Starfield player shocked to find ships have autopilot after 900 hours
BethesdaStarfield lets players buy, manage, and customize their own spaceships before venturing into the stars. The game has many systems in place to facilitate space travel, including an “autopilot” feature that a player on Reddit recently came across.
Starfield makes the most out of its sci-fi setting by letting players enjoy space flight. The RPG packs in plenty of planets located across dozens of star systems, and to uncover all the mysteries in these locations, players can make use of spaceships.
Ships in Starfield are highly customizable, and they can be modified to look like almost anything. Besides all the upgrade options, players can also add ships to their fleet by purchasing new ones or boarding enemy vessels during combat.
The game features different mechanics that make space travel engaging, with examples being docking and the in-built scanner. Another mechanic in that seemingly flew under the radar was recently discovered by a player on Reddit named ‘fidelamos.’
They posted their discovery with the title, “900+ Hours in and I just realized my ship has an autopilot.” Attached to the post was a clip that showed off a sequence of in-game events, beginning with the player taking over a bounty hunter’s ship. Following this, they quickly made it their home ship and repaired it, but it wasn’t long before bounty hunters returned for revenge.
The player barely had time to react as they immediately suffered heavy fire. Fortunately for them, their previous home ship fired back on its own reducing the enemy to rubble and steered away without any input from the player.
Normally, switching home ships in space results in the original ship grav jumping away. But in this case, it stuck around to defend its owner, showing signs of an autopilot feature that kicks in when the ship is near the player’s location.
Users in the comments section replied with their takes, with one of them providing a bit of context: “Some time ago I made a post showing that there are a lot of scripts and code for a player-driven space station. This space station ‘feature’ also has AI which makes allied ships defend the space station.”
Another user shared how they used the feature to cheese through a quest, “I did this during the Freestar Rangers missions. During the assault on the planet when the First ships attack in waves I was able to hijack one ship per wave before the next wave appeared. By the end, I had three ships flying around, auto pilot, attacking enemies for me, etc.”
It’ll be interesting to see if the devs build on this feature and maybe offer a way to put ships on autopilot manually in Starfield.
For more on the game, check out our picks for the best weapons and best ships in Starfield.
