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Starship Types Explained: How Corvettes compare to the other classes.

Quick Answer

Corvettes are built, not bought. They arrived with the Voyagers update (version 6.0, 27 August 2025) and are the first ship class you assemble yourself instead of finding on a landing pad.
You build them at the Corvette Workshop aboard space stations, using a part-placement editor that will feel familiar if you've done any base building.
A Corvette is assembled from modular components: hull and frame sections, a cockpit, wings, engines, weapon mounts, and decorative pieces.
The parts you attach determine how the ship performs. Bigger, heavier builds handle differently from small, light ones, and engine and weapon choices feed directly into speed and firepower.
Colour and material customization is extensive, and you can repaint without rebuilding the ship.
Corvettes are larger than most standard ships and have walkable interiors, so they sit somewhere between a starship and a small mobile base.
Building one is a long-term project, not an instant upgrade. If you want raw stats today, hunting an S-class ship is still faster.

Overview

For most of No Man's Sky's life, getting a better ship meant looking at ships other people made. You scanned landing pads, waited for a good roll, and paid for whatever the galaxy happened to generate. Corvettes changed that. Instead of shopping, you open a builder, place parts onto a frame, and end up with a ship nobody else in the universe is flying.

That freedom comes with a trade. A purchased S-class ship is a known quantity with a known stat ceiling, available the moment you can afford it. A Corvette is something you invest in over many sessions, expanding and refining as you unlock more parts. Players who enjoy base building tend to love the system immediately; players who mainly want the strongest possible combat ship often keep a traditional ship alongside their Corvette rather than replacing it.

What a Corvette Actually Is

A Corvette isn't a ship type in the old sense. Fighters, Haulers, Explorers and the rest are procedurally generated by the game and handed to you complete. A Corvette is a chassis you fill in. The game supplies the parts catalogue and the rules for how those parts fit together; the shape, size, silhouette and role of the finished ship are yours.

Two consequences follow from that. First, there's no "roll" to chase in the way there is with a purchased ship, because the ship's capability is a product of what you built rather than what the universe generated. Second, a Corvette is genuinely a project. Your first one will look modest, and that's normal. Parts become available to you over time, so the ship you finish a hundred hours from now will not resemble the one you fly out of the workshop on day one.

Corvettes are also physically large compared to a Fighter or Shuttle, with interior space you can walk through. That's part of the appeal and part of the cost: they're less nimble to land in tight spots, and the sense of scale is very different from a standard cockpit ship.

Getting Into the Ship Builder

Corvette construction happens at a workshop area aboard space stations rather than out in the world. Look for the dedicated construction area when you dock; it's a distinct part of the station interior, separate from the trade terminals and the usual NPC vendors.

Access to Corvettes is gated behind progression rather than being available from your very first landing. If the option isn't showing up for you, it's almost always because you haven't hit the relevant unlock yet, not because something is broken. Play forward, and the system opens up.

Once you're in the editor, the interaction model is close to base building: you select a part from a category, position it relative to what's already there, rotate it, and confirm placement. Parts snap to valid connection points, so you're not free-floating components in space, and you can remove and replace anything you're not happy with. Expect to spend your first session mostly deleting and re-placing pieces while you learn what connects to what.

If you're new to the game's construction tools generally, the muscle memory from planetary base building transfers almost completely.

Assembling the Ship, Part by Part

A workable build order is: frame first, cockpit second, propulsion third, weapons fourth, cosmetics last. Getting the core hull shape right before you commit to detailing saves a lot of rework, because moving the frame after the fact usually means detaching everything hanging off it.

Hull and frame sections define the ship's overall footprint and how much you can attach. This is the decision that shapes everything downstream, so it's worth sketching a rough silhouette in your head before you start placing.

The cockpit determines your view out of the ship, which makes it a gameplay decision as much as a visual one. Some cockpits give you a wide, open forward view; others are more enclosed. If you do a lot of low-altitude flying or dogfighting, pick for visibility.

Wings and stabilisers contribute to the profile and the ship's flight character. They're also where a lot of the visual personality lives, since wing shape does more than anything else to make a build read as a fighter, a hauler, or something stranger.

Engines and thrusters drive propulsion. More engine mass on a heavy frame behaves differently from the same engines on a light one, so think of propulsion and hull size as a pair rather than two independent choices.

Weapon mounts carry your offensive hardware. Mount placement matters for firing arcs and for how the ship looks under load.

Decorative parts exist purely for appearance and are where most of the long tail of build time goes for people who care about aesthetics.

Part category	What it affects
Hull / frame sections	Overall size and shape, structural capacity, how much else you can attach
Cockpit	Forward and peripheral visibility, the ship's visual centrepiece
Wings & stabilisers	Flight profile and silhouette; a major driver of the build's character
Engines / thrusters	Propulsion and how the ship accelerates and moves under its own mass
Weapon mounts	Offensive capability and firing arcs
Decorative / detail parts	Appearance only; no meaningful effect on performance

Furnishing the Interior

A Corvette is large enough to walk around inside, and the interior is built the same way the exterior is. Corridors, bunks, and functional rooms are all placed by you. Room types include med-bays, war rooms, teleportation hubs, mission radars, and crew quarters, so the ship can absorb jobs that previously meant flying back to a base or a station.

Corvettes are also built to carry people. They accommodate multiple passengers, which makes them the natural ship for playing alongside friends rather than meeting them at a destination.

Stepping Outside: Spacewalking

Voyagers added something no other ship class does. You can open your Corvette's accessway anywhere and step out into open space, floating weightlessly around the hull of the ship you built. It is mostly a spectacle feature, and it is also the clearest argument for spending time on the exterior silhouette: you will be looking at it from the outside, in the dark, with nothing else in frame.

How Parts Influence Stats and Handling

The headline rule: your Corvette's performance is an emergent result of the build, not a fixed number attached to the ship. Add more mass and the ship carries itself differently. Add more propulsion and it moves better. Add more weaponry and it hits harder.

Practically, this means you should decide what the ship is for before you start. A compact, engine-forward build with modest hull mass gives you a responsive ship suited to combat and close-range flying. A large, heavy build with generous interior space is a comfortable long-haul vessel and a striking thing to look at, but it won't turn like a Fighter. Trying to get both from one ship usually produces something that does neither especially well.

The other half of performance is the same as it is on any ship: installed technology. Corvettes still benefit from good upgrade modules and from stacking your best technology into supercharged slots, and inventory management follows the same logic covered in the ship inventory guide. A thoughtfully built Corvette with mediocre tech installed will underperform a plain ship with a well-planned loadout, so don't let the construction work distract you from the modules.

Paint and Cosmetic Customization

Colour customization is where the system pays off fastest. You can recolour your ship after it's built, so there's no need to lock in a palette while you're still iterating on the shape. Materials and finishes are applied through the same customization flow, and the results are dramatic: the same hull reads completely differently in a clean white finish versus a weathered dark one.

Two habits worth adopting. Keep your palette tight, because three or four colours used deliberately look far better than eight used enthusiastically. And treat repainting as a normal step rather than a final one, since revisiting the colours after you've added new parts almost always improves the result.

Corvette vs. Hunting an S-Class Ship

These solve different problems, and plenty of players do both.

Hunting an S-class ship is the efficient path to raw capability. You know what you're getting, the stat ceiling is well understood, and the process is a matter of hours rather than weeks. If your goal is to be maximally effective in combat or to squeeze out hyperdrive range for a long expedition, that's still the reliable answer.

Building a Corvette is the path to a ship that's yours. Nobody else has your silhouette, your paint, or your layout. The interior space and the scale make it a different experience to fly, and the build itself is the content. For a lot of players that's worth more than the last few percent of stats.

The pragmatic approach is to keep a purchased ship for jobs that demand specific numbers, and fly the Corvette the rest of the time. Ship slots are cheap relative to what you gain from specialising. If you're deciding where a Corvette fits alongside the other classes, the starship types breakdown lays out what each one is actually good at.

FAQ

Do I need to finish the main story to build a Corvette?

No, but access is tied to progression rather than being available immediately. If the workshop isn't offering you a build, keep playing and it will open up. This is a gate, not a bug.

Can I change a Corvette after I've built it?

Yes. The build is editable, so you can return to a workshop, remove parts, add new ones, and repaint. Most players treat their first build as a draft and revise it heavily as more parts become available.

Are Corvettes better than S-class ships?

Not in a straightforward stat comparison. A well-rolled S-class ship remains the dependable choice when you need specific numbers. Corvettes win on customization, scale, and the fact that you made them.

Do Corvettes use normal upgrade modules?

They use the standard technology and upgrade systems, unlike Living Ships, which are restricted to their own organic technology. Your existing module strategy carries over.

How long does a good Corvette take to build?

Longer than you'd expect. A basic flyable ship comes together fairly quickly, but a build you're genuinely happy with is a multi-session project, especially as new parts unlock and you rework earlier decisions.

Key Takeaways

Corvettes shifted where ship quality comes from. For years, the answer to "how do I get a better ship?" was a search problem: visit stations, scan pads, wait for the game to generate something good. Corvettes make it a design problem instead, and design problems reward attention rather than patience.

That reframing is why the class doesn't cleanly replace anything. It sits alongside the existing ships as a different kind of ownership. The purchased S-class is a tool you acquire; the Corvette is a thing you maintain. Both are valid, and treating them as competitors leads to disappointment in whichever direction you lean.

If you're starting a build, commit to a role early and let it constrain your part choices. The builds that go wrong are almost always the ones that tried to be a nimble fighter and a spacious hauler at once. Pick a purpose, build toward it, and accept that the ship will be a work in progress for a long time. That's the intended experience, not a shortcoming.

For what's landed in the game more recently, the 2026 updates roundup tracks how the ship systems have continued to evolve since Voyagers.

No Man's Sky Corvette Guide: Building & Customizing Your Own Starship