Ship

Ships are the central focus of StarMade. You will never get anywhere without one. Ships are created with a Ship Core. This core acts as the center; you fly and edit it by using the core. If the core is destroyed, the ship overheats. At this point, you can salvage scrap off of it. If it is not rebooted in 45 seconds, the ship is deleted.

For an overview of basic controls, see Tutorials/Getting started. For tips on making a ship, see Ship Design.

Ship Basics

Building your ship

Build Mode

Build mode is where you spend almost all your time when designing a ship. It has a few benefits:

• The ability to move around quickly (left shift by default)
• No-clip (ability to pass through blocks without collisions)
• Infinite range (ability to place, remove, and interact with blocks from far away)
• Ability to jump between docked ships instantly
• Ability to see normally hidden blocks

Advanced Build Mode

Advanced Build Mode (Left control) lets you do a wide range of things:

• Enable symmetry to reduce work
• Increase brush size and place more blocks at once
• Replace blocks
• Fill in areas
• Use guides to easily create hard-to-make shapes
• Copy blocks (if you have it; most useful in Creative Mode) (Click in mouse wheel)
• Access advanced info, remove shadows (render everything at max lighting), copy and paste areas, and much, much more!

The tools it supplies are invaluable no matter what you are creating, and they make your life much easier with a variety of tools meant to speed up and/or simplify parts of the construction process.

Shops and buying resources

Don’t underestimate shops - they are an easy way to get whatever you may need (and get paid for what you don’t!), so you should preferably build ships either by [Shop||NPC shops] or by a [Station|station] with a Shop Module on it. If you can’t do this, you should at the very least keep some sort of storage entity or cargo transport nearby so that you can pull spare parts out of it and put away things you don’t need at the moment.

Building tips

Planning Ahead

You may want to map out your ship before you make it. This will allow you to plan out where systems go ahead of time, rather than slapping a ship together on the fly.

Grab Spares

Get what you need for your ship, then get more resources. You should probably aim to have around 200 more of each resource then required, just in case you mess up or make an unplanned change.

Use that AI

If you are making an assault carrier or a mining ship, don’t forget that Fleets allow you to simplify the process using drones. Assault carriers can add extra slots for AI-operated fighters, while miners can have docks on top for a few small mining ships.

Classifications

When a ship is saved to the Catalog, you can assign it one of the following classifications:

• Miner
• Support
• Scavenger
• Carrier
• Cargo Transport
• Attacker
• Defender