Starfield: Ship building door and ladder placement, explained

Starfield’s Ship Builder system is very thorough in some ways, and shockingly simple in others. Unfortunately, I don’t mean simple as a positive thing here. Initially, I thought some of the limitations in Ship Builder were user error on my part, because the things I was trying to do seemed way too simple to be unavailable—things like choosing where I wanted to place the doors in my ship.

In fact, Ship Builder seems to have forgotten entirely that there is an inside of a ship, and that the interior is naturally as important if not more important to players than the exterior.

Can you choose your ship’s door and ladder placement in Starfield?

The simple and unfortunate answer is no, you cannot choose where doors and ladders are placed in your ship. Each ship module has preset locations where a ladder will appear when another module is built above or below it, as well as preset door locations for when modules are placed next to it.

This limitation is disappointing, but there are some minor workarounds. Don’t expect complete creative freedom by any means, but a little bit of finesse is possible.

How to influence door and ladder placement in Starfield’s Ship Builder

Like I said before, you cannot openly decide where ships’ doors and ladders go, but you can influence it slightly. There are a couple of different features of Ship Builder that can be taken advantage of to slightly customize your ship’s interior, though they require a complete understanding of how the game decides where things go in ships.

Of course, the game doesn’t offer any explanation—you really have to test everything yourself in Ship Builder. I’m counting down the days until a modder adds a “Preview Ship Interior” feature though, perhaps via mods?

Influencing ladder placement

Ladders have specific set locations within each individual module—usually smack dab in the middle. This seemingly weird design choice is actually to maximize compatibility for placing modules above and below. However, being able to choose where you placed ladders would have the same effect.

With this set location in mind, there is only one way to influence ladder placement, and that is to avoid placing modules directly above or below modules you don’t want to be ruined by a ladder. If you have say, a Living Quarters Habitat that you feel doesn’t need a ladder in the center of it, this can only be achieved by placing another module next to it, and then building below that new module, instead of below your Living Quarters.

You cannot change where a module’s ladder is placed, but you can change whether or not that module has a ladder in the first place.

Influencing door placement

Trying to figure out Starfield’s method for placing doors in a ship was a headache, to say the least. I tested out many different build options, and here is what I learned.

Doors only want the path of least resistance—the shortest possible route—from one end of your ship to the other. However, they don’t take other doors into account at all as it seems each one is coded separately. Why does this matter?

If you have four modules in a square, one path will not be made around the outside of that square with doors. Instead, each module will place a door to access each other module that it is touching. This means that if you have complex, nonlinear builds, your ship is quickly going to turn into an absolute maze of doors.

There is only one way you can do damage control against maze ships—try to limit the amount of accessible modules that are touching one another. This does not mean building fewer modules, just being creative in their placement. Use structures or other non-accessible sections to separate areas where you don’t want doors built. If two modules have a structure between them, there will not be a door leading from one to the next.

It seems absurd that you have to add more parts to your ship if you want fewer doors, but alas. Another good strategy is to try to have linear ships, but this method impedes creative freedom, so I personally prefer the structure method even though it’s more work.

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