It's so quiet around here, I thought I'd occasionally post some tips that I think would be useful. Useful for those who didn't already know them, of course.

Today's tip is something I just found out, after some 1500+ hours of playing Starlink: elemental shields. They aren't mentioned in the Collections, and they aren't mentioned in the start-up tips*. So here's what I've learned (or at least, how I think things work).

You automatically get an elemental shield every time you provide a corrupted Nova sample to a Workshop. If it's a heat-corrupted nova sample, you get an orange heat shield. If it's cold-corrupted, you get a blue cold shield. If it's gravity-corrupted, you get a purple gravity shield.


The actual dialog text varies, sometimes calling it a "custom" shield, or a "temporary" shield, or a "gravity stabilizing" shield, or whatever. But I think they always call it a shield.


The shield appears as a fat color gradient bar that covers your usual armor and shield status bars. If you immediately exit from the interaction with the Workshop after the dialog has cleared, you'll also see a message for a second or two that tells you that you have the shield.


Exit too soon and the dialog will cover up the message. Exit too late and the message won't be displayed at all. That's why it took me so long to figure this out.


Your elemental shield is attached to your ship, and it goes everywhere with your ship, including via fast-travel. You can't remove it, but there's no reason to.

The elemental shield sits between your active shields and your rechargeable defense shields. So the active shields protect the elemental shield, and the elemental shield protects your normal defense shields, which in turn protect your armor which protects your ship.

I presume that the elemental shield is particularly strong against the given element, so a heat shield is strong against heat and fire, etc. I can't verify this, but that does seem to be the case.

As it takes damage, the shield wears down until it's gone. It doesn't regenerate like your other shields (and armor) do. As it wears down, you'll see the normal ship armor and shield status bars starting to show, but they won't be filled in until the elemental shield is completely worn out.


Although you can't tell for sure, it's probably safe to assume that if you have an elemental shield, your armor and defense shields are at full strength.


You can only have one elemental shield at a time. If you want a new one, you'll need to deliver some appropriately corrupt Nova to a Workshop. Similarly, if you happen to deliver some corrupt Nova to a Workshop, perhaps as part of a mission to help them, any existing shield will be replaced whether you wanted it to be or not.

* There is a start-up tip that reads, "Nova residues corrupted with Heat, Cold, or Gravity can be turned into powerful Elemental mods." I believe that's just talking about ordinary mods, not elemental shields.