Starfield crafting and research unlocks weapon mods, space suit upgrades, medicine, food and more. Anything you can build, even base structures and buildings, can be created once you know how. This is all achieved via research projects that get you new crafting recipes and other options which are then paid for using the resources you find and gather as you explore.
So, if you want a new pistol mod in Starfield, say, you'll need to unlock it in the Research Laboratory, pay up the resources for the necessary research and when the project is ready, craft it. Let's take a deeper look at everything we know about Starfield crafting and research, and see how it all works.
Starfield research areas
Starfield research covers five categories that govern items and objects you can craft:
- Pharmacology
- Food and Drink
- Outpost Development
- Equipment
- Weaponry
These different Starfield research areas unlock related gear, enhancements and mods you can then use to improve related gear, weapons and facilities. For example, Pharmacology research can improve medical gear or unlock performance enhancers. Upgrading Outpost development can increase things like resource extraction, while Equipment advances can make mods to improve your helmet. Weaponry works in a similar way, unlocking mods and attachments to improve guns.
It's likely character creation elements like Starfield backgrounds and starting skills, Starfield traits or Starfield skills might help here by speeding up timers, say, or helping you harvest more resources.
Starfield Crafting
Starfield crafting is vital to improving gear, and will see you gathering all the resources you can to fund everything. In the shot above you can see that a Barrel Mod for a weapon will cost the following resources to research:
- Iron (20)
- Nickel (20)
- Sealant (10)
As well as the resource cost these Research Projects also display a percentage completion, so there's a time and a cost involved.
You can also expand on the upgrades you developer using via a Research Tree that unlocks either new levels or variants of anything you've researched. So getting the Barrel Mod 1 unlocks the Barrel mod 2 and so on.
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In an example of how you can change a weapon with crafted mods, Bethesda showed off this pistol. On the left is the basic model, while on the right is the enhanced version sporting an improved iron sight, muzzle, laser sight and extended magazine.
Starfield ship customization appears to be absent here from crafting and research because it seems mainly to involve buying parts, not making them.
