Top 5 BEST Weapon Mods in Starfield // How to make your guns OP

Don’t sleep on Penetrators. When a group or Ecliptic or Va’ruun Zealots land, they march out of their ship single file, and one clean sniper shit can take down four enemies. It’s beautiful. Also, Penetrators and Gut Busters also have another huge bonus, in that they let you bypass corpses. If you’ve ever been in one of the ships where three times the crew as usual spawns, or on a planet with a lot of large swarming enemies, you know that corpses can provide a lot of cover to oncoming foes as the bodies start to pile up. Penetrators go right through the bodies, and Gut Busters blast upon hitting them and strike things behind them, making both great for that sort of situation.

Honestly, the best gun in the game is a fully modded Revenant. It just melts enemies and breaks the game on very hard.

1. Binary Trigger: Any pistol with this is amazing, maintaining semi-auto damage while basically having auto weapon fire rate.

2. Whitehot Rounds: Fire deals %HP damage. This means, the stronger the enemy, the stronger the effect. It’s display bugged, but I promise, you won’t shred a level 75+ Terrormorph faster than with fire damage. (See Cutter is technically best DPS with Laser skill rank 4 because of this).

3. Hornet Nest: agree on this one, the Coachman is the best Shotgun in the game because it also scales with the Explosives skill with this mod. Slug Shells make Shotguns great snipers though.

4. Depleted Uranium Rounds and Armor-Piercing Rounds: until you level Armor Penetration, these mods greatly increase DPS. Check out some vids on damage calculations.

5. Supressors: required for Stealth play, they also magnify critical damage for some reason. A lot of times, even without sneak skills, you’ll be able to kill two-three enemies if youre fast enough without getting noticed.

This is mostly for Ballistic weapons of course. Laser weapons benefit more from Ignition Lasers/Laser 4 skill and other mods.

I have a Rapid + Extended Mag Advanced Coachman fully maxed out with hornet’s nest rounds, and it’s easily my favorite gun. The only thing that’ll make this perfect is if it was a legendary with like Shattering or Skip Shot

I got a maelstrom with one inch punch and it’s bloody insane for clearing bases and starbases. Go full auto and nothing has a chance.

The muzzle rise is brutal, I got one on a Kodama. Really nice to get auto-shotgun DPS using low end rifle rounds.

aside from the Motion sickness inducing movements, I understand you’re moving around to not get hit but, I would recommend slowing the video down in Post production to reduce motion sickness effecting the viewer.

Did you leave out Explosive rounds on purpose? I believe you can use that on 6 different guns with at least 1 of each type (pistol, shotgun, rifle) and they are very effective, especially on shotguns and high ROF guns. Not quite as OP as the Hornet’s Nest but a close second. I’m still hunting for a Legendary gun with Explosive effect that I can also put Explosive round mod on it for double the explosions (I don’t know if that will happen or not).

The AA-99 with EXP is my favorite rifle…its obvious weakness can be covered with Shattering effect or AP Skill.

Found a double barrel shotgun with “doubles the magazine size” on it … 4 shotgun blasts of the hornets nest sounds nasty

I’ve had my eye out for one since I discovered how ridiculously fun hornet nest rounds are.

Brutal. The double mag perk is crazy, I’ve had it on full auto guns before and it’s felt nuts, I hadn’t even considered what it would do on a Shotgun!

I managed to find an Extended Mag Advanced Coachman at level 15 ish. I have that guy stored away, it’s ridiculous. I renamed it Four-Leaf Clobber

I found a coachman with extended mag at the end of my first play through. Got to use it for a couple miscellaneous missions but started a new game and poof, it was gone. I’m at new game + 4 now. Im just gonna speed run until I hit ten but I’m collecting every zeta (grav dash) artifact on each play through. I grab the piers until I get zeta.

you don’t attach it. You have to find a couchman that has the rare perk “extended mag” on it because it’s not a weapon mod. It’s completely determined by your rng.

One question for a controller user – what settings do you use for AIM and LOOK? I find that I spend way to much time in a fight trying to stay on target

got legend Bridger upgraded with hornet nest, and with perks bashing(doing double damage in gun fight), and skip ,Also Bridger takes advantage of all perk trees including ballistics , shotguns(it is a shotgun) , demolitions( it is firing grenades’ ) , and heavy weapons. Perks adding 140% additional damage at base to the Bridger , and with hornet nest nothing else needed . btw did get Bridger with volatile rounds , the skip fires 2 rounds at the 4th shot , superseding sniper rifles in in 4 shots . but all this is reset per new game+ .

It wouldn’t give me the option to put Hornets nest on my Bridger, but I saw a clip of someone else with it. I wonder what opens it up. Level locked maybe? Or need a legendary or something? Hmm

Are we talking about the lever action grenade launcher? Because it’s absolutely not a shorgun. It benefits from explotion & heavy perks. And that’s that. It’s not a shotgun and not a balistic weapon

incorrect , shotguns are ballistics just like hand cannons or pistols and rifles, the only difference is that it can fire different many types of ammunitions. Just look up shotguns it’s not that difficult, and the interaction with the ballistic tree is taking advantage. Secondly according to Starfield and Bethesda their definition of the gun is a semi-automatic shotgun grenade launcher that fires the grenades like a rocket launcher, all this info is online and backed by Bethesda.

I JUST quicksaved. Looked at a bridger and a coachman in a shop. Exited the shop. Put a point in Shotgun to get 10% dmg. The coachman’s damage was increased. The bridger’s was not. Test it yourself.
Seeing all other weapons are benefitting from two categories: ammunition – ballistic/laser/particle beam and explosive. & Weapon platform – pistol, rifle, heavy ect. How come the Brigder should be under four compared to other weapon’s two?

And it doesn’t matter. The weapon type for the Bridger is “Heavy”, not “Shotgun”. The “lore” of the weapon is irrelevant. The game files code it as a heavy weapon and not a shotgun. And it does not benefit from ballistics either.

thanks for the days look back. Standing corrected is very easy due to a game where in lore game verbs and nouns dont interact correctly with real-world ideas where Bethesda got them. Bethesda doesn’t care about that as I’m finding out, this is my first rodeo with them. Thanks for the feedback

It happens. It can be easy to fall into that sort of trap sometime. And some of the weapons DO have really weird category effects. Like, Particle Beams do physical and energy damage. For some reason, they get the buff from laser skills (which also deal energy damage) but not from ballistics (which deal with most physical damage).
I think that’s because Ballistics is coded specifically not to physical damage type, but to weapons that are meant to deal damage through bullet impacts, to separate Ballistics from Explosives. While I think they just coded lasers to work on Energy damage. But I’m not sure. It’s weird and inconsistent.
Sorry if I seemed harsh in my statement. Just wanted to get the correct info out.

If you use the annihilation rounds don’t have a companion with you or they will get cross with you.

Hornet nest is annoying when fighting inside and that’s mostly where you fight, gut buster is only available for the malestrom and it’s not a good gun, chock charge band is hardly any good too. Best mods are scopes, explosive rounds, ignition beam, high powered, depleted uranium rounds, anything that let you benefits from another perk tree or directly bump damage is top tier because dmg calculation is multiplicative.

Fairly new to the game..only level 26. I just maxed out lasers and am doing a lot of damage with the first weapon in the game, the cutter which just sets everything on fire at that level. I haven’t been able to do mods until yesterday because I hadn’t given any skill pts for that yet. My question is can the cutter be modified and what would be good on it? I wish it had more range for instance.

I’m speced out for stealth sniping. As often as not though, I fire without stealth. I ‘do’ scope aim however even if not stealthed. I use a fully modded ‘rare’ advanced Beowolf that has instigating on it. For mods, I’m using nothing fancy, just anything and everything that adds damage and range, plus of course scope and silencer. On very hard in level 75 planet dungeons, I typically one shot enemies, even when not stealthed. (I head shot.) Level 98 bosses with multiple red bars might take a couple of shots, that’s it.

I am not a fan of area effect weapons because far too often I’ve turned friendlies hostile by virtue of them being inside the damage radius of the area effect. Having a rapid fire weapon with fire damage on it however is very useful for dealing with the likes of terrormorphs or other high HP enemies.

Oh… A cute side effect of my weapon choice is that I typically walk out of a dungeon with ‘more’ ammo for my Beowolf than I had when I went in! (I do have scavaging 2.)

I donno I’m running a hitman Bridger with slugs and high powerd, the rang is pretty nutty it just honestly makes it into the only weapon you need xD up close? Decimate them! Mid range? Decimate them! Long range? Decimate them! It can do it all

Even on VHard Just buy a ShearMag Rifle, game over, you never need any upgrades for spacesuits or guns, Mantis suit even at level 3 is enough for the whole game