Starfield Starship Building Overlapping Parts Tricks Guide

How to overlap pieces in ship build:

– First, overlap duplication only works if there is A: a free available attach point for the duplicate piece to attach to and B: the duplication only goes up and down, never side to side. (tho note that the attach point can be anywhere, including on the underside of a piece, just as long as the “attach” would be “legal” between the two pieces during duplication… )
– Next, create a piece to duplicate, let’s use the example of the easiest piece in the game to build with, the Nova Bracer piece, and put a fuel tank in the space you want the Brace to overlap…

– Place your fuel tank where you want it (we are theorizing a side mounted fuel tank for this example, an H30 Atlus is my choice… always).
– Now attach a Nova Brace below or above where the fuel tank is. Doesn’t matter which, but make sure it is “sticky” placed, not free floating (if this requires additional parts to make it work, hey, guess what, you are already using a Nova Brace and it is basically the best option for building things out while just designing, so make it work!).
– Next, duplicate the Nova Brace. If it tries to build in a free space that is not over the fuel tank, the leave that one there and duplicate again, it should now be over the fuel tank and “green”.
– Attach!

You have now duplicated a part over another part! Congrats.

Just remember, don’t move the duplicated part even a tiny bit, or it will go immediately “red” and you will have to repeat one of the above steps to make it “green” again. As soon as you duplicate, just “drop it” and attach, and it won’t even break any other build rules. Everything will be “nominal”.

Obviously, since this trick only seems to work when duplicating “up” or “down”, you can’t do certain things with some pieces especially built for not attaching in certain ways, but it will work with most pieces and if you are creatively thinking outside the box in your build, you can do some interesting things with this trick.