Welcome to the Assassin Stealth Build for Starfield. This is the perfect build if you want to engage in a stealthy playstyle in Starfield, taking out enemies while remaining undetected.
You can engage in stealth combat at all ranges – in melee with knives, at shorter range with silenced weapons, and long range with snipers. Ensure that you remain crouched and out of sight of enemies in order to stay hidden and retain your stealth bonuses.
We will now go through the elements of this build step by step.
Assassin Build Table of Contents:
Assassin Build Background
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 Assassin Build, we recommend choosing the Cyber Runner background. This will give you a head start with the following skills:
- Stealth – Improves your damage when you are undetected.
- Security – Allows you to bypass security systems, letting you access containers, rooms and passages that would otherwise be off limits.
- Theft – Improves your chances of successfuly stealing items without getting caught. Likely includes actions such as Pickpocketing.
Assassin 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).
Please note that traits are completely optional in Starfield – you can choose to have between one and three Traits, or none at all. Some traits can turn out to be detrimental depending on your playstyle and choices in the game. For example choosing Introvert will actually make you weaker if you later choose to adventure with a companion. So if you’re unsure, it is better not to pick any traits at all.
Assassin Build Skills
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.
It’s 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 Assassin Build:
- Physical Skills:
- Stealth – Helps you to sneak around without being detected, and increases your damage when hidden
- Wellness – Increases your maximum health
- Martial Arts – Increases your damage with melee attacks
- Concealment – Significantly increases your damage with sneak attacks
- Combat Skills:
- Ballistics – Increases your damage with Ballistic weapons
- Pistol Certification – Increases your damage with Pistols
- Rifle Certitication – Icreases your damage with Rifles
- Sniper Certification – Increases your damage and accuracy with Snipers
- Technology Skills:
- Security – You are more proficient at breaking into enemy security systems (lockpicking)
Assassin Build Weapons
In the early game you will have to use whichever weapons you find, but before long you will begin encountering higher quality weapons, including Legendary weapons.
The Assassin Build specialises with Pistols, Rifles and Snipers, so I recommend focusing on using those weapons most of the time. It’s also good to have a melee weapon such as a knife for close quarters combat.
It is very important to have silencers for your guns with any stealth build, so upgrading your favored weapons with a Silencer should be a fairly early priority. You can do this at a weapons workbench.
Assassin Build Armour
Armour in Starfield falls 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).
The 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.
