Starfield Starship Docking: How to dock your ship to space stations and other ships

One of the core gameplay conceits in Starfield is flying your Spaceship; and when you're in space, sometimes you'll want to dock onto either another ship or a space station. But how exactly do you do it? While it's certainly not difficult, it might be a little confusing at first how to do so; especially if you're attempting to dock an enemy ship.

How to Dock in Starfield

To make things simple - to dock your ship, you'll need to be less than 500 meters from a ship or space station. Once you're close enough, you'll have to hold the button to dock. By default on PC with keyboard and mouse, that would be the R key. However, that's only how you'll dock friendlies or abandoned vessels; you can board enemy vessels, but there's some extra steps.

Docking an enemy vessel requires you to take out their engines first. Once you've locked onto an enemy vessel, aim your weapons at their engines, and take them out. Once they're fully depleted you can dock the same as any other vessel. Just, of course, be careful you're not in the line of fire when you go to board the ship!

Why should you board enemy ships?

Players will of course get salvage from enemy ships once destroyed, but there's a very good reason why you might want to board them instead. Not only can you pick resources off of the corpses of any enemies on-board a ship you kill, but you can also loot items from the ship's cargo hold and Captain's Locker. Naturally, you can steal the ship for yourself, to register later for sale.

Regardless of what your final intention is, boarding a ship is well worth the effort! Best of luck with your travels, Constellation.