10 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started ‘Starfield’

It’s not very often I get to write one of these early tips articles with 90 hours into a game on day two of launch, but here we are. Starfield is a massive game, but it’s also one that doesn’t explain much very well, and it may throw up some pretty big walls at the beginning, turning off some players.

I think there are a lot of things that can make your time easier as you play, and no, no story spoilers here don’t worry. Here are ten things I wish I knew when I started Starfield:

1. You Can Fully Change Your Appearance Later

I know that many people are going to spend an hour or three in the character creator perfecting every millimeter of the explorer they are going to spend the next hundred hours with. Thankfully, Bethesda has listened to feedback and has already put in a way where you can fully change your appearance. Not just get a haircut, but change your entire face, your gender, even your name. Just not your backstory or traits. This is done at a shop called “Enhance!” that you will see in most of the bigger cities, including New Atlantis, Neon and Paradiso. It costs 500-700 credits and is a breeze.

MORE FROM FORBES‘Starfield’ Review (PC): It Is What You Wanted It To BeBy Paul Tassi

2. Max Jetpack First

I will probably do a whole “best skills” thing later, but many of those are obviously build-dependent, based on what kind of playstyle you’re going for. However, no matter what, I would recommend maxing out your jetpack first. By the end, you will barely be using any fuel and can essentially chain jump with it forever. This is not only good for hopping around during combat, but it also helps get around the game’s horrible oxygen restrictions, as you can sort of bunny hop along the landscape saving O2 once you have maxed this perk.

3. Health Regen is Worth the Investment

This is the final row of the physical tree, and if you’re a stealth/hacker/ship captain person you may not want to do it, but trust me, using only med packs and beds to refill health is going to get incredibly annoying. No matter what your build is, I think it is worth it to spend the points in that section to eventually reach Restoration and get that health regen, as you can refill your entire bar in like 20 seconds at max level once you’re out of combat for any amount of time. Worth it.

4. The Best Traits

I wrote this up yesterday in a separate article, but the three main ones I picked are: Wanted, which gives you a steady flow of bounty hunters chasing you for XP and loot, Empath, which boosts your companion’s combat abilities so long as you are not a huge jerk, and Extrovert, where if you’re traveling with a companion, which most people will be, you use less oxygen which is very important.

5. The Best Early Ship

This will also be a separate piece going up later today, but here are the basics. Your first ship is trash. You can upgrade it and sink money into it, but I would not bother. You will have trouble in space combat with it, without question. However, if you do the Freestar quest, which will be accessible after you resolve a hostage situation with Sam Coe when get to New Akila early in the main story, you will be recruited to join the Freestar Rangers. Without going into the content of the main quest, you complete the entire thing and get a much better ship at the end (the ship is not part of the story). Do that.

6. Two Ways To Do The Main Quest

This one is tricky. There are two pieces of advice about how to tackle the main quest here. One thing I would agree with everyone on is not to avoid it the way you might in Skyrim or Fallout. There are things you get from the main quest that will make exploration more fun (like that ship), so I would follow it to some extent. The dichotomy is that some people are saying to rush the main quest, do NG+ then start doing the side content. My advice is not to do that. I would do as much side content as you can and enjoy playing around with the building systems and such for a long while. New Game Plus will wipe all that but you will keep your skill points. I just regretted doing NG+ when I had so many unfinished quests still to go which I would have to re-find. I only started NG+ last night after 80 hours because I was starting to run dry on things to do. NG+ is heavily tied into the story so I can’t really go further into it, but my advice is to max out your first playthrough in every way, then do it.

7. Empty Planets May Not Be Empty

You will find many planets that seem like duds. You look at them on the map, there’s nothing there. However, that’s not always true. First, some planets will not reveal POIs until you scan them. Second, there are often situations where you can find a random POI that turns out it was worth landing on in a random spot (and you can land anywhere on a planet except the ocean). You may find a legendary weapon drop from an outpost boss or a parked pirate ship you can take over. The only time I really peace out of a planet instantly is if I land two places and there are no building and no wildlife and clearly the only thing to do is scan rocks and natural formations (though scanning an entire planet can still get you good XP).

8. Scanners Do Two Important Things

Speaking of scanners, while it’s pretty clear that you can use it for scanning objects in the world from loot to resources, it also does two important things. First, it’s a fast travel system. You can pivot around in a city or on a planet, look at your ship and press E (I don’t know what the console button is) and teleport right into it. The same for POIs you’ve discovered. But not only that, you can also travel to different planets or moons by pointing your scanner to them and activating it. The second thing is that if you have an objective you can walk to, you can open your scanner and blue arrows will be on the ground leading a path to the point, which is easy to miss.

9. Place Outpost Beacons To “Save” Planets

You can build a number of bases around the galaxy, but I would also recommend using the beacon system to simply “save” a planet or moon if it’s cool or useful. It may be overwhelming or too expensive to actually build a full base there, but what I would do is at the very least, place a beacon and mission board. A beacon means you can see the planet on the larger galaxy map and warp there instantly. The bounty board means you can take on ship/enemy hunts in the area, which is useful for credit/gear farming zones if you don’t want to randomly explore to find them. One use of this is that I “saved” a planet with a bunch of high level, hostile wildlife on it I could periodically return to hunt because they gave me a lot of XP. Or you may want to save a beautiful planet you want to build a huge base on when you can afford it.

10. Be Careful Of Cargo When Swapping Ships

The way Starfield handles cargo is weird. Once you start getting encumbered, you will want to dump things into your ship (the way you do this is a screen in the cockpit, or bringing up the menu and hitting F). But different ships have different cargo holds. My one ship may have 2000 cargo space and my other one has 500. But when you swap home ships, you will swap all your cargo, and if you had 1500/2000 used in the first ship, you now have 1500/500 on your current ship, and you cannot put anything new in there at all. The two ways to alleviate this is to tack on more cargo space to your ship, which adds weight, or to build bases with storage to hold some of the stuff instead of your ship. There’s also a way to transfer stuff directly from your ship to your base but I did not actually figure out how to do that. But that’s possible.

I’ll probably have another ten tips later. Enjoy!

Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.