Starfield player tricks AI with 'unbeatable ship' made only of corners
The silver bullet to Starfield's enemy AI? Empty space.
The Starfield ship builder continues to be an absolute gift. Players have wasted absolutely no time crafting ships ranging from ludicrous cubes to genuinely impressive recreations of famous starships, but my favorite design by far is both absurd and so powerful that it basically breaks space combat.
Dubbed the "unbeatable ship" by redditor Morfalath, the design couldn't be simpler: a cube made entirely of edges and corners, so that the center of the ship is hollow. It doesn't look like a spaceship as much as it looks like the scaffolding one would need to build a ship around it. Morfalath later shared a video tour of their "ship," and I'm suddenly feeling very bad for the crew. The thing is a maze of doors and 90-degree hallways, and those vertical stacks make for one hell of a climb just to get from one end to the other. It took Morfalath over three minutes to run around the whole thing, and most of that was ladder time.
But those ladders have a purpose. The shape leaves a giant gaping hole in the middle of the ship, which is apparently a major problem for Starfield's enemy AI. As demonstrated by a combat video against a particularly nasty level 58 pirate, enemy ships will usually aim for your ship's center, meaning they almost always miss Morfalath by a mile.
So it's not "unbeatable" in the sense that it has wicked armor or particularly powerful guns: Starfield NPCs just don't know how to shoot anywhere but straight. Sounds like the Crimson Fleet needs to invest in better targeting computers. Morfalath told PC Gamer their unbeatable ship has held up well in every combat encounter they've thrown at it, only running into trouble when picking a fight with 20 pirates in the Kryx system (and on the highest difficulty setting, too).
"Versus those 20 'skull threat' enemy ships you do get hit from all sides," they said, "so it wasn't done on the first attempt of course, but it's doable with this ship."
The only catch, I guess, is that your sanctuary in the sky becomes an unwieldy erector set with rockets and a nuclear reactor strapped to it. The third-person view is also basically unusable as the camera plants itself right behind the ship's top supporting beam, though Morfalath reckons they could fix that by moving that structure to the bottom edge instead.
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Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn't pay him. He's very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he'll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don't, though.