Our Starfield guide is packed with essential tips and tricks
Looking for Starfield tips and tricks?Thousands have players have likely already discovered and scanned the rock on Mars that you’ve been hiding under if you haven’t heard ofStarfield. Bethesda’s gigantic spaceRPGhas shot to the top few games in Steam’s most played list, and that means a whole lot of people are currently busy being baffled byStarfield’s more opaque and confusing systems.
In this guide we’ll walk you through our25 top Starfield tipsthat you really need to know before starting your first playthrough. It’s very easy to fall into numerous traps of wasted time and expense without this knowledge, so take a look at our tips below and see how they can help you become master of the Settled Systems in no time at all.
These are the most important skills to get early on
Character creationin Starfield gives you a variety of different ways to customise your character’s abilities, from picking yourbackgroundto choose up to threetraitswith positive and negative effects. But afterwards, the most important choice you must make is which skills to unlock first once you level up.
You’ll have plenty of time to unlock all the skills in the world over the course of your playthrough, but thebest Starfield skillsto unlock early on are:
Several of these skills will unlock entire game systems in Starfield with just a single skill point, and the others are just incredibly useful for any player to have.
For better or worse, you’ll likely be spending a lot of time in menus while travelling across the variousStarfield planets. There are a few different ways that you canfast travelto any destination you like, and you should get used to them, because it’s not likeSkyrimwhere you can walk all the way from Riften to Markarth. You actuallyneedto use fast travel to get across whole star systems in Starfield.
The good news is,you can fast travel directly from the missions menu, allowing you to head to the location of your next mission’s task immediately, without looking anything up on Starfield’s confusing array of maps. Just open your missions menu, select the quest you want to follow, and tap “R” (or “X” on controller) to “Set Course” directly to that location, allowing you to zip from Proxima Centauri toEarthin the blink of an eye. It’ll save a whole lot of time and frustration, I promise you.
Starfield’s skill system is designed in such a way that the best way to become extremely powerful is to save your skill points, plan ahead, and specialise heavily in one or two areas. Each skill in Starfield has four ranks, allowing you to invest heavily in a single aspect of your playstyle - but each subsequent rank in a skill also requires you to complete a challenge. For example, you can’t reach Rank 2 in Boxing until you kill 20 enemies with an unarmed attack.
This means you’ll likely level up and get more skill points before you can even put them where you want them.Don’t be tempted to spend your skill points immediately!Hold onto them until you complete your challenges in the really important skills, because ranking up individual skills makes you far stronger overall than placing a single point in everything. This is the key to creating the verybest Starfield builds, so remember: save your skill points, and specialise.
One of the most important pieces of loot to watch out for in Starfield is aSkill Book. These innocuous magazines are unique items scattered throughout the Settled Systems, andeach Skill Book you pick up gives you a permanent buff. One might increase your carry capacity. Another might boost your critical hit damage with a certain weapon type. There are nearly 150 unique Skill Books to find, and each one is worth picking up. So watch out for them!
Smuggling is one of the most confusing and important aspects of Starfield, and one of the best ways toget rich quickly. If you find an item with a yellow icon next to it, this means the item iscontrabandand illegal. Anytime you enter a star system controlled by the United Colonies or Freestar Collective,your ship will be scanned for contraband- and if you’re caught smuggling any, you’ll be in trouble.
Fortunately, it’s very easy to make a lucrative career smuggling such illicit items as harvested organs, Va’Ruun heretic writings, and more. Justhead to the Wolf Systemthe moment you get any contraband, and you’ll be able to sell all of it at the Trade Authority shop in The Den space station without having to worry about procuringShielded Cargoto fool any scanners detecting you. Just be sure toput some skill points into Commerceso you get more money for selling each item!
With such an in-depth skill system, it’s important to learnhow to level up fast in Starfield. There are lots of ways to expedite your experience gains, but one of the easiest is to sleep in your bed. Time will pass, but you’ll also get theWell Rested effect, which increases your XP gain by 10% for the next 24 minutes. Passing time doesn’t change anything in Starfield, so there’s really no reason why you should ever NOT have the Well Rested effect active. Like in real life, a solid sleep schedule pays dividends!
We get it. It’s a Bethesda game. The main story is not the reason you play it. But in Starfield, some of yourmost important abilitiesare locked until you reach certain points along the main mission list. You don’t need to play through the wholelength of Starfield- it only takes a few missions before you unlock your first Starborn power, and then you’ll see why it’s well worth doing the main story missions. Once you unlock a handful of thebest Starfield powers, you’ll be able to get a lot more done in a shorter space of time wherever your travels take you.
Companionsare amazingly useful to keep around in Starfield. Not only are they virtually invulnerable in combat, but they are also veritablepack mulesthat you can use to carry around all your spare gear. But you shouldn’t neglect them or forget about them, or you’ll be losing out. And no, I’m not just talking about yourStarfield romance options.
If a companion mentions they want to speak to you, speak to them. They’ll often have some reward to give you at the end of the conversation. Also, if you’re not using a companion as a pack mule, then take the time to transfer your next-best gear and equipment to them - andmake sure their gear fits their speciality! For example, Sam Coe has Rank 3 in Rifle Certification, so make sure you give him a rifle instead of a shotgun orpistol.
Starfield has quite a selection offactions. Some are large, some are small. And you can join up with the biggest ones and accept quests from them, just like the Stormcloaks and Imperials in Skyrim. But unlike Skyrim, you can actuallyjoin up with every single faction at oncein Starfield, and none of them will mind, despite often having very poor opinions of one another.
Oh, and in case you were wondering: just because you’re a member of every faction, doesn’t mean you won’t get abountyput on you for doing something illegal. So don’t go getting ideas.
Here are a couple of sneaky tricks you can use to get some of the best early-game gear in Starfield. First:go and visit Emma Wilcox. She’s in The Rock, the Freestar Collective headquarters on Akila in the Cheyenne system. Quicksave, then pickpocket her. If she notices, reload and try again. She’ll eventually part with her Assassin’s Advanced Grendel, an excellent legendary suppressed weapon that we think is one of thebest guns in Starfieldearly on.
Second: whenever you see aspacesuit locked in a glass cabinet(like the Mark I Spacesuit in The Lodge basement), carefully aim your reticule at the right-hand edge of the glass cabinet door and as long as you get the angle right, you’ll be able to bypass the Master-level lock and take the spacesuit immediately and for free. It’s an exploit, so who knows how long it’ll stick around in the game, but until then, feel free to enjoy it. Thanks toJorRaptor’s videofor highlighting these two ideas!
Starfield has a hotbar, of sorts. It’s called the “Quick-Keys” menu. It’s more like a cross between a hotbar and a radial wheel, but in any case, if you want to assign a hotkey shortcut to a weapon (or an aid item), find that item in your inventory andtap the “Favourite” button, then select a slot in the Quick-Keys menu. After that, you can tap “Q” on the keyboard (or use the D-pad on the controller) to open and switch between favourited items in the Quick-Keys menu.
If you want to maximise the loot available to you in Starfield, you’ll need to get sneaky. As long as you have the required rank in Security, you’ll be able to open thelockpickingminigame on any locked container or door you come across, which can lead to some very potent items, even early on - likethe example I gave earlier on. So make sure you stock up onDigipicksso you can pick all of the locks.
Once you unlock Theft, you’ll be able to startpickpocketingcharacters as well. The great thing about picking pockets in Starfield is thatyou can freely look inside any NPC’s inventorywithout them getting angry. It’s only once you take something that they’ll be annoyed - if they catch you doing it, that is. So you can feel free to snoop around everyone’s belongings, and if you find something particularly valuable you can try your luck pilfering it from them.
Thehand scanneris so unbelievably useful in Starfield. Even though the visual clutter pains me at times, I almost never have it off while I’m exploring and looting, because with the scanner enabled,nearby interactable objects are clearly highlighted. This makes it so much easier to sift through the contents of a room or a locker for the genuinely useful items hidden among all the tat.
We know how tempting it is to give in to your compulsions and hoover up every item in sight in a Bethesda game, but it’s particularly not a good idea in Starfield because of how easily you can become encumbered. While encumbered, even walking will drain your Oxygen, and youwon’t be able to fast travelanywhere.
Those are two hefty, gruellingly irritating penalties. And while there are ways to increase your carry capacity (like thoseSkill BooksI mentioned earlier), the best method to avoiding being encumbered is simply to recognise what’s worth taking and what’s just… a dumbbell. Or a packet of crisps. Or whatever other garbage is clogging up your inventory.
Cast a discerning eye around any combat environment in Starfield, and you’ll often find a fewred drums or cylinders. Shoot these and they’ll explode, causing large damage in an area around them.
In general you should never be afraid of using explosives to turn the tables of a fight. Grenades deal high damage and are very easy to use, and the same is true of mines - of which there is a wide variety. The freezing mines in particular are devastating to whole groups of enemies at once.
Another way to avoid being encumbered is to offload some of your stuff somewhere safe. Yourship storageis an ideal solution, because it has much more space than your character inventory, and it goes with you wherever you go. But even a ship’s Cargo Hold can get filled up.
Fortunately you can findinfinite-mass storage containersin yourhouse, once you get one. Incidentally, you’ll get one immediately if you picked theDream Hometrait at the beginning of the game. But if not, you can also use the locker in your bedroom atThe Lodge, which is also infinite-mass, allowing you to put as much as you like in there.
One of the biggest selling points of Starfield is its impressive and versatileShip Buildersystem, which allows you to customise and even build from scratch your very own spaceships by visiting a Ship Technician. However,don’t spend all your money on ship upgradesright away.
The likelihood is that you’ll soon start to complete missions like theMantisside-mission which reward you with entirelyfree shipsthat will make all your hard work modifying yourfirst shipseem like, frankly, a big waste of credits.
An added bonus is that you can evensell shipsthat you earn for free, netting you even more credits!
With options to cross the galaxy waiting for you in menus and your mission journal, a new player can easily forget to spend any real time in the cockpit of their ship, actually learning to fly around.Try to force yourself to learn how to fly, because there’s a fair bit to learn, and it’s far easier to be killed in a dogfight than in-person. Learn the quirks of Starfield’s combat - that you turn quickest when your speed gauge is in the middle; that you can’t perform a Grav Jump without at least one point of power in your GRV gauge; that you can onlydock with and board a shipor pick up loot if you’re within 500 metres of it. It’s all worth knowing and experiencing for yourself.
In Starfield, you’ll spend a lot of time running around on the surface of a planet or moon. But with limited Oxygen supply, it won’t be long until you need to take a breather. To help make these on-foot journeys quicker, you should make use of yourBoost Packand consume Amps from your inventory. The Boost Pack will allow you to keep moving even while your Oxygen replenishes, and consuming an Amp willboost your movement speed by 35%and your jump height by 100% for 2 minutes, allowing you to make light work of journeys that are too short to take by ship.
While you’re busy sucking up every item that isn’t nailed down (in spite of mystrict instructions), keep an eye out forany item with a red iconin its info panel. If you see that red icon, it means the item it owned, and you’d be stealing if you took it. Stealing an item without realising can cause chaos very quickly.
There are some items and areas, however, where you are free to take what you like. One of the most useful examples of this is thegreen first aid packswhich are dotted around just about every interior in the Settled Systems. These first aid packs contain aid items like Med Packs and Heal Paste, and they’re always 100% free to take.
Afflictions can really ruin your day in Starfield, and it’s startlingly easy to unwillingly obtain them. Afflictions are broken into two categories: injuries, and infections. And each type of injury or infection you get requires a different consumable item to cure it. You have tomatch the colourof the affliction with the colour of the icon on the aid item if you want to cure it. Either that, or check our handy table listing all theStarfield status effectsand their cures.
You may have heard talk aboutoutposts in Starfieldor played around with it a bit, but the whole concept and the point of it didn’t quite click, so you abandoned all thought of it. You’re not alone there. Butoutposts are actually incredibly powerful toolsfor a variety of reasons - and while they do require a hefty commitment of resources and a bit of time to set everything up, a working outpost is a thing of beauty.
Outposts can bring in resources at a rate you can’t get any other way in Starfield. They’re also a great home away from home, and a way to create useful rest points and bases all over the galaxy. Place one down on a planet in a system that isn’t owned by a major faction, and it’s also a great place tostore contraband.
It was many hours into my playthrough before I remembered that Research Stations were a thing that existed, and that if this were amultiplayer4X, I’d be lagging well behind in the tech tree. You can find a Research Station in the basement of The Lodge (take the door under the stairs as you enter the building), andyou’ll also have one on your ship, so there’s really no excuse to be an idiot like me. Make a point to return there often, and add resources to projects that you like the sound of, so you can unlock everything from weapon optics to cheese.
Bethesda games are all about choice, and Starfield is a singleplayer game. It’s not breaking any rules to useStarfield console commandsandItem ID liststo change every little thing about your game. Nor is it frowned upon to make use of the community’s incredible creations and download the verybest Starfield modsout there. In fact, we highly recommend you do so, if only to fix the game’s shortcomings such as the lack of anFOV sliderorDLSS support.
In a similar vein:save-scumming(the act of saving before an action or decision and reloading again and again until it goes your way) is often looked down on by a portion of RPG players. But there are no rules against it if that’s how you want to play! So go nuts, play how you want, and don’t let anyone tell you that the way you’re playing the game is wrong, or not thepureStarfield experience.
Alright, fine, this one isn’t one tip, but many. Below we’ve stocked piled all the other useful little tips, tricks, and techniques that we couldn’t fit into the earlier sections of our Starfield guide. We hope they help you!
Good luck out there! The Settled Systems are a dangerous place. We hope our Starfield tips and tricks help you to survive!
