All damage types in Starfield and how they work: Combat guide

Starfield has a whole roster’s worth of unique damage types and effects for its combat system to rest on. As Bethesda learned from its experience working on Fallout, variety is the spice of life, and being able to destroy the local wildlife and an occasional space pirate using over half a dozen different kinds of pain is way more interesting than just gunning them all down. Starfield certainly subscribes to this idea, and over the course of the next couple of sections, we’ll explain how each damage type works and what makes it intriguing to begin with.

All different damage types in Starfield

First things first, there are seven distinctive damage types in Starfield:

• Physical – bullets, melee, explosions, etc.
• Energy – lasers and such
• Electro-Magnetic / EM – certain explosions, ship weaponry
• Thermal – application of extreme heat or cold
• Corrosive – wildlife, substances, etc.
• Radiation – environmental area-of-effect damage
• Airborne – diseases and contaminants

The provided descriptors should be taken as a rough outline of how a given damage type is applied. There are, for example, weapons that have been modded to dish out Thermal damage instead of Physical, for example, meaning there are a number of outliers for each one of these damage types. Still, the provided list is a good rule of thumb for players to follow, as it’s unlikely that your garden-variety Spacer would come equipped with a Corrosive-spewing autogun all that often.

Why are damage types important in Starfield?

Buildcrafting and RPG features are crucial for progression in Starfield, and outfitting your character with the right gear for the given situation is a total no-brainer. To that end, knowing what damage types you might come up against is a great starting point. For exploratory purposes, defenses against Airborne, Thermal, and Radiation are bound to prove handy, while Physical and Energy resistance will be far more useful in active combat.

The Status Affliction is another feature that plays into Starfield‘s varied damage types. Your character can be beset by an impressive array of negative afflictions that range from regular old blisters all the way to broken bones. Obviously, Thermal damage will lead to one over the other, so it will pay off to stay aware of what’s going on. By building up a resistance to Thermal damage via suit upgrades, your Starfield character might never experience blisters again!

Dealing the correct kind of damage to a given threat

On top of being able to handle incoming damage through correct resistances, it is crucial that Starfield players also understand how to best deal with the wide variety of threats they’ll be coming up against. Efficiently taking down a machine is a far cry from hunting vicious wolf-raptors, after all. It’s a good idea to lug around a whole arsenal of varied weaponry, then: some of them to deal Physical and Thermal damage, while others should rely on Energy and EM.

One last thing of note here is that EM damage is, specifically, non-lethal. This means that there’s a whole category of non-lethal armaments available in Starfield, which may be the go-to option for pacifist characters. They’re also very handy against threats that might be too hard to actually take down for good, such as high-level enemies and bots. So, we recommend keeping at least one EM weapon around – just in case!