Starfield Tips & Tricks 2026: 25 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting

I've got about two hundred hours in Starfield now and I've made basically every mistake you can make, wasting credits on useless ships, building outposts on planets with zero useful resources, and getting locked out of quests because I did factions in the wrong order. If I could send a message back to my past self on launch day, here's what I'd say. Save yourself the headache.

Money: Stop Selling Resources, Start Crafting

Mining iron and aluminum and selling the raw ore is a trap because you'll make maybe a few hundred credits per trip, so instead build an industrial workbench at any outpost and craft Adaptive Frames where one iron plus one aluminum equals one Adaptive Frame that sells for about twenty-seven credits and weighs almost nothing. With two extractors on a decent planet like Andraphon in the Narion system, you'll produce hundreds per hour while doing other things. I set up my outpost, went to dinner, came back to five hundred frames and cleared about thirteen-thousand-five-hundred credits in one selling trip. Passive income while you eat. Can't beat that.

Better yet, craft Amp at a pharmaceutical lab because it requires two resources, Argon and Metabolic Agent, and sells for about one hundred credits each, and the trick is finding a planet with both resources in close proximity so you can link extractors without running cargo links across systems. Tau Ceti II worked for me where I built four extractors, linked them to a pharmaceutical lab, and made roughly fifty-thousand credits per hour of passive production. Enough to fund an entire endgame ship build in one afternoon of doing nothing. Literally nothing.

The real money, though, is in ship theft where you board enemy ships in space, kill the crew, fly the ship to any ship services technician, register it for a fraction of its value, and then sell it. Va'ruun ships in the Serpentis system are the best targets because they spawn frequently and their ships sell for fifteen-thousand to forty-five-thousand credits each. I funded my entire endgame ship build, over three hundred thousand credits, exclusively through ship theft. Just stealing everything that moved.

Outposts: Build One and Stop

I fell into the trap of trying to build a network of outposts across multiple systems, but don't do that because the return on investment is terrible and managing cargo links between planets is a headache you don't need. Build one good outpost on a planet with iron and aluminum, Andraphon is ideal, set up extractors and storage, and use it solely for crafting materials to sell because everything else you need like ammo, med packs, and weapon mods you can buy with the credits you earn from that single outpost. No need to overcomplicate it.

If you really want to expand, build a second outpost on a planet with helium-three so you can fuel cargo links to other systems, but honestly one outpost is enough for ninety percent of what you'll ever need. The only rare resource actually worth mining is Aldumite on Schrodinger III because it's used in the best spacesuit mods including the one that reduces all damage by ten percent. Everything else you can find through looting or vendors. Don't spend twenty hours building what one outpost can do.

Factions: The Order That Actually Works

Start with the UC Vanguard because the questline gives you access to the best ship parts in the game, a free penthouse in New Atlantis, and combat encounters that are well-balanced for levels ten to twenty, with the final reward, the UC Antixeno spacesuit, giving one hundred percent damage resistance against alien attacks which makes the main story's terramorph encounters way easier than they have any right to be. Second, do the Freestar Rangers because it's the shortest faction questline at about six to eight hours and the Star Eagle ship you get at the end is the best free Class A ship in the game, so use it as your main ship while you save credits for a custom Class C build. Third, do the Crimson Fleet because this questline locks you into some choices that affect your relationship with the UC, so doing it after the Vanguard questline avoids conflicts, and the payoff is access to The Key where vendors pay premium prices and sell unique ship parts you can't get anywhere else, plus the final mission nets you two-hundred-fifty-thousand credits.

Save Ryujin Industries for last, or skip it entirely, because all the missions are stealth-based with instant-fail detection states and the final reward is underwhelming compared to what the other factions give you. The Operative Suit is nice for stealth builds, but by the time you finish the other three factions, you probably won't need it. And slogging through ten hours of boring stealth missions for a suit you'll barely use is not worth the frustration.

Crew and Companions: Quality Over Quantity

You can recruit dozens of companions but you only need a few because Sarah Morgan is the best all-around companion with her Leadership skill boosting your XP gains and her botany skill helping with outpost farming, while Sam Coe gives you a piloting bonus that increases your ship's top speed and Barrett's particle beam weapon skill makes him deadly in ship combat if you assign him to your crew. Andreja, who you meet during the main quest, has the highest stealth skill of any companion and her personal questline is genuinely compelling. Assign crew members to your ship based on their skills because the game doesn't explain this well, but crew skills stack with your own, so if you have Piloting level three and assign a crew member with Piloting level one, you effectively have Piloting level four which lets you access high-tier ship parts earlier than you otherwise could. Huge time saver.

Little Things That Save Time

Sell contraband at The Den in the Wolf system because it doesn't scan for illegal goods, so you can offload harvested organs and stolen art without installing shielded cargo or scan jammers. I wasted serious credits on shielded cargo before discovering this. Use the scanner constantly, not just for surveying planets but in space where it shows you which ships are hostile before you get close enough for them to aggro, and on the ground where it highlights lootable containers and bodies you might otherwise miss. Always sleep before selling to vendors because the Well-Rested bonus gives a ten percent XP boost for twenty-four minutes, and vendors restock every forty-eight hours of in-game time, so sleep for forty-eight hours on your ship, sell to the vendor, sleep again, and repeat. It's tedious but efficient.

Don't pick up everything because I filled my inventory with junk on my first playthrough and spent more time managing weight than actually playing, so only loot weapons with a value-to-weight ratio above five hundred credits per kilogram. Most pistols qualify and most rifles don't. Leave the junk. And for the love of everything, create hard saves before major quest decisions because Starfield's autosave system is unreliable and there are multiple points of no return. I lost three hours of progress to a corrupted autosave once. Never again. Seriously.