Welcome to the Bounty Hunter Build for Starfield. The Bounty Hunter is particularly skilled at space flight and combat, and at moving around quickly on the ground to pursue and take down their enemies.
In Starfield you can take bounty-hunting missions by interacting with Mission Boards. These missions task you with finding and eliminating criminals in return for a monetary reward. The Bounty Hunter build will be the most proficient at completing these missions. And if you want to play as Han Solo in Starfield, this is the perfect build.
We will now go through the elements of this build step by step.
Bounty Hunter Build Table of Contents:
Bounty Hunter Build Background – Starfield
When creating your character at the start of your Starfield playthrough, you’ll need to select a Background for your character. There are 20 Backgrounds in the game, and each one has three starting skills associated with it, allowing you to get a head start with a particular build idea. Backgrounds may also affect some dialogue options as they change how NPCs see your character.
For the Bounty Hunter Build, we will unsurprisingly be choosing the Bounty Hunter background. This will give you a head start with the following skills:
- Piloting – You will enjoy greater maneuverability with ships that you fly, and eventually gain the ability to pilot more advanced ships.
- Targeting Control Systems – You can use targeting systems on your ship to lock onto targets, and deal more damage to locked targets.
- Boost Pack Training – You can use boost packs to increase your mobility and agility when on the surface of a planet or moon.
Bounty Hunter Build Traits
You can choose traits to further customise the abilities of your character at the start of the game.
Most of the Traits are not especially powerful and are more for roleplaying purposes. However one that is strong is the Wanted trait, which will give you a bonus to damage output when you are at low health. However, this trait also causes mercenaries to occasionally come after you (probably works in a similar way to the mercenary encounters in Skyrim).
Traits are optional, you can choose up to three but you do not need to choose any at all. Beware that some traits may turn out to be detrimental, such as choosing introvert and then later wanting to adventure with companions. So if you’re unsure it’s better not to pick any traits.
Bounty Hunter Build Skills – Han Solo Style
Every time you level up in Starfield, you will gain one skill point to spend. These can be spent to improve various skills in the game. For a skill to be eligible for improvement, you’ll need to have completed a challenge that makes use of that skill. For example unlocking the next rank of the Security skill requires you to have picked a certain number of locks.
Due to the prerequisite challenges that must be completed before improving a skill, it is difficult to give a step-by-step guide for what order to upgrade your skills in, however we recommend progressing through the following skills for the Bounty Hunter Build:
- Ballistics – Improves your damage with Ballistic weapons
- Rifle Certification – Improves your damage with Rifles
- Sniper Certification – Improves damage with scoped weapons, and reduces the sway when aiming.
- Marksmanship – Increases critical hit chance and damage with non-automatic ranged weapons.
- Sharpshooting – Increases critical hit damage with ranged weapons
- Stealth – Makes it easier to stay hidden, and increases your damage done when hidden
- Piloting – Your ship becomes more maneuverable, and you can pilot more advanced ship types
- Targeting Control Systems – Your ship can lock onto enemy ships, and will do more damage to locked targets
- Engine Systems – Your ship’s engines give you more speed, and you can boost more often
- Starship Design – Allows you to upgrade your ship with more advanced modules.
These skills will allow you to be much faster and more effective at hunting enemies in space, and great at sniping high value targets on the surface.
Bounty Hunter Build Weapons
In Starfield you can customise your weapons with various attachments that change their behavior in combat. A silencer is a great attachment for the Bounty Hunter, allowing you to attack enemies without giving away your position. You can craft a silencer upgrade for your weapon by visiting a weapons workbench.
A very important weapon for the Bounty Hunter Build will be a Sniper, which is great at taking down high value targets from a distance. For closer range engagements, it’s recommended to keep a rifle handy, as this is a versatile weapon that is effective at most ranges.
Bounty Hunter Build Armour
Armour in Starfield is expected to fall into four categories, of which you can equip one of each at a time. These are:
- Spacesuits
- Packs
- Helmets
- Apparel
Armour is important for not only protecting your character from enemy attacks, but also shielding you from various environmental effects as you explore different planets in Starfield. High quality armour (especially Legendary armour) will also come with various modifiers that improve your character’s abilities in a specific way (for example a % damage buff when using a particular type of weapon).
Starfield’s loot is mostly random, so it is difficult to create a precise guide for which items you should be using. However look out for high quality armour that gives you good resistances, along with modifiers that increase your offensive or defensive capabilities.
