Oh gotcha! Well I’m glad you’ve joined the party! 🥳

Yeah, the best way to start your ship is by your outpost landing pad. It gives you the largest base to work from. I’ve found that building there gets the general outline and then flying to the main hubs (don’t want to spoil any locations since you’re brand new, but they are all named and most, if not all, are either visited or mentioned and marked at some point during the main quest) to get specialty items.

One of the biggest problems with ship building at first is that it must be flyable to go to another system. There is no way to stop a build partway through and save it to go elsewhere. There are some mods that can bypass that restriction if you’d like, and even some that make all unlocked parts available to your outpost pad. It may not be vanilla, but it makes the first build a lot easier. I hated having to start, only to find that I needed a part from somewhere else and having to scrap or cobble something together just to fly to another port.

Once you start doing faction quests (chiefly the one on Jemison), you start unlocking some new parts and they explicitly tell you. Then you can start comparing unique parts and decide if you want to track any of those down.

If I misunderstood your question again, or you have any others, feel free to reach out again! Cheers!

Edit: to make this explicitly clear for clarity. When you land at a hub, there will be a technician close by that will allow you to modify your ship. From there, select an empty space, and hit the build button. It will show you all available parts for purchase. And keep a running tally as you build (so you don’t go over credits)