Best Ship Upgrades to Get First in Star Wars Outlaws

Ship combat in Star Wars Outlaws is almost as valuable a skill as exploration and fighting on-planet. You won’t make it to the game’s different planets nor see much of its optional content if you can’t win a fight with pirates. And if you choose the best ship upgrades first, you’ll have a much easier time in the vast and dangerous galaxy.

The Best Ship Upgrades to Get Early in Star Wars Outlaws

You can blaze through Star Wars Outlaws in a paltry 15-20 hours if you beeline it from main story quest to main story quest. However, if you do any exploration or side content in space, you’ll want the best possible upgrades as soon as you can get them. To my mind, there are five you should get before any others, as they’ll help with survivability and basic exploration. They are:

• The upgrade to the LC-60 Laser Cannons
• The upgrade to the M-72 Concussion Missiles
• The upgrade to the E-310 Sublight Engine
• The upgrade to the S30B Deflector Shield
• The upgrade to the H-RD Duralloy Hull

Each upgrade is relatively inexpensive, doesn’t cost too many rare ship upgrade materials, and will do wonders for your comfort levels in the game’s early fights. Even engagements with ships you’re not otherwise ready for, like a pair of cruisers in Toshara orbit, are easier to ask to defeat with even a few improvements to your ship.

The LC-60 Laser Cannons

Your Laser Cannons are your workhorse weapons and will do the lion’s share of the damage to enemy ships. I recommend upgrading the starting cannons because, at least for the first few hours of the game, and especially in and around Toshara, I found consistency to be better than specialization. The charging power of Plasburst Cannons or the output of the Rapid Fire Cannons are nice, but you can ease into those. Improved standard Lasers will do more than well enough for all the main story space content, and any other upgrades you might use are gravy.

M-72 Concussion Missiles

One of the biggest problems I found when dogfighting in Star Wars Outlaws was a lack of additional weaponry. by default, you only get one tracking missile, and upgrading the launcher grants two. Using missiles wisely is paramount to proper ship-to-ship combat because it lets you get one enemy down low, then launch a missile at them and change targets well before they’re reduced to space dust. Two missiles not only increase your overall damage, but it cuts the amount of time you spend on a single target by as much as half. And like the Laser Cannons, that utility overrides the Torpedoes’ power and the Ion Missiles’ specialization.

E-310 Sublight Engine

There’s nothing I hate more in an open-world game than the downtime as you go from one place to another. The E-310 doesn’t remove the downtime as you explore space, but it does make your ship much faster so long as you’re not in combat. Without proper testing, I’d say this first upgrade is about a 25% improvement. When it takes up to five minutes to fly from one point of interest to another in space by default, you’ll feel those extra seconds. And while you won’t be escaping combat any faster, once you do make it out and things calm down, getting to a safer space becomes much easier.

S30B Deflector Shield

The concept of a shield is simple: add what amounts to a regenerating health bar on top of your ship’s actual health bar, one that doesn’t need repairs and comes back significantly quicker. Upgrading to the S30B version is a straight increase to your shield’s capacity, though it does nothing to its recharge time. I’ve found that it takes several ships shooting at me with an upgraded shield for it to drop entirely as long as I’m doing at least a bit of evasive flying. It was tough for a single ship to do anything to me in the early game.

H-RD Duralloy Hull

Sure, a shield is straight-up extra health, but if your hull health reaches zero, it’s game over. Upgrading to the H-RD Duralloy Hull not only gives the Trailblazer more health but it provides a modest but noticeable auto-repair effect. It’s not as quick and consistent as your shield’s recharge rate, but it can save you from needing to start manual repairs and then wait the long cooldown. I rarely enter engagements where I feel like I’m in active danger of being spaced, but with the first hull upgrade, I don’t need to worry about that nearly as much. And neither will you.

The longer you play Star Wars Outlaws, the more time you have to experiment with different ship upgrades. Getting the ones listed in this guide early will make reaching the later parts of the game, and especially the later side content, much easier. For more Star Wars content, check out our guides on How to Solve the Crypt of Uhrma Puzzle and How to Throw Your Lightsaber in Star Wars: Jedi Survivor.