Starfield Ultimate Guide Complete Guide & Walkthrough

So I crashed my first ship into a spacer outpost about 45 minutes in and then had to reload a save I made forever ago which is the kind of thing that makes you question your life choices. Happens to everyone. All of us who bought this game anyway.

Honestly Starfield throws a lot at you in the first 10 hours and the in-game tutorials barely scratch the surface, and thats the real problem because it isnt hard really it's just terrible at explaining itself and once you actually figure out how the systems work everything clicks into place. But most people quit before that click happens. Kinda sucks because the stuff buried under the clunky UI is genuinely worth finding.

Character Creation That Doesnt Mess You Up Later

Backgrounds matter way more than the game lets on, tbh. They give you three starting skills and you cannot respec them so pick wrong and you're playing catch-up for 20 levels which is a long time to be behind the curve. Almost restarted my first character over it.

I've found two backgrounds that actually work for a first run after putting too many hours into experimenting with different builds and I've tried most of them at this point.

Bounty Hunter gives you Piloting, Targeting Control Systems, and Boost Pack Training right out of the gate and Piloting alone saves hours of grinding because ship combat is painful without thrusters. Honestly I cant imagine playing without it.

Soldier gives Fitness, Ballistics, Boost Pack Training and it's a simple combat build that works with most weapons you'll find scattered around without needing to think about synergies or special setups. Nothing fancy but it gets the job done every time.

Traits are permanent too so choose carefully because Kid Stuff takes 2% of your credits and sends them to your parents but you get a free ship later which makes up for the credit drain eventually and Wanted spawns bounty hunters but gives a damage boost at low health. The extra fights are more reward than risk once you have a decent gun. Skip Introvert and Extrovert by the way because companions mess with them constantly and you end up with neither bonus active half the time.

Skills Worth Your First 10 Points

The skill tree has 82 nodes and most of them are filler, honestly, but here's what actually moves the needle when you're trying to get established and dont want to waste points on skills that sound good but do nothing in practice.

Piloting in Tech T1. You need it for B-class and C-class ships and there is no way around it. Zero alternatives exist.

Boost Pack Training also Tech T1 and you can't even use a boost pack without it so it's not optional. Just take it.

Security in Tech T1 lets you pick Advanced locks and half the best loot in the game is behind locked doors, I've found after hundreds of hours of looting every corner of every dungeon across multiple playthroughs.

Ballistics is Combat T1 and gives 10 to 30 percent more damage on the most common weapon type you'll be using, and it stacks with weapon mods multiplicatively which is a nice bonus that adds up over time.

Persuasion at Social T1 saves you from fights you can't win and opens dialogue options that skip entire mission chains sometimes so it is worth the investment early.

Weight Lifting gives 10 to 50 extra carry weight depending on how many points you put in and you'll hit the encumbrance cap constantly without it, trust me on this one.

Starship Design at Tech T2 gates the entire ship builder behind a skill check and is required for most part upgrades so plan accordingly before you start building.

Get Piloting and Boost Pack Training before you leave New Atlantis and then spread the rest across levels 2 through 10. Simple enough.

Ship Building Without Burning Credits

The Frontier is honestly a flying coffin with guns attached and you want to replace it as fast as possible because building from scratch costs 200k plus credits which is a lot in the early game when you're still scraping together credits for ammo and med packs. Stealing ships is way cheaper and more fun anyway.

So here's what I do every time and it works consistently: land on any planet with a civilian outpost, wait for a ship to land nearby, sneak up to the landing bay, and board before the crew gets out and spots you, then kill everyone inside, sit in the pilot seat, undock, set it as your home ship, and fast-travel to a spaceport to register it. Registration costs about 85 percent less than buying the same ship from a vendor which is honestly kind of broken but I'm not complaining.

For actual building, Deimos staryard near Mars has the best structural parts and Stroud-Eklund on Neon has the best habs and interior modules so those are the only two places you really need to visit for parts. Taiyo parts look nice but the interior layouts are a maze so I skip them unless you care about looks over function which most people dont after the first 20 hours.

Three things I learned the hard way about ship combat after dying way too many times to count.

Particle beams deal equal damage to shields and hull at the same time so you only need one weapon group, freeing the other two slots for missiles and EM weapons for boarding disabled ships.

Auto turrets on rear hardpoints fire at enemies behind you without needing to turn around so set them and forget them. Done.

Engine speed caps at 150 no matter what the builder displays so dont waste credits on engines above C-class because the extra maneuverability you get is marginal compared to just adding more thrusters to your build.

Weapons Worth Keeping

Legendary rarity is a trap half the time, tbh, because the modifiers are random and most combinations are useless and a plain Advanced-tier gun with a good base type out-damages a Legendary with bad rolls almost every single time I've tested it.

The guns I actually keep in every single loadout after trying basically everything the game has to offer.

Beowulf in 7.77mm is a semi-auto rifle with common ammo that hits hard at mid-range and this thing honestly carries you from level 10 to 100 without breaking a sweat or needing to switch to anything else for most encounters.

Big Bang is a particle beam shotgun that gets buffed by both shotgun and particle weapon perks simultaneously and it deletes enemies at close range like nothing else in the game can.

Hard Target is the only suppressed sniper rifle in the entire game, and with stealth skills and a suppressor mod it one-shots most humans from hiding before they even know you're there which is incredibly satisfying.

Magshear burns through 50cal ammo fast but kills anything in under two seconds so you save it for boss fights and tough encounters where you need something dead right now.

Melee is a joke and I dont recommend speccing into it at all because even the best blade in the game with maxed melee skills takes three hits to kill a level 30 spacer while a shotgun does it in one shot. I'm genuinely confused why melee exists.

Outposts That Actually Matter

The outpost tutorial sells it as a settlement builder but it really isn't one at all, and honestly outposts do three things and three things only: resource extraction, storage, and crafting stations. That's it and nothing more despite what the tutorial tries to tell you.

Set up your first outpost on Andraphon in Narion because it has iron and aluminum in the same biome which are the only two resources you need for basic construction and once you find overlapping veins and drop extractors on both and link them to storage containers you've got infinite building materials forever.

For XP farming, Bessel III-b works pretty well since crafting adaptive frames from iron and aluminum gives steady XP that adds up over time if you're willing to stand there spamming the craft button for a while. At higher levels Vytinium fuel rods from a multi-outpost chain give more XP per craft, but the setup takes 5 or 6 hours and honestly I'm not sure its worth it unless you're going past level 100...

One trick that actually saves real time: build a large landing pad at your main outpost because it has a ship builder terminal built right in which gives you instant access to every part from every manufacturer in one place instead of flying between staryards for hours.

Faction Questlines Ranked

Every faction questline gives something unique at the end and here's what you're signing up for before you invest 6 to 10 hours per storyline that you can't get back.

UC Vanguard has the best faction quest in the whole game with a Terrormorph storyline that has actual moral choices that made me stop and think about what I was doing, and the reward includes a penthouse in New Atlantis plus access to the best ship shield available anywhere in the settled systems.

Freestar Rangers is a western detective story and the reward ship Star Eagle is one of the best class-A ships that carries you through mid-game without much trouble at all. But the quest drags in the middle and I almost quit twice during the slower sections.

Crimson Fleet is a double-agent thing where you infiltrate the pirates from the inside, and the Revenant rifle you get midway is a top-tier weapon that stays relevant for a long time. And the downside is that siding with SysDef gives you 250k credits but burns the Key as a vendor hub permanently, and the Key is the single best place to sell contraband in the entire settled systems. Hurts to lose.

Ryujin Industries is all stealth and dialogue with very little combat, and the Operative suit gives 25 percent harder detection while sneaking which is nice. But the quest is 90 percent walking around Neon talking to people and it gets old fast. Real fast.

But most people skip the Ryujin questline, which is a mistake because the manipulation implant you get lets you force NPCs without passing the speech minigame and it comes in handy way more often than you'd think.

Stuff the Game Never Tells You

Hold the interact button while looking at a container to transfer items without opening the full inventory screen and it saves maybe 5 seconds per container which adds up fast over a full playthrough when you're looting hundreds of containers across dozens of planets.

Grav jumping cancels enemy lock-on mid-combat, so if you're about to die in a space battle and your grav drive is still powered just jump anywhere. Doesnt matter which system you pick. You survive and live to fight another day and that's all that matters in the moment.

The Well in New Atlantis has Apex Electronics and they sell digipicks in bulk but nobody tells you this and I went 30 hours thinking digipicks were scarce and felt pretty stupid when I finally stumbled across the shop by accident.

Aid items with the same effect name but different brands don't stack at all because "Sustained" from one brand overwrites "Sustained" from another brand and I wasted so many chems before learning this the hard way so check before popping consumables.

Companions have infinite ammo if you give them a single bullet for their gun type, so give Andreja one 7.77mm round and she fires forever without depleting which is a broken mechanic but honestly I'll take it.

Cutter beams harvest resources faster than anything else but also damage enemies in a pinch, and on very hard difficulty its your backup when you run out of ammo in extended firefights. Saved my run more than once.

Sarah Morgan hates piracy, murder, and being asked to carry your 300 kilos of harvested organs back to the ship so just dont bring her when you plan on committing crimes and you'll save yourself from an unskippable lecture loop that goes on forever and ever.