Starfield is a game about exploring the final frontier. And where there’s a frontier, there are the rugged frontiersmen. In an interstellar setting, these frontiersmen take the shape of space cowboys.
If you want to play a space cowboy in Starfield, there are plenty of notable characters to choose from for your inspiration. However, since the game begins with us being a lowly space miner, we’ll be styling our space cowboy after one Raylan Givens, a Deputy U.S. Marshal portrayed by Timothy Olyphant who’s been known to dig coal together with his eventual nemesis Boyd Crowder.
Character Creation
Background
For our Background we’ll be picking Soldier to portray Raylan’s time with the Marines and to grab some handy early skills.
Fitness – digging for coal is a sure way to get tough.
Ballistics – a master marksman can use any ballistic weapon well.
Boost Pack Training – a great exploration ability and a nod to Timothy Olyphant’s cameo as Cobb Vanth on The Mandalorian – a bounty hunter armor-wearing Marshal.
Free Space – here you’re free to choose a religion, Spaced or Terra Firma, or some other Trait that speaks to you.
Progression – Next One’s Coming Faster
Since Starfield will eventually allow you to unlock everything, the build will be focusing on the core skills required to turn your character into a fearsome Space Marshal. Outside of these, feel free to unlock supplementary skills that fit well with your playstyle.
All our mandatory skills will be situated in the Combat skill group. A Marshal like Raylan Givens generally wants to be as close to the fastest shot around, and just as deadly. As such, we’ll be focusing on a high critical chance pistol build that shoots from the hip.
As soon as you get level 2, put a skill point into Pistol Certification. This will allow you to start unlocking ranks in both it and Ballistics. Both these skills unlock their higher ranks when you kill enemies using ballistic pistols. And since one of those is the first real weapon you find, you won’t have any problem with doing so.
Raising both these skills all the way will allow us to skip the second tier of Combat skills and go straight for:
Targeting allows you to stop worrying about aiming down sights, which in turn will allow you to start shooting faster. Marksmanship will then raise your critical hit chance and synergize well with the fourth level of Pistol Certification that greatly increases our critical hit chance when wielding pistols.
It’s up to you whether you want to max these two skills or just put a total of 4 points into them to unlock the ultimate Combat tier giving us access to:
Sharpshooting will once again increase our critical hit chance while also boosting our critical damage. And Armor Penetration will allow us to ignore a percentage of our targets’ armor, especially when dealing critical damage.
The idea for the core of this build is to be a crack gunslinger with a hair trigger. We’ll hit hard and fast, and will only get stronger after our first kill. With Ballistics we’ll get extra range to open up on our enemies, while Targeting will allow us to further increase that range and actually land our shots when shooting from the hip. No aiming down sights required.
Marksmanship will greatly increase our critical hit chance and damage, while killing our first enemy with a pistol will increase our critical hit chance by a whopping 25% for 5 seconds. Furthermore, thanks to Sharpshooting, every kill delivered by a critical hit will raise our crit chance by 25% more, and this time for 20 seconds. Combine it all together, and you’ll be landing crits left and right, while Armor Penetration will allow those critical hits to deal even more damage. The space pirates and outlaws won’t know what hit them.
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Val Hull
Resident role-playing RPG game expert. Knows where trolls and paladins come from. You must fight for your right to gather your party before venturing forth.
