Starfield Terran Armada DLC Guide: Incursions, Delta, and New Gear

The Terran Armada DLC launched alongside the PS5 version of Starfield on April 7, 2026. It costs $9.99 on its own if you bought the Standard edition like I did, or comes included with the Premium Edition and the Premium Edition Upgrade.

This isn’t Shattered Space. Where Bethesda’s first expansion focused on a single new location (Va’Ruun’Kai) with a self-contained story, Terran Armada takes the opposite approach. It spreads across the entire Settled Systems with a new faction, a new combat system, new companions, new weapons, and a threat that doesn’t stay contained to one corner of the map. For better or worse, the Terran Armada wants to be everywhere, and the DLC is designed to make you feel that.

Here’s everything you need to know about the expansion, how to start it, and what’s waiting for you once you do.

What Is the Terran Armada?

The Terran Armada is a breakaway military faction made up of former Freestar Collective and United Colonies soldiers who disappeared from the Settled Systems during the Colony War. They’ve come back. They believe themselves to be the true children of Earth, and they’ve brought an army of advanced combat robots and enough firepower to back up that belief.

Their goal is to unify the Settled Systems under a single authority, and they aren’t asking politely. The Armada deploys forces across star systems, attacks civilian targets, and uses technology advanced enough to disrupt your ship’s grav drive and prevent fast travel. They’re a legitimate galaxy-wide threat, not just another faction hanging out in one system waiting for you to visit.

The robotic army is the DLC’s most visible addition. You’ll be fighting robots constantly throughout the Terran Armada content, and while the core combat mechanics in Starfield are still satisfying, the enemy variety within the DLC does lean heavily on robot encounters. The upside is that these robots drop X-Tech and new gear at a higher rate than standard enemies, so every fight is potentially rewarding.

How to Start the Terran Armada Questline

You can begin the Terran Armada story very early in the base game. Once you’ve reached Akila City during the main story, you’ll be prompted to listen to an SSNN broadcast. This broadcast kicks off the introductory quest called “Attack of the Terran Armada.”

The quest sends you to the Nirvana system to investigate a missing cruise ship and its crew. During the following quest, “Lost Luxury,” you discover that the cruise ship was attacked by the Terran Armada. This is where the DLC’s story hooks its teeth in and doesn’t let go.

You don’t need to be a high level to start it, but the encounters do scale, and some of the later Incursions can be genuinely challenging. My recommendation is to start the questline whenever it pops up so you can recruit the new companions early, but don’t feel pressured to rush through it. Let the Incursions happen naturally alongside whatever else you’re doing in the game.

Incursions: The New Combat System

Incursions are the centerpiece of the Terran Armada DLC, and they’re the feature that has the most potential to change how the game feels long-term.

An Incursion is a Terran Armada assault on a location somewhere in the Settled Systems. These can happen in space or on planet surfaces. When the Armada deploys an Incursion, it shows up on your Starmap as a marked event. Some Incursions are tied directly to the Terran Armada questline and are required to advance the story. Others are optional, popping up dynamically as you play.

The important mechanic here is that Incursions can disable your grav drive within the affected star system. That means you cannot fast travel out of the area while the Incursion is active. If you fly into an Incursion zone, you’re committed. You either deal with the threat or use Cruise Mode to physically navigate out of the area of influence.

This is where the Free Lanes Cruise Mode system and the Terran Armada DLC work together in a way that feels intentional. Cruise Mode isn’t just a convenience feature anymore. It’s a tactical necessity when the Armada locks down a system. Approaching an Incursion requires you to fly there manually, and the Interdiction events that pull you out of Cruise can happen along the way. Space finally feels dangerous.

Incursions vary in scale. Some are smaller skirmishes with a handful of ships or a ground outpost to clear. Others are larger operations with multiple stages and objectives. The rewards scale accordingly, with larger Incursions dropping better gear, more X-Tech, and equipment module schematics for your ship.

The DLC’s lead creative producer, Tim Lamb, described Incursions as Bethesda’s response to player feedback asking for content with a more widespread, galactic impact. Shattered Space was a compelling single location. Terran Armada is meant to make the entire galaxy feel like it’s at war.

Delta: Your New Robot Companion

Delta is a reprogrammed Terran Armada combat robot, and Bethesda’s design director Emil Pagliarulo described it best when he said Delta is “not evil, but definitely not good.”
Every companion in the base game leans toward lawful behavior. If you played a more aggressive or morally questionable character, you were constantly getting pushback from your crew about your choices. Delta doesn’t have that problem. This is a companion designed for players who want to make shady decisions without a lecture every time they pick a lock or shoot first.

Delta was actually created to combat the Terran Armada, despite being built from their technology. It’s been separated from the Armada’s chain of command, but whether its loyalty to you is real or conditional is left deliberately ambiguous. Conversations with Delta are consistently interesting because you’re never quite sure where the robot’s true allegiances lie.

You recruit Delta early in the Terran Armada questline. Once you start “Attack of the Terran Armada” and progress into the story, Delta joins your crew as part of the narrative. You don’t have to go searching for it or complete a separate recruitment quest.

Delta can be upgraded through an upgrade path tied to the “Overclocked” trophy/achievement. The specifics of the upgrade system become clearer as you progress through the DLC, but the short version is that Delta becomes a more capable combat companion as you invest in it, and there appears to be a relationship system where earning Delta’s respect (or not) affects your dynamic.

The Other New Crewmates

Delta isn’t the only new face joining your crew. The Terran Armada DLC adds two more recruitable characters.

Roxanne Bourreau is Delta’s creator. You’ll learn about her after meeting Delta, but you don’t actually find her until the quest “Into The Void,” which takes you to a Terran Armada mining station. Roxanne was kidnapped by the Armada, and after you convince her you’re not one of them, she joins your party to help you destroy the station. She gets taken to Anchorpoint Station afterward and is temporarily unavailable during part of the story, but she can join your crew permanently later.

The third recruit is Muria, the Galbank lobby NPC who became a fan favorite for her dialogue. You can finally recruit her from her usual spot in the Galbank lobby, giving you one of the more entertaining crewmates in the game.

New Weapons and Gear

Terran Armada’s new weapons lean into a grounded, military aesthetic that feels distinct from the base game’s more sci-fi arsenal. The headline addition is the Multi-Gun Platform (MGP), which is essentially a modular machine gun platform. If you’ve been wanting a straightforward automatic weapon that feels like it belongs in a military shooter, this is it.

Beyond the MGP, the DLC adds NASA-tactical ground-based military gear and weapons that are more utilitarian and less flashy than a lot of what’s in the base game. The armor pieces follow a similar design philosophy. Think body armor and tactical rigs instead of sleek spacesuits.

New ship parts and modules are also included. The Terran Armada uses advanced ships, and defeating them during Incursions can drop schematics for new ship components. These tie into the broader ship customization systems from the Free Lanes update.

The Pre-Built Outpost

For anyone who wants an outpost without the grind of building one from scratch, Terran Armada introduces a pre-built elevated cabin module. You can drop this on any planet and it comes fully furnished and decorated with new items. You can modify the interior however you want once it’s placed.

This is a small addition, but it’s a quality-of-life touch for players who want a base of operations without investing hours into the outpost building system. Combined with the new decorative items (faction-themed workbench skins, small animals and habitats), outposts in general feel a bit more lived-in than they did before.

The bigger outpost news comes from the “This for That” trophy, which confirms you can now build out and hand over an outpost to a faction. This mechanic is reminiscent of Fallout 4’s settlement system, where your settlements could serve faction purposes. If it works the way the achievement description suggests, it’s a meaningful upgrade to outposts that finally connects them to the broader game world.

New Babylon

Bethesda kept this one quiet. None of the pre-release trailers or blog posts mentioned a location called New Babylon, but the “Master of Magnetism” achievement confirms it exists. The achievement requires you to use a magnet to destroy a specific robot for a character named Ivica in New Babylon.

Whether New Babylon is a city, a planet, a space station, or something else entirely remains to be discovered through play. But it’s significant enough to house its own achievement, which suggests it’s a notable location in the DLC rather than a throwaway area.

The Arbitrator Bounties

The “Contract Killer” achievement requires killing 10 targets for the Arbitrator. This appears to be a new bounty system within the Terran Armada DLC, separate from the Trackers Alliance content. Details on the Arbitrator and how this system works will become clearer as players progress through the DLC, but the presence of bounty targets suggests repeatable contract content similar to the Trackers Alliance structure.

Is It Worth $10?

For players who already enjoy Starfield, Terran Armada at $9.99 is an easy yes. The Incursion system alone adds a layer of repeatable endgame content that the game desperately needed. Delta is a companion that fills a role no base game character does. The new weapons and gear are satisfying. And the DLC works in concert with the Free Lanes update to make the whole galaxy feel more alive and more dangerous.

If you’re a PS5 player who bought the Premium Edition, this is already in your game. Start the questline early, recruit Delta, and let the Incursions happen naturally as you explore. The Settled Systems have never had this much going on.

Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at our Vortex Effect forums.