How to assign a weapon to a group in Starfield

Starfield’s Ship Builder lets you customize and modify your spaceships as much as you want. That includes equipping them with an impressive array of weaponry. Sometimes, though, you’ll run into an error concerning weapon group assignments. These include “unassigned weapons,” “missing weapon assignment,” and “maximum weapon count.”

Our Starfield guide to weapon groups and assigning weapons will show you how to assign a weapon to a group — and teach you how to fix any errors that pop up.

What are weapon assignments and groups?

Basically, a weapon assignment — and assigning weapons to groups — just means mapping your ship’s weapons to the buttons that fire them. The most common way you’ll learn about this is when there’s an error in the Ship Builder’s Flight Check.

Image: Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks via Polygon

Just like the other aspects of building a custom spaceship in the Ship Builder, there are a couple restrictions on arming your spaceship. First, your ship technically doesn’t have to have any weapons. But once you start adding them, they have to be assigned to a group.

But you can’t just keep adding guns. You’re limited to only three types of weapons — like lasers, cannons, and missile launchers. Type is basically the name of the weapon — two different brands of laser, for example, counts as two types. You can have as many instances of each type as you can fit on your ship, but you’re limited to three types.

How to fix weapon assignment

When you add or remove weapons in the Ship Builder, the Flight Check might throw an error about unassigned weapons or missing weapon assignment. This means that your ship has weapons that aren’t mapped to a button or key.

Image: Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks via Polygon

To fix this, open the Flight Check menu and tab over to the Weapons tab. Here, you’ll see a list of the three weapon groups — W0, W1, and W2 — your ship can have. On consoles, these map to left trigger, right trigger, and the Y button respectively.

Each group entry is a dropdown that lists the types of weapons you have attached to your ship. You’ll need to assign as many weapon groups (buttons) as you have types of weapons by pressing the A button (on Xbox) over what you want to assign.

Image: Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks via Polygon

When you’ve successfully assigned your weapons to a group, you’ll see a little blue ticky box with a checkmark in it reading “nominal.”

You might also see a maximum weapon count error. This happens when you have more than three types. You’ll have to delete (at least) one type.