Anytime you board an enemy ship in Starfield, kill the crew, and take it as your own, you can’t do much with it until you take it to a port with a Ship Services Technician and register it. And to do that, you probably have to grav jump, fast travel, or otherwise land on a planet, which makes the ship your “home ship.” Your home ship is your default ship or the one that will exist in the world with you. The question then is, is there a way to claim a ship without making it your home? Let’s discuss.
Related: Starfield: How to Reset Vendor Stock & Credits
Can You Claim a Starfield Ship Without Making It Your Home Ship?
After undocking from the ship you just took, most actions you can take will automatically make it your home ship. These include:
- Grav jumping
- Landing on a planet (either at a port or anywhere on its surface)
- Fast traveling anywhere from where you claimed the ship
- Make it your home ship in the ship menu
In short, there is essentially no way you can traverse Starfield without making a claimed ship your home ship. You might technically be able to make it to a starstation using your ship’s regular boosters alone, but the time required (in the dozens of hours, at least) makes it a practical nightmare and not worth the effort.
While there is no feasible way to claim a ship without making it your home ship, that doesn’t mean you can’t use it as credit fodder or as a stopgap until you find something you really want to use. Alternatively, you can simply take out the ship’s engines, kill the crew, grab everything that’s not nailed down, and book it back to your original ship.
If you run across some contraband to smuggle, it’s probably best that you don’t take the claimed ship, as it may not have near enough shielded cargo space to evade a scan. Leaving a ship you disable also allows you to destroy it to progress the Piloting skill if you haven’t already maxed it. You’ll also get a bit more loot from the supply crate that appears when the ship blows up.
Should you decide to claim a ship anyway, I do recommend heading to the nearest port city and at least selling everything you picked up. Remember to jettison anything that would end up scanned by the authorities, then go to any of the merchants nearest merchants and sell the farm.
