Starfield – Armor Penetration Explained

How Does Armor Penetration Work?

Armor penetration is a perk which increases your penetration of enemy armor with weapons. It’s at the bottom level of the combat perks. It has 4 tiers like all of the other perks/skills.

• 1st point in it – Attacks ignore 15% of a target’s armor
• 2nd point in it – Attacks ignore 30% of a target’s armor
• 3rd point in it – Attacks ignore 50% of a target’s armor
• 4th point in it – Enemy armor is decreased by 25% for 6 seconds

Armor penetration is also something that a workbench modification to weapons can do.

Armor-penetrating rounds are a mod to the magazine/battery slot on a weapon. (Battery is the magazine equivalent for energy weapons, i.e. lasers and particle beams, etc.). So this can be added to all types of weapons except melee things like daggers.

The description for the armor-penetrating modification is: “More powerful casing can penetrate even the sturdiest armors.”

Another available weapon workbench mod is depleted uranium rounds. Has the same description as the first one.

In addition to the perk for armor penetration and the weapon modification for armor penetration, there is an effect which can appear on better than standard weapons (blue, purple and gold tiers) which is called shattering. It is described as “Shattering: Break through even the strongest armor.”

Note: We also recommend reading the article explaining ship vendor / manufacturer in Starfield. The information in this guide will be useful for both beginners and experienced players.

One thing I should note about the above. In the description for the armor-penetration weapon workbench mods, both use “can” instead of “will” which in itself implies a percentage chance. Shattering doesn’t use that wording, so is it a 100% chance, effectively ignoring all armor on all enemies.