Starfield backgrounds and starting skills will grant your players different abilities in character creation, usually based on your former career path. You can be a diplomat, a combat medic, and even a chef, and each background offers three different skills that help you with certain aspects of gameplay. Pick the right backgrounds and you'll likely have a serious advantage in those early hours.
It's basically a way of picking a career to pre-build a starter spaceman and there are two ways to approach this - you can either use these Starfield backgrounds and starting skills to roleplay a character with whatever advantages or constraints that might get you. Or you can just try and pick out some useful skills right at the start. Whatever you do in Starfield it could have a significant impact on a game you could be playing for hundreds of hours. With that in mind we've broken everything we have on Starfield backgrounds and starter skills to help you make the right call.
How do Starfield backgrounds work?
Check out all the Starfield ship customization you can play with if you want to shape more than just your character.
A Starfield background gives you a job or role within the world and, as a result, some starter skills to go with it. We have a full list of Starfield backgrounds below for all the ones we know about right now, but basically each background comes with three related skills - everything from increased gun damage to better lock picking, speech skills, extra health and and so on. While these might feel similar to Starfield traits, which are personality based starter perks you carry through the game, backgrounds actually give you three core Starfield skills as part of your character creation. These are the more general abilities you unlock with XP and level up as you play so there things you can unlock later, this just gives you immediate access.
All the Starfield backgrounds revealed so far
Chef starting skills
- Gastronomy - Craft special food and drink, and research additional recipes.
- Duelling - 10% more melee damage
- Wellness - gain a extra 30 health points
The chef's cooking skills boost a few food related things boosting your health, knife skills (presumably from all the ET butchery), and unlocks extra food preparation options which appear to be part of the Starfield crafting and research system.
Combat Medic starting skills
- Pistol certification - 10% extra pistol damage
- Medicine - 10% more healing from health packs
- Weight Lifting - extra 10kg carrying capacity
The Starfield Combat Medic background feels like a good starter for people who want to hit the ground running with damage and healing buffs, as well as a good literal lift to carrying capacity.
Cyber Runner starting skills
- Pistol certification - 10% extra pistol damage
- Security - able to hack level 2 locks and bank two auto attempts
- Persuasion - increased chance of success on speech challenges
The Cyber Runner starting skills lean into a more stealth orientated combat role with a boost to pistol damage, but better lock picking and speech skill. It suggests the pistol buff is there more for a last resort as you'll hopefully be sneaking and talking you way through problems instead.
Cyberneticist starting skills
- Medicine - 10% more healing from health packs
- Robotics - 10% more damage dealt to robots and turrets
- Lasers - 10% more laser weapons damage
The Cyberneticist starting skills are all about fighting robots with extra damage buffs against robots and turrets. There's also extra laser weapon damage which, if Starfield works anything like, Fallout, means that class of weapon damages mechanical enemies more.
Diplomat starting skills
- Persuasion - increased chance of success on speech challenges
- Diplomacy - Force a target NPC below your level to stop fighting for a time
- Bargaining - Buy for 5% and sell for 10% at vendors
Unsurprisingly Diplomat starting skills are all about dealing with people, letting you win conversations more easily, get better rates with merchants and stop people fighting. We expect it's a good idea to grab this one if you want to get in good with the Starfield factions.
Other Backgrounds
Above are the Starfield backgrounds we know about so far in more detail, but Bethesda has revealed 16 in total. We only have names for the rest however, but based on what we've seen so far you can probably start to make some guesses about what some of the choices below will get you.
- Beast Hunter
- Bouncer
- Bounty Hunter
- Explorer
- Gangster
- Homesteader
- Industrialist
- Long Hauler
- Pilgrim
- Professor
- Ronin
