There are five different skill trees inStarfield, each one of which has sixteen or seventeen unique skills. If that weren’t enough already,every skill inStarfieldis broken up into four ranks, with higher-ranked skills providing larger buffs, and in some cases, granting access to brand-new perks entirely.
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Sadly, upgrading skills inStarfieldis not quite as simple as dumping skill points into a skill until it reaches Rank 4. To be clear, players will still need skill points, but they’ll also have to complete a special skill-specific challenge for each rank before being given the option to upgrade.
How to Upgrade Skills in Starfield
Whenever they unlock a new skill, players will be given a new challenge, which will always relate to the skill in some way. For example, the challenges for the Pistol Certification skill require players to get a certain amount of pistol kills, while the ones for Boost Pack Training involveusing a Boost Packa certain number of times while in combat situations. Players can check a skill’s challenge from the Skills menu whenever they like as well as any progress that they’ve made toward completing it.
After completing a challenge, players will then be able to upgrade the skill by spending another skill point. Doing so will unlock a new challenge, which will usually be the same as the previous one, only with a larger number of kills, boost pack uses, or whatever task or feat was previously required. Progress is not cumulative across challenges (each challenge starts from zero), nor does the game start tracking progress toward a challenge until its respective skill has been unlocked.
Some challenges are a lot simpler than others and can thus be considerably easier to farm. For example, challenges forthe Weight Lifting skillinvolve sprinting while carrying a certain amount of weight. However, other skills, such as Security and Persuasion, have challenges that are incredibly situational (i.e. players will need to find characters who can be persuaded or locks that can be picked in order to make progress), making it much harder to upgrade these skills.
The good news is that players will be able to look at the bonuses provided by every single rank of a skill before spending any skill points on it. This makes it easy to decide whether a skill is really worth the skill points, and, if it is, whether players should upgrade the skill to the highest rank or keep it as it is. To be clear, higher ranks are always objectively better than lower ones, but whether or not an extra 10% or a few additional seconds is worth the time and effort required to upgrade a skill isn’t always so clear.
Starfieldis available now for PC and Xbox Series X|S.
