Starfield: Beginner's Guide & Best Tips

This Game is a Mess, and I Love It

Look, I'm not gonna pretend Starfield is a perfect game. It's not. The loading screens are obnoxious, the inventory system makes me want to throw my mouse through the monitor, and about 40% of the planets are empty rocks that exist just to waste your fuel. But here's the thing—when this game clicks, it clicks. I've got 340 hours logged across three characters, and I still find myself firing it up at 11 PM on a Tuesday, telling myself "just one more mission," and suddenly it's 4 AM and I haven't blinked in three hours.

The magic of Starfield is that it lets you be whoever you want in space, but it really punishes you for not knowing the systems. The tutorial dumps you on Kreet with a barely-functional gun and tells you to figure it out. I died six times to the first Terrormorph on my first playthrough. Six. Times. I was about to refund the game on Steam, convinced it was broken.

It's not broken. It's just opaque. The game doesn't tell you half the mechanics that actually matter, and the other half it explains poorly with text boxes you'll accidentally click through. That's why I'm writing this. Not for clicks, not for SEO, but because I spent 20 hours being frustrated before I figured out what the hell I was doing, and I want to save you that headache.

Also, quick warning: the ship builder is a drug. You'll think "I'll just tweak the cargo hold a little" and then six hours later you've built a flying brick with 14,000 cargo capacity and a bedroom that doesn't have a door. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Why You're Probably Screwing Up Right Now

If you're struggling, it's almost certainly one of these things. I've seen the same complaints on Reddit, Steam forums, and in my friend group. Here's what's eating your lunch:

• You're ignoring the Research Lab. This is the biggest trap. The game throws so many UI tabs at you—Character, Ships, Inventory, Powers, Research—that you'll ignore the Research Lab entirely. Don't. You cannot make good gear upgrades without it. I spent my first 15 hours hoarding adhesive and zero wire like a dragon, then realized I needed Rank 2 in Weapon Engineering just to craft a basic suppressor. The Research Lab is where you unlock those ranks. Use it immediately.
• You're treating it like a shooter. The combat is fine, but it's not Call of Duty. You cannot run and gun on Very Hard. You'll get shredded by a single Ecliptic merc with a Beowulf. Starfield wants you to use your boost pack, flank, abuse the slow-motion from the Targeting Control Systems, and level the playing field with your Perks. If you're dying constantly, it's because you're standing still and trading bullets.
• You're hoarding everything. I know. The loot goblin in your brain says "pick up every weapon, every suit, every pack, sell it all." But here's the math: most gear is trash. A Common Eon pistol with no mods is worth 300 credits and weighs 1.5 kg. You can carry maybe 140 kg at level 5. You're filling your inventory with junk that takes 30 minutes to sell for 4,000 credits. Pick up only Rare+ gear, only ammo you use, and only crafting materials you'll actually need (adhesive, sealant, zero wire, tungsten). Vendor trash everything else.
• You're ignoring ship combat. The space combat tutorial is a single text box. I bounced off it so hard I didn't touch ship combat until level 25. Then I realized: you can cheese it. Put points into Piloting and Targeting Control Systems. Spec your ship with Particle Beam weapons (they do double damage to shields AND hull). When a pirate locks missiles on you, boost straight at them and do a hard turn. The AI can't track you. It's brain-dead once you know it, but the game never tells you this.

The real pain point nobody talks about: the "well, I guess I'll just pew pew through this" mentality. The game has 20+ skills. If you're just taking combat perks, you will hit a wall around level 15 where everything is a bullet sponge and you have zero credits, zero ship upgrades, and zero outpost functionality. You need to spread out your skill points. I do a 3:2:1 ratio—three combat, two tech/social, one science. Keeps you alive but also lets you actually interact with the game's systems.

The First 3 Hours: What I Wish I Did

Boot up the game. You're a miner on Vectera. First thing: pay attention to the mining laser. It has a secondary fire mode (hold right mouse button) that creates an explosive charge. This destroys large rocks instantly. I didn't know this for 30 hours. I was mining individual chunks like an idiot.

Second: after you get the Frontier and go to Constellation, do NOT rush the main quest. The game pushes you to follow the artifacts, but the main quest is a linear funnel. If you just follow it, you'll end up at level 5 fighting level 25 spacers. Instead, after you get Vasco as a companion, do The Old Neighborhood quest (it's easy) and then break off. Go to New Atlantis, do the UC Vanguard questline. It's the best tutorial in the game disguised as a faction quest. It teaches you stealth, diplomacy, and combat in a controlled environment, and it gives you a superb ship (the UC Prison Shuttle if you make the right choices) and a ton of starting credits.

Third: rob the bank in Akila City. Not literally. There's a quest called "The Bank Robbery" in the bar. You can defuse it peacefully, and the reward is a unique pistol (Kryx's Revenge) that hits like a truck for early game. And it's fun. Most side quests in this game are wildly better than the main story. Take them.

Fourth: set up a single outpost immediately. I know outposts seem like a mid-game system, but they're not. Go to Jemison (the planet around Alpha Centauri where New Atlantis is). Find a spot with Iron and Aluminum (use the scanner on the planet surface to see resource nodes). Drop an outpost beacon, build one Extractor for each, one Power Source, and one Storage Bin. This will trickle-feed you the two most common crafting materials in the game. You'll need them for literally every weapon mod. Do this in hour 2 and you'll never run out of iron and aluminum. I didn't do this until hour 50. I hate myself for it.

Fifth: change your controls. The default keybinds are garbage. Go into settings and rebind Boost Pack to a thumb mouse button. Rebinding Scanner to F (instead of the default which I can't even remember because I changed it immediately). And for the love of everything, turn off the film grain and depth of field in graphics settings. The game looks so much cleaner without that vaseline-on-the-lens effect.

The Stuff You Only Learn After 100 Hours

Alright, you've put in some time. You've done the Vanguard questline, you've got a ship that doesn't explode when you sneeze at it. Now here's the advanced stuff that separates "I'm having fun" from "I am a terror of the settled systems."

• The Economics of Weapon Selling: Vendors have very limited credits. You'll hit a wall where you have 200 kg of legendary shotguns and nobody can afford them. Solution: The Trade Authority kiosk at The Den (Wolf System) has 11,000 credits and refreshes every 48 hours UT. Better yet, unlock the Commerce skill to Rank 4—it gives all vendors an extra 11,000 credits. Then you can rotate between The Den, Neon Core, and New Atlantis' Commercial District. I make 200k an hour just doing this loop.
• Ship Building: The Only Hull That Matters. Everyone tries to build a combat ship with 10 guns and tiny shields. Wrong. The Class C 40,000 shield generator (name escapes me, but it's the one from the HopeTech showroom) makes you nearly invincible. Pair it with the Vanguard Obliterator Autocannon (UC Vanguard exclusive, requires Piloting Rank 3). That combo is the meta. I've solo'd three Va'ruun cruisers at once with it. Don't waste money on missiles. Missiles are a noob trap—they look cool but have terrible ammo economy. Use Particle Beams and Ballistics.
• Powers Are OP, but You Have to Grind Them. The powers you get from temples (like Sense Star Stuff and Personal Atmosphere) are insane. Personal Atmosphere at Rank 5 gives you infinite oxygen for 30 seconds. You can sprint across a planet without tiring. Combine it with O2 Filter on your spacesuit and you never stop moving. But getting powers requires doing the temple minigame, which is tedious. My advice: do the temples in batches. Go to a system with 3-4 temples visible on your scanner, clear them all at once, then leave. Don't try to do one at a time between missions.
• Weapon Mods: The Secret Damage Multiplier. In endgame, your weapon mods matter more than the base weapon. A normal Beowulf does 60 damage. A modded Beowulf with Reflex Sight, Long Barrel, Suppressor, High Velocity, and Armor-Piercing Rounds does 180 damage with stealth multipliers. The key is Armor-Piercing Rounds—it ignores enemy armor, which is a hidden stat that reduces your damage by up to 40% against high-level enemies. Without AP rounds, you're fighting with one hand tied behind your back.
• Outpost Links are Broken, Here's the Workaround. The inter-system cargo links are buggy. They just stop working sometimes. My fix: don't bother with the links. Keep your main base on the same planet as your outpost that produces the resources you need. I have a base on Alpha Tirna VIII-c (beautiful planet, temperate, has iron, aluminum, and beryllium). Everything I need for crafting is mined on the same moon. Links are for masochists.

Five Mistakes That Made Me Alt+F4

I've done all of these. You will too. Learn from my pain.

1. Killing the wrong person. This game has a bounty system that is brutally punishing. I once accidentally shot a civilian in New Atlantis while fighting a spacer. The entire city turned hostile. I lost 45 minutes of progress. Save manually, often. And don't kill named NPCs unless you're sure they're bad. I killed a quest-giver in the Ryujin Industries line by accident and locked myself out of that entire faction for the rest of the playthrough.
2. Over-specializing your skill tree. I did a "sniper" build: all points into Rifles, Stealth, Ballistics, and Sniper Certification. Level 20 came around and I couldn't pick a lock, couldn't pilot a Class B ship, couldn't boost pack effectively. I was a one-trick pony. Spread your early points. Get Security to Rank 1 (lets you pick Advanced locks, required for 70% of the good loot in the game). Get Piloting to Rank 2 so you can fly any ship. Get Boost Pack Training to Rank 1 so you can actually use it. Your gun can wait.
3. Ignoring food and drink. I know, it's a common joke in Bethesda games. But Starfield food gives real buffs. Shepherd's Pie heals 35 health over 30 seconds. Alien Tea restores 10% oxygen. Cook them at any cooking station. I survived a boss fight on very hard by chugging Shepherd's Pies like a madman. Don't sleep on cooking as a skill.
4. Storing everything on your ship. The ship's cargo hold feels infinite at first, but it isn't. And every kilogram slows your ship's acceleration. My first playthrough I had 3,000 kg of random junk in my hold. My Frontier flew like a brick. Visit a Settlement, find a Safe or Locker in your apartment (you get one free in New Atlantis after joining Constellation), and store your collection of snowglobes and desk ornaments there. Keep your ship light.
5. The worst one: not quick-saving before space combat. There is nothing more frustrating than spending 15 minutes methodically clearing a pirate base, getting 15,000 credits of loot, boarding your ship, and then immediately getting obliterated by a randomly spawning Ecliptic fleet of 3 ships. Your last save? Two hours ago. Quick save (F5) is your god. I press it every time I board my ship, every time I enter a new system, every time I sneeze. Seriously.

Quick Answers to the Dumb Questions You're Googling

I've seen these questions 500 times on Reddit. Here's the straight answers.

Q: How do I lockpick those stupid digipicks? I keep breaking them.
A: The lockpicking minigame is annoying but has a trick. Don't rotate the rings randomly. Look at the innermost ring first. Find a key slot shape that matches a slot on the first ring. Select it, then move to the next ring. If you try to do it by instinct, you'll waste digipicks. Also, buy every digipick you see. You'll need hundreds.

Q: Can I romance Sarah? And do I have to be nice to her?
A: Yes and YES. Sarah likes diplomacy, exploration, and helping people. If you're a murderhobo, she'll hate you and the romance option locks. To speed up the romance, take her to Neon and do the Entangled side quest together. She gets a lot of affinity from that one. Also, sleep in a bed. That triggers the romance dialogue.

Q: What's the fastest way to level up?
A: Crafting. Seriously, set up an outpost on Andraphon (moon of Kreet) and build a ton of Adaptive Frames (requires 1 Iron + 1 Aluminum each) in your industrial workbench. Each one gives about 2-3 XP. You can grind 10 levels in an hour. It's boring but it works. The better way is to do the Killing Spree quest in the Red Mile arena—kill waves of enemies for good XP and loot.

Q: Is the Hunter Rifle worth buying from the guy in the Well?
A: No. It's a mid-tier weapon with a high price tag. Save your credits for a Refined Beowulf from the UC distribution center. It's cheaper, uses common ammo, and does more damage. Or just steal it. I'm not saying you should steal everything, but I'm also not saying you shouldn't.

Q: What's the best starting background?
A: Bounty Hunter or Combat Medic. Bounty Hunter gives you Piloting, Targeting Control Systems, and Shotguns—perfect for early combat. Combat Medic gives Medicine, Pistols, and Boxing—the Medicine skill is really for your companion since they heal you faster. Avoid Diplomat for your first playthrough, it's weak until you unlock higher-level social perks.

Q: Why can't I scan this creature? It says "incomplete fauna scan."
A: You have to find all the different species on the planet. It's a pain. The trick is to land in different biomes—mountains, forests, swamps, coasts. Each biome has different creatures. And some are underwater. You have to wade into the water and scan fish. Yes, it's tedious. No, you don't have to do it. The Planetary Survey skill is for completionists only.