How to Easily Escape Ship-to-Ship Space Combat in Starfield

As you embark on your galaxy-hopping adventure across the stars, you’ll soon realize that the ship-to-ship space combat in Bethesda Game Studios’ sci-fi RPG is no joke. In fact, from a design perspective, some space encounters feel like roadblocks, especially if you’re under-leveled and you don’t have the requisite ship upgrades. So, if you’re anything like us, and you’ve bumped into a hostile ship that’s way higher leveled than you, you may be wondering how to easily escape ship-to-ship space combat in Starfield.

How to Escape From a Space Combat Encounter Easily

As soon as you instigate a combat encounter in space, you won’t be able to fast travel to any planets in the system you’re in. Likewise, you won’t be able to fast travel to any previous locations that you’ve discovered as the usual ‘Jump’ icon will be replaced with ‘In Combat’.

However, you can grav jump to any nearby galaxies that you’ve previously visited, which is a surefire way to escape a deadly space encounter in Starfield. Thing is, you’ll need to be quick to initiate this manoeuver.

Firstly, you’re going to want to place at least one unit of power into your Grav Drive. Really, the more power you can safely invest into your Grav Drive, the better. That’s because the more power you have in your Grav Drive, the less time it takes to charge up and jump away.

If you leave it too long, the enemy ship can potentially disable your Grav Drive by damaging it, thus leaving you unable to grav jump away and completely vulnerable to your adversary’s attacks.

Once your Grav Drive is powered, quickly bring up your star map by pressing and holding the Menu button. From here, choose a system that you’ve already visited that is close by. Next, opt to ‘Set Course’ by pressing the X button.

Lastly, press and hold the X button to grav jump away. It’ll take a few moments to warm up the grav drive and jump, and these moments can be nail-bitingly tense. As long as the enemy doesn’t disable your Grav Drive, you’ll be able to jump to a safer place where you can take stock and plan the next step of your journey. In short, you’ve lived to fight another day!

That’s everything we have on how to easily escape ship-to-ship space combat in Starfield. For more, here’s how to target engines and how to level up quickly. Or alternatively, feel free to explore our related coverage down below before you leave.