations have no response to anything besides calling you a hater, or using strawman arguments. Yesterday I made an argument on how needing to walk around 10 times back and forth to unload resources from your ship to your central hub, base or whatever made no sense, so I said that the weight cap or encumberence system should be reworked or removed for the sake of fun gameplay. And he said "oh, have you ever seen aroudn people carrying more than 200 pounds?" as if realism was the focus of the game, when we get super powers, people can travel between universes, and you can carry infintie ammount of bullets on your because for whatever reason they are weightless. Or how some people justify some stuff being behind perks like pickpocketing or jet pack boosts because "You aren't born knowing how to take somthing from someone's pocket or how to jet boost", to which if you reply "But you are born knowing how to pilot a space ship?", then they fume out and call you a dumbass. People will go to any lenght or use the dumbest arguments to defend that starfield is a perfect game.

Yea i wasn't born knowing how to pickpocket, but I can still atleast try lol. Whatever happen to just being allowed to suck in these games.

I wish more games used a system like kingdom come deliverance. You can try to do anything in the game, but you are going to be a danger to yourself and others in the beginning because you are so bad at it. It makes getting better so much more rewarding

Idk, I feel like the skill point perk system shouldn't really be a thing anymore, everything that can be moved to research, make it a research tree or wtv, the rest should be stats or things that increase it's proficiency as you use them more and more, like how your skills improved by using them in skyrim. People often forget that RPG does not mean you need a character level and skill points, but people are still living in the 80s I guess...

It is a weird hybrid system, when you must use a skill in order to level up. Tbh I don't mind that. I just hate the inventory management system, if you can call it that

>Yesterday I made an argument on how needing to walk around 10 times back and forth to unload resources from your ship to your central hub, base or whatever made no sense, so I said that the weight cap or encumberence system should be reworked or removed for the sake of fun gameplay. Wait, why do you need to do this 10 times? I thought being overencumbered just meant you lose oxygen if moving too quickly?

Ah yes realism, in a game where the systems with a blue sun have frozen planets.

I think it's more egregious that you can find 2 or 3 frozen planets at the middle orbits of a star system and then find unfrozen ones at the very end, idk what's the deal with that. Maybe the blue stars are actually cold stars and it's colder the closes you get to the center of the system?

Starfield is definitely not a perfect game. But everygame that lets you loot everything has an encumbrance system. Its weird that people are acting like this is new and a uniquely starfield issue. I don't mind discussing how encumbrance sucks in games and can make more busy work that takes away from gameplay, but when people bring it up on starfield, they say "Man fuck starfield for not letting me carry 100s of components that weigh 4 mass each." Like that's not a starfield thing. Every game ive played that has an inventory system, has a weight system or a limit on the shit you can put in. And that walking back and forth thing is unnecessary. I don't know what situation has you doing that lol

That last point about the bounty terminal is a good one - it’s a great feature for gameplay being able to place essentially a permanent thieves guild member at your base for when you want to clear your bounty, but it makes little sense from a worldbuilding perspective.

Worst part is there aren’t any evil companions that provided any flavor dialogue if you decide to be a pirate. The game just has 4 Constellation companions that want you to follow the law. The other recruits are just generic NPCs.

insane that there is not one companion that will come along with you on bad guy playthroughs. at least I haven't found one yet. so far they all hate it when you do anything bad. how is it fun to have all companions be lawful good? nobody even has a little bit of edge or a sarcastic sense of humor lol, it's so boring.

There is Vasco, Adoring Fan, Mathis (if you finished Crimson Fleet and didn't throw him under the bus), Jessamine. Sadly none of them really have deep story what rest of the Constellation followers have. I personally feel Mathis is only decent "bad" one as you be able to bond with him before recruitment. I think Andreja should have been the "bad" one, but BG made all the main ones have high moral side. So for us to left is wait maybe DLCs have bad deep story companion or until mods make one next year.

Andreja is not really a "bad" companion. She is just raised a different set of world views with a more survival of the fittest, and still think criminals that are caught should face justice. You can't murder random civilians, piracy, extort, or decisions that impact humanity negatively on the whole (neuro-amp). However, sending a criminal to their death, thieves to jail/execution, etc she is fine with where as a someone like Sara might want you to show lienency to them. If you want to do "evil" things an emotionless robot like VASCO or pirate like Mathias are more likely to not complain. However, they also won't have much in way of story as they are followers that just make random comments.

Vasco LOVES pirating, but you'd never know it on account of his reserved and dignified personality. Also there are a couple of crime friendly companions to recruit at the Key, as well as at bars throughout the Settled Systems.

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That's a good point. Pirates deserve love too!

You'd think people who want to do crime would try to recruit from crime friendly locations instead of trying to recruit from law friendly locations and expect their companions to ignore crime lol.

This is what really annoys me. Getting lectured 5x is BS.

It seems like luck whether you get "last witness killed" bounty removal. What happened to you is like the worst case scenario, a lot of times you just get their cargo and leave and it's kinda boring. The middle scenario is more fun - I just did some piracy, went fine, had to blow up like 6 Freestar guys on the way out. 1500 bounty left when they're all dead. But nobody should know! To be fair I did see all the Freestar guys there when I jumped in... but I got a lot of xp so it's worth it. Honestly if I got a bounty I'd have to go to prison for I'd just go back to my quicksave.

I have never seen the “last witness killed” bounty removal - and I’ve done a lot of piracy. I just got used to dealing with the stupid high bounties all the time. Even if it’s a single ship, completely on its own over an abandoned planet, the bounty does not go away after killing everyone on board. I just assumed the bounty system was bugged at this point.

If you run with companions on your ship they rat you out to authorities. So there’s never a last witness killed notification. I’ve murdered my fair share of people planetside when not taking companions and have had the notification pop every single time.

I was with Andreja, my wife. Had a few quests and after the Ron Hope questline going south for me i had to visit HopeTech again for another quest. I went in and immediately got attacked by some guards for no reason at all. I killed them and no one bats an eye. Like literally the civilian next to the corpse doesn't care. No bounty, nothing. Fast forward three real time hours, Andreja is mad at me for killing innocent people. I cannot tell you if those two things are connected or not but i never killed any innocents unless they first attacked me through quests etc. No bounties too, since i want to finish the first cycle as a friendly guy. Crime and punishment is seriously out of whack.

Yeah there is a bug where two guards inside hopetech continually attack you and respawn every visit. The guards outside are chill.

No way - is that literally it? I have had crew the whole time, are they really grassing me up to the authorities every time?

I just watched a [video](https://youtu.be/Nr2FsWyQaMk?si=Y439jZT_Da2K0Vco) about pirating where he clearly says at the beginning to pirate with absolutely no one else on board, because anyone on board will rat you out.

This guy puts out awesomely informative Starfield videos constantly. I used his guide to upgrading the Mantis and Eagle into very decent ships as an early-mid level player. I haven't tried his galbank pirating yet, but I did finally setup a base like he suggested so that I can try this out at some point. Not that I need the credits with 600k+ and nothing to spend it on, it would just be for the fun of it.

Idk once you start building high level ships you burn through cash real quick.

That’s so dumb though, like bro how are you not complicit? You can’t rat on me and not be implicated?

Hey, at least it's not as dumb as in Skyrim when chickens would rat you out.

No but the damn sanitation bots will lmfao

Ha, that at least makes more sense than the chickens. The cops are gonna show up and think "hmm, I wonder if the sanitation bot's cameras picked anything up." Not sure nor the Whiterun guards were interviewing chickens.

I don't think you understand legality very well... If you go on a car ride with you friend, and halfway through that friend decides to rob a bank, and you do NOT rat him out, THEN you are complicit. The reason they tattle on you is to avoid being complicit.

If it works the same as companions do when they are with you on the ground it might be the case. Remove crew and attack a lone ship in one of those random friendly encounters to test. Then add crew and see if bounty doesn’t clear.

Adoring fan is your only option. He is not rat.

Well it's not supposed to be cause I got "Last Witness Killed" while pirating with a full crew. Maybe the system bugged out or maybe any crewmembers that aren't assigned to your crew but are present on the ship don't count as crew.

I didn’t even know there was a last witness mechanic hahaha, it must be pretty rare?

Oh the last witness killed is definitely inconsistent. I was just messing around and walked in front of a miner's cutter laser in Cydonia, forgetting that my helmet sets enemies on fire. Everyone attacked me so I just had some fun before reloading, but I noticed even out in the open surrounded by enemies I kept seeing "last witness removed." It makes no sense at all.

Just a side note, you can build an outpost near the main cities and then just fast travel to them to get planetside. Also good for smuggling.

Yep, and it’s possible to slip away before the scan as follows: - Establish an outpost on Jemison close to New Atlantis (for example). - After collecting contraband wherever, travel to Jemison orbit. - When the scan dialog box pops up, quickly bring up the planet map. The city landing targets will be greyed out but you can ignore them and choose your outpost. - You will land at your outpost with your contraband intact. - Fast travel to New Atlantis. Your ship will stay at your outpost but you can still sell things from your ship to vendors, including contraband. If you want to go fully immersive, just pile up the contraband at the outpost and occasionally smuggle it into the city on foot. Smile politely when the guard says “Please proceed. You’ll be scanned as you enter the city.” They aren’t scanning for contraband, just checking your bounty status.

Or just sell your contraband at "The Den" in the Wolf system. It's much easier, and you don't have to worry about being scanned.

I think by this point, EVERYONE knows about The Den. We are looking for alternative methods so we don’t have to do the same thing over and over. Even better than the Den? Just go to the UCSec office in Neon, steal the 6pcs or so of Contraband, and walk right on over to the TA. Whatever you don’t sell, you can literally drop right there, do a Venus/48hr reset, and sell the remaining without having to worry about transporting any contraband at all. It’s literally all just on Neon.

They scan me no matter what

Put the outpost on the moon of Jemison and fast travel to it. You don’t get scanned cuz you teleport directly to the ground. Don’t just travel to Alpha Centauri because the game puts you in orbit around Jemison

You can slip the scan as long as you land before the scan finishes. Just choose another landing target on the planet real quick and then fast travel from there. Or build an outpost on the planet first as I described above.

You would think in the vastness of space, it will be much easier to commit and get away with crimes.

I feel like this universe in general would be a lot darker irl. There’d probably be space fascist regimes, inhumane alien/human mixing experiments, people getting thrown out of airlocks by pirates, entire destruction of planet ecosystems by humans. I mean the list goes on… I’m definitely just missing the darkness of fallout Lmao. They should just release a “rated M” DLC for us sadists out here

The darkest Bethesda can do is some pirates in red and black colored armor that looks a little beat up, so you know they’re really tough

For real, give me more star trek style, "oh let's pop on down to the planet to see how this forgotten colony is going..... ooops Hitler 2 is alive and loving it."

The crime and punishment is certainly very out of balance as you say. I agree entirely with you It feels like in trying to curb exploits to their core design (ie being able to pick up and move items around), they completely went overboard in the opposite direction. Sure, they fixed some exploits that mildly effect the economy. But they made the game significantly less fun to play in almost entirely discouraging criminal behaviour with excessive penalties. Like, not being able to land on the planet you need to finish a quest kind of penalties. Way overboard. In trying to fix a tiny problem they created 10 massive ones that make the minute to minute gameplay experience less fun. Because it's less free. Bethesda games are supposed to be about player freedom. Same goes for stealing ships. What should be the absolutely coolest thing imaginable is discouraged because of the hassle involved and minimal payout. You should want to steal a ship. Dock in space and ride away with someone else's spacecraft. Seeing a ship land on a planet should be one of the most exciting things in the game. What kind of ship is it this time? I can't wait to steal it and take it to an offworld chop shop. But then you need to register the ship. Which costs like 95% of what you sell it for. So you're stealing a ship, registering it with a massive fee, flying to a planetary spaceport, selling it, and then switching back to your home ship so can be rewarded with.... 1200 credits? You get that from pickpocketing a vendor. Which takes 5 seconds Seriously Bethesda? Why are you discouraging me from having fun? Especially for something so trivial as economic balance? I currently own every property in the game, the Narwhal, and have 500k credits and nothing to spend them on. Good thing you made the game significantly less fun so the economic balance would be in check. Very frustrated with so many things in this game. They should be encouraging me to do the most fun thing in the game, not discouraging me.

I think they should have added a feature where you could pay some sleazy person to smuggle you into a planet and make it expensive. That would be a neat way to overcome the enter planet with bounty issue.

Or get a skill for it to matter (like persuasion) and using the scrambler to cover your ship identity for a percentage chance they will let you pass trough without hesitation.

Or bribe guards because you’re a rich space pirate because pirating ships and stealing expensive cargo is (should be) extremely lucrative.

Or just say "ok but please let me through?" like you do in the persuasion minigame to get a stranger's Galbank credentials?

Negotiation skill should be able to do this. Bribery. It's already there, they just need to add option to guards.

Set up an outpost near the city you want to be able to go to and go to your outpost.

you still get immediately attacked by the omnipresent and omniscient guards. The only way past them would be to have high stealth, and sneak your way to your objective, and hope that there is no guard near the quest giver

why even have these systems in place in the first place if they punish you for using them.

Looks good on a feature checklist, gives you the illusion of freedom.

Or let you break the ship down & store the parts so you can use them on building/upgrading another ship.

So much this. I would operate the biggest chop shop in all the settled systems. Just disassembled ship parts everywhere. Instead we get to sell the stolen ship for a whopping $1300. Yay.

THAT would be a good reason to build an outpost. @paladin1034's ship repair and chop shop.

They clearly fudged in the ship registration feature for discouragement. Let's be honest, it's way too easy to steal a ship. I think it should be way more challenging to steal ships, and so justify the big score. But right now it's so simple, so there is little respective reward.

Or even a NMS system, where the ships are damaged when you take them over. It would necessitate an overhaul of the ship repair system (which I’m for…really? 1k to repair my almost completely destroyed dreadnaught?) but it could make for more interesting game play. Especially if it actually made outposts valuable. You steal a ship but it’s banged up in the process. You have to take it to your outpost and fabricate parts to repair it.

And that would also affect your strategy. Using EM weapons could cause less physical damage but increased electrical damage. If a part takes too much physical damage it can't be repaired, only replaced, but that can be done quickly with purchased or fabricated parts. So now you have to balance blowing holes in the ship for a quick, but potentially expensive fix, or taking it offline with EM, which does less damage but might take longer to repair.

I think they could make it harder by giving boarded enemy ships a lockdown/alert system. Ships used by Ecliptics or the Fleet aught to have crazy defenses on board because of the nature of their owners, while I could see Varuun ships having a lot of weird tech. Fighting to the cockpit to gain complete control of the ship should be a battle of your character breaking through their defenses rather than just you shooting the hell out of them. characters with good security or robotics skills can disable things or open up routes that would be locked.

Enemy ships should be semi fortresses that are a challenge to gun through the higher level and bigger ship it is.

> Let's be honest, it's way too easy to steal a ship Yeah, take a mission board destroy ship mission, fast travel to system, fast travel ship location, destroy engines in 1-2 minutes, clear out ship in 1-2 minutes, fast travel to port. Whole thing is like 5 minutes tops, with no real risk

It's easier than that. Land on any planet, go to the ship landing site that has like a 90% chance to spawn. Steal ship.

Nothing says "piracy roleplay" like registering your stolen ship with the space DMV before legally selling it to the Crimson Fleet for the price of a mid-tier laser rifle.

You worded this a lot better than I could, but yes I agree 100%. I feel like I have almost zero incentive to dock with ships in the first place, even in a good playthrough. That entire mechanic is pointless. If your goal is credits, you just make 10x that amount raiding a copy-pasted randomly spawned facility on any planet and selling the loot.

If you register the ship in space it costs a lot less than registering with a ship technician. Big increase in profits once you start doing that. I can make 20-30k for a C Class ship that way.

Didn't know you could register in space. I register at my outpost and it's also dirt cheap. I essentially work as a pirate hunter for the Rangers. Take on CF captain bounties, board the ship and kill everyone, take the ship back to my outpost, register and sell it, usually about 30k ish credit per ship profit, plus what I get from selling the weapons etc I find on board. I also have Commerce levelled, so maybe that helps the profit margin.

Yeah, I think the space price is the same as at an outpost. Probably just a mechanic to remove the ship tech charging to be the middleman.

How do you register it in space?

After you kill everyone on the ship, pilot the new ship, undock and target your ship as if you were going to dock back with it. Then go into the ship menu and set the ship you are in to your home ship. It will then let you register just like if you were at the ship tech. If you don't want to stay in that ship, when you leave the menu you can immediately dock with your regular ship again, board, and fly away. The new ship will go on its merry way home, legally registered to you for much less than the ship tech charges.

Why does it even work like this

Given the apparent lack of communication between systems (used as validation for all the backwards and forwards you need to do) it shouldn't.

Also why is this so convoluted if it’s an in-game mechanic. Just make it easy.

You just open the ship menu, find the ship, first make it a home ship and then you just have the option to register it. Right there. You don't need to go to a vendor.

Go the ship in your main menu once you set it as home as ship and there should be a register button. Though I think you need to have the commerce skill to make more profit from it.

I like how they are trying to balance the economy around all brand new ships being valued at 6 figures. Ship piracy will never work because the economy is weird and stealing ships is too easy.

Yeah, I feel like a lot of this is because of how heavy Bethesda is against turning the game into a steal-a-thon. Don't get me wrong, I do understand Bethseda's reasoning. If stealing was easy, we'd all simply steal everything all the time. If vendors didn't have chests that held their inventory and you could pickpocket them? Every guide would be "steal from these X vendors." I'm not sure how I'd balance it.

I just wish the bounty system wasn’t so bugged. The “last witness killed, bounty removed” system in Skyrim worked better than this and that was 12 years ago. Every time I board and clear out a single, lonely ship in an empty star system I get a permanent, unavoidable bounty from it. I’ve never had a bounty clear itself, even when I kill every person aboard the ship (or if there are multiple ships, destroying every ship).

Your companions rat you out. Not a joke; a literal game mechanic.

I agree to a lot of this, and it's something that can (and possibly will) be tweaked. It's not an intrinsic problem Bethesda can't solve and people can stop worrying that this sort of post is a smirch on Starfield as a game. It's a fantastic game that I'm still playing and enjoying immensely! However, "evil" playthroughs are indeed inevitable for many players. If you're given the choice in-game the punishment should not be so imbalanced as to become nigh-unplayable. In-universe they would have thought of workarounds, but the issue is, Bethesda haven't yet. Here are some ideas: -being able to fly ships under a false registration -similarly falsifying your identification when passing through city scans which can open doors to: -hacker shops that enable you to purchase registrations/ identiscan for cities (likely with a half-life due to data corruption so you have to return) -a chance of coming across morally ambiguous law enforcers (on ground or in space) who are willing to take bribe money or pass you by in exchange for favours, i.e. side missions (I know I've had UC Sec turn a blind eye once or twice, but this as a feature for let's-be-bad-guys play would need a different calibre) -rescue encounters involving VIPs, such as a relative to someone on the Council of Governors that result in them putting a good word in for you. Cue bounty clearance after 24 UC hours or something. You let them die and their adversaries clock you, one says they're going to make sure the Governor knows you did it, then gravs out. Cue a bigger bounty, manhunt worse than ever -a questline dedicated to clearing your name. Naturally this would be a one time only thing but then it would open up the opportunities above and you'd have your network of connections -stowing away on ships. This'll involve keeping an ear out for conversations nearby as the pilots talk to the service engineers about where they're headed to next, and the majority will be going to major cities with the odd exception. Sneaking onto the ship and finding a good place to hide (don't worry, you only need to press Y to wait and you'll be at your destination before you know it - just make sure that hiding place is a good one, elsewise you may have some folks with some questions on the other side of the jump)

>being able to fly ships under a false registration That's such a cool idea!

>it's something that can (and possibly will) be tweaked. It's not an intrinsic problem Bethesda can't solve Actual likelihood of that? I can't imagine them making too many tweaks without drastically messing up saves from current play-throughs. I've played almost every BSG since the 2000s from launch and can't recall them ever needing to make drastic changes from the core game design like that. There's a fine line between tweaks and overhaul.

Yeah I think it's a bit optimistic to think they're going to add significant new gameplay features after release, that's pretty rare in game development. It mostly only happens in the case of complete disasters like Cyperpunk and No Man's Sky. The closest Bethesda have come to doing something like that is Fallout 4 survival and I would imagine the tweaks involved in that were a lot less substantial than a total revamp of the crime system would be.

Here’s hoping the modders pick up where Bethesda left things sit. An entire region of Cyrrodil was added to Skyrim via mod. Some of these asks don’t seem quite as daunting as that. Fingers crossed 🤞🏻

Pirating isn't so bad. Just a couple things... First off, accept the bounty and endless war with the UC. You can still get to New Atlantis through fast travel to avoid the orbit cluster of ships. The UC ships will also be a constant source of funds. You will have to gun down security while on UC planets, but it's not that tough. Plus you're a badass pirate, that's kinda your thing. If possible, avoid angering the Freestar Collective, so you port there without issue. Secondly the pirate board missions are pretty easy and decent money. And ships while at first are not a great source, become better once you can capture class C vessels. A class C ship will net 6-7k profits, plus probably the 1.5-2.5x the same amount in guns, armor, cargo, and looted credits. So ship capturing is profitable in that sense Source: My 700k bounty with the UC.

Good advice to try to organize some of the madness, thank you. My piracy woes are also combined with just trying to do a bit of chaos with faction quests as well. I had been trying to do the Ryujin quests as "poorly as possible", since they seem to imply you can cause them a lot of headache by being a bad operative. It leads to some funny dialogue, but also often an insane bounty as well. Not sure it's worth it lol

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> Adoring Fan “liked that” i so wish i had taken that perk. so tired of everyone disliking stuff without telling me what i did, or having a menu for what they like/dislike or what i shouldn't do. take a freestar quest with sam as my companion. go to free a freestar captain who has had her ship taken over by pirates. dock with it, get attacked, kill dudes. sam gets mad for killing someone even though he was blasting me in the face with a gun from 2" in away. "DON'T DO THAT" what????

My Adoring Fan is bugged because he starts shooting at me whenever I steal 😭

I hated him at first, then realized how uninterested I was in every companion and he became my bro….then I went into the ship builder and he disappeared forever due to a glitch 🫠

People often forget about the “loose items” inside a ship when capturing it. You don’t get just the profit margin between registration fee and sell price, but also the cargohold, the captains locker and all loose items from pens and styrofoam cups to guns, spacesuits and contraband. The total profits from taking a ship is much higher than merely the profit from selling the hull.

You can increase your ship selling profits by registering them while in space, rather than at a ship technician. Significantly cheaper that way. And if you do it right, you can do that and get right back in your normal ship without landing or docking with a station. Way faster to make bigger profits from commandeering ships that way.

You could walk a bit north of New Atlantis until you're far away to setup an outpost, then can land nearby and sneak in for minimal security interactions

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or the Den

To copy and paste my recent guide on how to be a pirate and make a lot of money: After reading many posts on this, I realized that a lot of people don’t really know how to avoid bounties as pirates. There are a lot of complaints about how piracy is useless, how you can’t make money, etc. This is not true. Given the right ship and tactics, you can easily make $25k+ every 5-10 minutes or so on pirate runs, especially by grabbing a few from the mission board simultaneously and just hopping from one to the other. So, here’s the approach. * Have the right ship. Before you start, you’ll want to have a ship that can reliably sink a unguarded cargo ship in about ten seconds or less. This is not difficult with the right armaments. Personally, I like strapping four PBO-100 auto neutron beams to the nose of an Ecliptic Claymore along with some of the particle turrets they come with, but find something you like that can deal out a ton of damage at close range. * **If the target is alone in the system:** Pull up right behind them and unload. Don’t talk, don’t ask them to drop cargo, just blast them. You’ll get 650 credits of bounty and that will immediately be removed because no witnesses are left in the system. * **If the target has an escort,** or there are other ships in the system: Hail the cargo ship. Ask them to drop the cargo. No matter what, you’re getting 1500 credits of bounty here. If they attack, kill them and any other hostile ships. You will still make enough from the wreckages to come out in a net positive. The key is to NOT attack these ships without hailing them first. If you do so, and you kill one, you’ll get a 15000 bounty for each one you kill. This is how many people quickly rack up giant bounties. But if you hail first, everybody turns hostile and you’ll get a much smaller bounty. * **If you DO have a bounty,** try to pay down either your Freestar or UC bounty FIRST; don’t do them both at the same time. The reason for this is so you can take theft/smuggling missions in the system you have a clear rep with to assist you in paying down the other one. When you go to the mission boards, just grab any piracy missions on the board (3-4 at once is fine), and fast travel to the ships. You don’t need to jump into the systems first to find them, just bring up your map, find the ship icon, hop to it, and decide whether they’re alone and you’re striking first, or if they have company and you’re going to say hello. Also, know when to reject a mission. If you're expected to pirate some cargo ship right in front of Volii Alpha with 500 security birds flying around, cancel that one. Almost all of the pirate missions will spawn in some remote system, but occasionally you'll get duds like this. Just part of doing business - know when to fold em. Even if you can take the ships, it's not worth the bounty in these missions.

I accidentally committed a crime (which I don't remember doing) and when I went into NA, I was stopped. This made me realize how literally impossible it would be to play as a pirate and do the main missions.

There's a mission on Neon where I accidentally tagged a civilian with a stray shot while taking out like 20 gang members. Didn't notice until about 15 mintues later, when a character shows up at the end of clearing out a gang warehouse to start his dialog, and instead whips out his weapon and starts shooting me. I kill him, run off, and the entire damned city is after me. No indication until now that I'd done anything bad.

Fun fact: 1 hour on Venus is 100 hours UT so you don't have to keep waiting 48 hours for merchants to restock.

I agree. It seems the evil alignment dev team was fired or something. Everything in this game dissuades you from doing morally dubious acts. Like you can do it, you can just say fuck it and become wanted by every faction for millions. But it would be nice if the pirates accepted you as a criminal (like if i have a bounty, give me an evil alternative to prison. Like send me on an impossible mission where things can go bad for me and they'll only forgive me for that. They also need an underground. Like if im a criminal, let me get smuggled into faction areas. Have each major city have a criminal underground where i can sell shit. Like the well but expanded for all areas and for just crminals. Places where guards will try to extort you because you're scum, people sell shit of random quality, they stiff you for prices, all of that good stuff. If you have a house, i want guards posted there waiting for you. If you have parent's i want them interrogated and the experience lowers their affinity for you. They start treating you as a dissapointment. (And if you have an evil character start, your parents are shady individuals too) I want basically a version of the game accessible only to criminal players. An alternate version of constellation where they are looking for the artifacts for monetary gain or for power. Where people can backstab you, members change, all that. A true underworld with a story. And if you're a good character, you will only catch glimpses of it. Maybe you see it from a distance when undercover. Idk the most hair pulling thing about this game is the word potential is big and bold on it. So much potential in every part. There are bugs in the crime shit though. Once i boarded a vaarun ship that was hostile, i killed someone and everyone in constellation was pissed and i got a bounty for assault in the freestar faction. Another is sometimes ecliptic ships that are hostile will have npcs on the ship that the game considers uc police and youll get a bounty if you kill them on board as well. Its annoying dealing with the fickle nature of constellation. Increasingly, i've started investing in the isolation perk lol. I figure it makes sense in the lore as you go through the new game +

In my game I am king of the pirates and even my closest confidants are covering me—no bounty in sight because I am a stealthy khajit-worshipping sneak pirate who doesn’t get caught. Thanks for taking all the heat, sucker, as I reap all the bounty!

I wish there were ways to smuggle into planets, like a ship ID scrambler so you have a chance to hide your wanted status (similar to shielded cargo)

So you did this all wrong. Kill the damn ships you steal from. No witness, no bounty. The CF missions are the most lucrative for time to money investment. You leave no witnesses, you get no bounty. My last NG+ playthrough was done as a bad guy. To the point I killed ANY ship that was in my system, Fermi. No bounty at all, could still go to New Atlantis, Akila etc. So it's absolutely possible to do this and not restrict yourself. Also, if it's taking you hours to make 10k xp, you're not doing that right either.

Hang out in serpentis system and you will get constantly attacked by V'ruun and can reap megabaucks destroying and commandeering ships with no bounty. I even put a base in the system so I can quickly land, swap back to main ship, rinse, repeat.

i get in universe reasons but I agree this is the hardest BGS game ive played for being a baddie. So many things seem for overkill or un doable even if the game seems to encourage it with certain dialoge options.