Starfield Ship Habs guide: Interiors, Stations, and what every Hab adds to your ship

One of the most satisfying things in Starfield is building out your own highly-customized starship, complete with everything you need to be successful on your space adventures. But thanks to the way the builder is constructed, the process can seem a little random - but this Starfield Ship Habs guide will help you to figure it all out.

• Ship Habs Explained
• What Features can be Added to Ships
• What each Hab Type Does
• Best Ship Habs
• Hab Interior Designs explained

Starfield Ship Habs Explained

While the concept of habs is pretty simple - ‘hab’ stats for habitat, aka the habitable area of your ship that you and your crew can walk around, live, and coexist in - the nature of how these environments mesh with the Ship Building mechanics of Starfield is actually pretty confusing, and is hopefully something Bethesda addresses in a patch.

To be specific, here’s the deal: each hab has the chance to add certain elements to your ship. But there’s also no guarantee that a hab will add a specific thing you might want to use thanks to how Starfield’s modular ship construction works.

Let us give you an example. All Infirmary Habs in the game are meant to have both Research and Pharmaceutical Stations inside - but these features can disappear depending on the layout of your ship. Doorways and ladders are placed at random by the game after you finalize your design, and these could be placed in a way that get in the way of the station - so the station that’s clashing gets removed. You can also cause these clashes yourself by placing windows in inopportune places, for instance. 

Because there’s no way to examine the interior of your ship in the ship-building process, or manually place things like doorways, you simply have to undertake trial-and-error to get your ideal layout. To have a lot of Habs, you'll probably need a higher class of ship, as detailed in our Ship Classes explainer.

What is helpful, however, is knowing exactly what can appear in each Hab from each company. With this, you can decide exactly what Habs you want, and then use our Starfield Ship Manufacturers guide to find out where to get them fitted.

What Features can be added to Ship Habs

Before we get into detail about each habit in specific, it’s worth noting what features your ship can have. With the right combination of Habs, you can add the following to your ship:

• Passenger Slots: Allows more people to travel on your ship.
• Crew Stations: Allows your selected crew to sit at a station and undertake a job.
• Beds: Places for you and your crew to rest.
• Navigation Console: All this does is open your map, which you can do via the menu anyway. But it looks cool.
• Weapon, Pack, and Helmet Displays: What the name suggests; visual displays to show off your best gear.
• Mannequin: Also what you’d expect; you can ‘equip’ these with spacesuits to show off gear.
• Storage: Chests and other large storage units that you can put items into - without it impacting your ship cargo hold storage capacity.
• Industrial Workbench: For creating Components used for crafting and outpost-building.
• Weapon Workbench: For upgrading weapons.
• Spacesuit Workbench: For upgrading spacesuits, helmets, and boost packs.
• Pharmaceutical Lab: For crafting aid items.
• Research Lab: For undertaking research projects.
• Galley: A kitchen, for crafting food items.

What each Hab Type can add to your Ship

It’s worth noting that Starfield’s ship building is astonishingly in-depth despite its small shortcomings. As part of that design, there’s a number of different ship manufacturers - and their habs all differ slightly. 

That means what we write here is generally true, but may vary from one brand and size of Hab to another. For example, every single Mess Hall configuration in Starfield can contain a Galley Kitchen - except for one, the 2x3 from Deimos. Basically, what we’re saying is that exceptions will apply - but generally speaking, here’s what each Hab can add to your ship:

• All-in-One Berth: Bed, Galley Kitchen (All except Nova Galactic B & Stroud A), Research Station, Navigation Console (Nova Galactic A only), 2-3 Passenger Slots
• Armory: Weapon, Pack, & Helmet Displays, Mannequins, and Chest Storage.
• Battle Station: Navigation Console, 6 Crew Stations
• Brig: Beds inside lockable cells, Storage
• Captain’s Quarters: Bed, Storage Chests, Nav Console (Deimos, Stroud & Taiyo), Galley (Nova Galactic)
• Cargo Hall: Storage Chests & Boxes
• Computer Core: Storage Chests, 1-2 Crew Stations
• Control Station: 4 Crew Stations
• Engineering Bay: 1-2 Crew Stations
• Infirmary: Research Lab, Pharmaceutical Lab
• Living Quarters: Beds, Galley Kitchen, 2-3 Passenger Slots
• Mess Hall: Galley Kitchen (All except Deimos 2x3), 3 Passenger Slots
• Science Lab: Pharmaceutical Lab, Research Lab, Galley Kitchen, 2 Passenger Slots (Nova Galactic only)
• Workshop: Weapon, Spacesuit, & Industrial Workbenches, Research Lab, 2 Passenger Slots (Nova Galactic only)
• Companionway: None
• Storeroom: None
• Cross: None

When in the ship building or editing process, you can switch between different habs of the same size by pressing left and right when it is selected. This is even the case if you're at a shipyard that doesn't sell the specific hab you're editing - which can be hugely useful. This is also free of charge! This makes it much easier to experiment with the different types of ship hab to get the setup you want.

Best Ship Habs in Starfield

While we wouldn't quite go so far as to say that there are specific and outright Best Ship Habs in Starfield, there are a few habs that stand out for their sheer utility. These habs have more additional bonuses for your ship than their equivalent peers, and are therefore worth more consideration:

• The Nova Galactic All-in-One Berth A features a Nav Console and Research Station, which no other brand or format of this ship hab has.
• The Nova Galactic Armory features a mannequin to showcase an armor set, which the other versions don't have. 
• All of the Captains Quarters are largely equal, but the Nova Galactic Captain's Quarters swaps the Nav Console for a Galley Kitchen, if you prefer that.
• The Deimos 2x2 Engineering Bay comes with two Crew Slots rather than the usual one, but it is a different shape to the rest, which are 3x1. 
• While the Living Quarters isn't that important, it's worth noting that the Deimos and HopeTech 2x1 Living Quarters should be avoided as they don't have all available stations the others have. The Deimos and Stroud Eklund 2x2 Living Quarters feature no stations at all, but have 3 passenger slots.
• For a Science Lab, to min-max you should pick the Nova Galactic Science Lab, as it gives you some Crew Slots as well as the two science stations.
• Of the Workshops, the Stroud-Eklund Workshop 2x1 has one more useful tool than the others, as it also has a Research Station. However, the Nova Galactic Workshop loses that, but also has 2 Passenger Slots, which none of the others have.

However, be aware if you mix and match habs from different companies, you might have a mismatched ship interior -- as we explain below.

Hab Interiors Explained

While there are five major ship parts companies in the world of Starfield, the Hab situation is actually a little more limited than that - and it’s worth noting this if you’re focused on aesthetics when designing your ship.

Across the five manufacturers (Deimos, Hopetech, Nova Galactic, Stroud Eklund, and Taiyo), there are actually only three unique hab designs. Specifically:

• Deimos and Stroud Eklund habs have identical internal designs except for some of their coloring inside. Deimos features more metal-like designs, while Stroud has a clean white aesthetic.
• Hopetech and Taiyo feature identical interiors. Hopetech has a darker color scheme here, while Taiyo is lighter in tone.
• Nova Galactic is therefore the only ship-maker with an entirely unique aesthetic.