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Starfield backgrounds are a selection of backstories you choose while customising your character that give you starting skills that function similarly to perks. It might be more melee damage, extra health, carrying capacity and so on. It makes these choices more than just flavor to flesh out your Starfield role play – picking the best background can have a big impact on how things play out depending on what you choose. So let’s take a look at the Starfield backgrounds we know about right now, and what they can get you.
How do Starfield backgrounds work?
All known Starfield skills
Even past your background, there’s all manner of Starfield skills your character can learn!
Picking a Starfield background essentially gives you a role or job, and with it some perks that presumably come from your experience. These include things like chef, combat medic or diplomat, for example (check the full list of Starfield backgrounds we currently know about, for more there). Whatever you pick comes with three perks that will boost different areas of skill – everything from gun damage to lock picking, talking to people, extra health and more. Obviously it means picking well can make a huge difference, and helps you specialize in certain aspects from the very start.
What’s not clear at the moment is if these buffs are a starter boosts to thing you can later level up, or fixed value perks. For example the diplomat comes with persuasion that give you an “increased chance of success on speech challenges”. Whether choosing diplomat is the only way to unlock that advantage, or you can spend XP to get the same result over time, remains to be seen.
All the Starfield backgrounds we know about currently
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.
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.
Other Backgrounds
While these are currently the only Starfield backgrounds we know about, Bethesda has revealed 16 in total. We only know these by name, however, based on the ones we have seen 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
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