Infection
How to cure Afflictions, Injuries, and Infections in Starfield
Sep
Exploring Starfield’s Settled Systems can be hazardous to your character’s health. There are pirates and Spacers and angry creatures that will all try to kill you, but there’s also a lot of environmental hazards like radiation and corrosive rain that you’ll encounter on some planets. This type of damage might leave your character with a type of status effect called an Affliction — things like a sprained ankle, pneumonia, or frostbite.
Our Starfield Afflictions guide will explain everything you need to know about Affliction status effects including how to heal them.
How damage types cause Afflictions and Injuries
Damage in Starfield comes from a variety of sources. Enemies and creatures deal physical, energy, or electromagnetic (EM) damage. All of these can be healed with anything that increases your health — like food or med packs.
The other kind of damage comes from environmental hazards. This is thermal, corrosive, airborne, and radiation damage from dangerous planets — your spacesuit (and helmet and pack) help protect from these. You can see a bit about the environmental hazards when you scan a planet from orbit. Less obviously, environmental hazards can also include gravity in the form of fall damage. In Mars’ 0.38G, for example, you can fall a huge distance without batting an eye, but Akila’s 1.51G means skipping a few stairs can be hazardous to your health (and ankles).
Environmental damage can lead to Afflictions, and those cannot be healed the same way. Afflictions are a status effect that range from inconvenient (like a nagging cough) to debilitating (like a lung infection). Afflictions can be broken down into two categories, Injuries and Infections. (We’ve included a list of all known Afflictions in Starfield at the bottom of this post.)
How to check your status and status effects
To see what Afflictions you’re currently suffering from, open your menu and hit Y on the controller or B on PC to open the Status menu. This menu is mostly stats and record-keeping, but the first entry — Status Effects — is where your Afflictions are listed.
Image: Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks via Polygon
The first thing to note is your prognosis. This basically just means how likely the Affliction is to go away on its own. From worst to best, here are the possible prognosis levels:
- Poor
- Stable
- Good
- Excellent
Below the prognosis, you’ll see how the Affliction is affecting you. You’ll see things like fever (increased O2 consumption) or blisters (melee attacks do less damage).
More importantly, you’ll be able to match up the Affliction and its icon. When you end up with an Affliction, you’ll get a new icon on your watch in the lower left corner of the screen. There’s a purple pill icon for an infection, a red bandaid for lacerations or puncture wounds, and an orange droplets(?) icon for burns and frostbite.
How to heal Afflictions in Starfield
In your inventory, head to the Aid section. This is where you’ll find food and med packs for healing, but also where you’ll find items to treat Afflictions.
Image: Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks via Polygon
Scroll through whatever you have and look for items with the same icon as your Affliction under the treatment section of their description on the right (there’s also a small icon for you current Afflictions at the bottom). Items with icons that match will heal that kind of Affliction. For example, heal paste treats burns and penicillin X treats infections.
Find something that matches, hit A to use it, and you’ll get rid of your Affliction.
Doctors can heal Afflictions
If you don’t have the Aid items (or just don’t feel like wasting your own hard-won loot), doctors can cure Afflictions (and just generally heal you). Look for an infirmary or a Reliant Medical shop. There’s one in New Atlantis on Jemison just to the right of the Lodge and one in Cydonia on Mars along the left side just before you hit the mine.
Examples of Afflictions and Injuries in Starfield
Here’s a list of the Afflictions and Injuries (that we’ve discovered so far) in Starfield:
- Brain injury
- Burns and blisters from fire or radiation damage
- Concussion
- Contusions
- Dislocated limb
- Fractured limb and joint pain from fall damage
- Fractured skull
- Frostbite
- Heatstroke
- Hernia
- Hypothermia
- Infections
- Lacerations
- Lung damage and cough
- Pneumonia and a fever that we caught from a sick miner
- Poisoning
- Puncture wounds
- Radiation poisoning
- Sprain
- Torn muscle
