Starfield has no shortage of Game Breakers.
- Enemy ships' weapon systems aim for the exact geometric center of your ship (as determined by its total height, length, and width). This means that if you build your ship in an unconventional shape that leaves open space at this midpoint (such as an "O" or "U" shape), enemy ships will miss nearly all of their shots on you, only capable of hitting you from angles where a piece of your ship blocks line-of-sight to the point they're targeting.
- As ship weapons go, high-quality particle beam cannons make ballistic and laser weapons obsolete. They deal more damage to both shields and hull, can shoot two to three times as far, and consume the same amount of power (and sometimes even less). Once you've unlocked them there's really no gameplay reason to use ballistics or lasers.
- In the unpatched version, leaving the pilot's seat on your ship causes enemy ships to pause their attacks on you. Allowing your ship to begin regenerating shielding. You can trivialize many encounters this way by getting up, waiting a bit for your shields to return, then sitting back down to resume the battle.
- The Phase Time power can completely trivialize most encounters and bosses. It works like the Slow Time shout in Skyrim, where the player slows down slightly but everything else slows down far more. Enemies will move so slowly they might as well be standing still. One can unload an entire magazine into a boss without fear of retaliation or evasion for the duration of the power. This is especially effective with builds that focus on headshots as the slowed enemies are sitting ducks for headshot aiming. This gets exacerbated via New Game Plus runs, as finding a power enhances it in some way, and in Phase Time's case, it reduces its cost. With enough levels, it is possible to give the power 100% uptime at your command.
- Coachman shotguns can be upgraded to use Hornet Nest Rounds, which fly forward a moderate distance before exploding into a rain of explosive projectiles. If it makes direct contact with an enemy, they take the full force of all of the explosive clusters, which allows the gun to function as both an extremely strong slug shotgun and a Splash Damage sweeper. The raw damage it puts out significantly outperforms most other weapons, apart from grenade launchers that also have the Hornet Nest round. However, the Coachman uses Caseless Shotgun Shells which is a very plentiful type of ammunition, especially when compared to the scarce/expensive 40mm XPL that grenade launchers use. To top all of this, it only requires the Weapon Modification 3 skill, which can be obtained as early as level 5 with the appropriate starting skills, turning the weapon into an extremely viable Disc-One Nuke that matures into an all-around Game Breaker as the player obtains stronger variants of the Coachman. And to make it even better, the Coachman is a ballistic gun, meaning it can be fitted with a suppressor. Yes, you can wield what's essentially a silenced cluster grenade launcher.
- The Void Form power description says it renders you "nearly invisible", but in practice, it's "utterly undetectable"; you can sprint within a few feet of enemies and they won't react. Any stealth-focused missions are immediately trivialized into "use Void Form to run to an out-of-the-way corner, wait for your power to recharge, repeat". It breaks when you interact with things like doors or switches, but applying the power at the right time can often let you use them without being detected.
- You can leverage Outposts to mine the required raw resources, then use them to craft manufactured resources (like Isocentered Magnets) at an industrial scale. Each one you create gives a small amount of experience, and creating thousands of them can net you hundreds of level ups in just a few hours. Almost nothing in the game will be a challenge at that point.
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