Starfield – Wish I Knew Sooner | Outpost Guide, Tips & Tricks

The skill tree in this game is insane. I’ve never had such a problem with deciding what to dump points into. As I’ve played, I’ve had numerous epiphanies where the light bulb clicks on, and I realize how important a skill I was ignoring is.

When I setup a He3 extractor and tank for a cargo link I got a popup with a cool tip. If you ship is on a course that passes through a solar system you are doing He3 extraction it refuels your ship as it passes through automatically effectively extending your ships fuel range. Once you have a couple in the right places you can cross most of the map in one jump in the little class A starter ship. Put one solar collector, He3 extractor, and storage tank down on a moon and it will rarely be attacked and you can cruise all over space easier.

One little bonus tip: If you (like me) decided to build your outpost near a coastline (for the view, obviously), you can place your ship landing pad in water. This won’t work everywhere because a lot of coastlines fall off very quickly and the terrain under water needs to be close to flat, but if you’re running out of room and don’t want to abandon the view, try moving your landing pad into the water (with the stairs on land) and see if that solves your problem. You can also place it on any lakes that may be in the middle of your otherwise all-terrain outpost.

I have a few tips to add…when connecting multiple storage containers the direction matters. input always pushes to output so connected storage will fill up the ‘last’ one first. if you mess this up, resources will get stuck in the middle. the best solution is to always link storage in the same direction always. so if i had an 8×3 storage stack i would link from left to right, down to up and right to left. the ‘input’ container will be the bottom left, the output container will be top right.

a cargo link can only be linked to one other cargo link. you can’t send outpost 1 to outpost 2 and outpost 3, you can only send outpost 1 to outpost 2. you can get around this by creating an outpost ‘hub’. in this outpost you would use 2 inter system cargo links and one cargo link. this allows you to ‘combine’ outposts into one so that a main outpost can receive the resources of multiple outposts. and if you use this method in each system, you can combine multiple outposts to one inter system cargo link in that system to get the maximum amount of resources into a main outpost.

if you want to send resources from an extractor to a cargo link don’t use storage in between the extractor and the cargo link. the cargo link will pull more than the cargo transport can carry and the cargo link will get bottle necked and resources will get stuck. you can see this happening when resources in the outbound bin start spilling over to the inbound bin.

cargo links are bi directional. take of advantage of this to send helium from an outpost with he3 to one without so that you can power an inter system cargo link. this can reduce the number of outposts needed.

try not to stack storage more than 3 high. when checking on storage you want to be able to see the status without having to jump to the top

Location, location, location. Bessel III-B has iron, aluminum, cobalt, nickel, platinum… there’s a spot that can have a 4-spawn point (or at least 3… 4 can be hard to find) where you can extract a LOT in one place. It also has 60 UT hours to one planetary hour, so you can skip ahead over 57 days in one sleep. That fills a lot of your storage if you want to grind for supplies, and a location to extract them.

Important point to know, even if you dont bother with a resource generating outpost or storage outpost:
You can build mission and bounty terminals. So if you happen to rack up a bounty and for the life of you cant find a bounty terminal in one of the accessible systems where you currently have no bounty in, you can build one in your base (in a neutral system) and pay it off.

Regarding PC controls, you can go into options and turn down the outpost build rotation speed. For some reason it defaults to 4x, which is why mouse and keyboard feels so hard to get placements right. Set it to 1x and then it works like you’d expect.

This guide is awesome , thank you for providing such a thorough explanation of this rather deep element of this expansive game. By this point I’ve built up a lot of resources through scavenging literally everything I come across (my character is going to need knee replacements at age 35) and it’s high time I put them to use in some Outposts to make even more of them, but it seemed like a daunting undertaking to figure out. Not anymore! 🤘

You can also connect directly from the extractor to the cargo link output, to load up into the cargo ships, and then transport to the next target. From there, the input needs to be connected to the storage container, preferably in the storage that you build as a base or HQ. I would recommend building a hub first to build multiple transport cargo links (or some people would like to call it a spaceport).

Another tip (not sure if it was mentioned) with greenhouses and animal husbandry, remember that you can only produce items that animals/plants on that planet can produce that ALSO have the “Outpost Production Allowed” tag at the bottom of their description. Personally that part is very frustrating because finding the right combination of “fiber” producing plants to feed the animals is like searching for a needle in a haystack. You may find plenty of “fiber” plants, but can’t actually use them in your greenhouse. I seriously hope they change that down the road.

TIP!!!: Do NOT move the beacon in the current version as of 10/4/2023. This will break your outpost in a few ways. 1) Your ship will not land on the landing pads. 2) Your outpost can disappear from the map, requiring a walk to the beacon which then any interaction with the outpost can crash the game. The first issue is really annoying when trying to transfer resources and leave the planet. While there are a bunch of temporary fixes like pulling up the ship builder on the pad (this can cause some weird game breaking bugs itself), to deleting the pad, rebuilding, traveling away, traveling back (specifically manually) and the worst, least effective, landing at 5+ places around the same planet to remove the landing zone around your outpost, there is no going back once you move it. Two is just game breaking and I hope you saved recently after making the outpost. If you are too far along, you basically have to abandon the outpost and accept 1 less possible build slot for the remainder of your game. Hopefully updates fix this bug as it would be convenient to move the beacon, but sadly, trust my experience on this one.

A warning:

There’s a glitch that can happen when you move the outpost beacon that makes it so bringing up the hand scanner or trying to use the build menu at or near your outpost will crash the game. There is no way to fix this aside from reverting to a save before you moved the beacon.

If you go to the planet and notice that the outpost is no longer visible on the world map, then you’ve got this glitch.

I actually made my first base on the moon around New Atlantis just for the soul purpose of storing contraband as well as armor and weapons I plan to keep and make. Outside of that the Aluminum and Helium I get there is kinda just a bonus. This outpost is mainly just going to have NPCs and bots guarding it with nothing special there besides my personal stash of goods. Any other outposts I make is going to be mostly for resources and cator towards gathering and shipping those resources to this base and sending crafted materials as well as resources to a secondary base that will be on a habitable planet focused on organic resource gathering and possibly shipbuilding if I don’t specialize a third at some point. Glad for the advice on certain subjects. My biggest confusion is sending resources between outposts and I wanna make sure I get it right.

I recommend getting a ship with lots of cargo before doing this. Best way for me was to get the Razorleaf and modify it as a hauler. I have 8 large cargo containers on it and I have a lab and workshop to craft on my ship. The default cargo on the Razorleaf is 420. With 8 cargo containers, I now have 1300 cargo space. This allows me to planet hop gathering the resources I need to start an outpost.

So as far as I can tell, food crafting, especially for the time and skill point investment, has a really bad return relative to the opportunity cost of other things you can invest in. Equipment modifications on the other hand have a significant impact in powering up your weapons and tuning them to your play style. But it’s very easy to buy all the resources you need to support that and do it all in the lodge. Same with chems. And otherwise resources are used for crafting outposts. So relative to just using the Lodge to craft chems and mod equipment, outposts seem to require a lot of effort. They can help you get materials to sell, but just farming weapons off human enemies in structures seems more lucrative. The outposts, at best, seem to support a certain quest type for large deliveries of resources. I haven’t engaged with any of them, but the idea of them seem pretty boring. Making your own bases sounds nice in theory if you like the idea of designing and decorating your own space, however so far from what I’ve seen the level of customization is very sparse.

I don’t fault anyone for finding fun with the system, but as far as the game design goes it feels half baked and underdeveloped. It seems to be geared towards developing a resource engine who’s rewards are fungible with other activities and less lucrative for the time spent. It also seems moot by the time you’ve reached the point you’ve got it all setup. I’m not saying there isn’t fun to be had with them, but it’s the journey, not the destination. It feels like something more should come from them, something with NPCs and quests and story. And something better in that regard than what goes on at your settlements. And it’s not like they didn’t have plenty of sources for game design inspiration using the mechanics in their Creation Engine. Look at Sim Settlements and other mods. For a game in the works for 8 years, all across it, there’s a surprising lack of evolution, growth, and refinement in the game design, even when there’s so much great proof of concept material there is to plumb from their own modding community.

Very shortly after starting the game I was totally sucked into outposts and research/fabrication. Finding the perfect planets with just the right blends of elements and getting everything linked. Then the bugs hit. My earliest outpost of iron and aluminum just….disappeared. The planet still shows the icon. My outpost limit still counts it. But the landing icon is gone. Cant land in the area and find it via scanner or anything. Ive tried all the tricks the internet has for a work around with no luck.

That was a ton of time and work for whats to me is a game breaking bug. If it happened to that outpost it can happen to em all. Unfortunately ive decided to set the game aside until a patch comes out addressing the outpost issues, and hopefully the skill challenges not counting issue too.

This was one area of the game that I found immensely interesting but also had me wondering what the point is. Like how does it feed into the rest of the game? Because it feels like it’s own game but I don’t know if it’s worth all the time and effort and skill points to invest in a system that requires so much of those if it doesn’t really impact the rest of the game accordingly. Like maybe I just need one small one as home base but beyond that, I need a compelling reason that I somehow haven’t learned yet.

Fun tip; the railing on the airlock is your building friend.
Not only can you balance the outpost starting point on top of the airlock(so you can spawn in at the door of your colony), if you place your airlock just right up against the starport(the big round one, not the smaller one it won’t work otherwise), lift it all the way up until the floor is level to landing platform, and you’ll notice the stairs disappears, and if you get it just right, you can have a seamless airlock on your starport that you spawn at when you fast travel, while making it super quick and easy to go back and forth between your ship and your colony.

Sometimes it’s a bit hard to get right, and also note your colony is going to be pretty tall based on where you starport, but like I said, airlocks are our building friend, so just go into your decorations and use the elongated rubber mat with maybe a fancy concrete bollard on either side so you don’t potentially miss and fall.

DO NOTE; like all Bethesda games they get buggy when you start breaking the games basic build functions, so before you do anything, make a hard save!!! If you mess with the starting point too much, it can cause a weird detaching bug where you instead start about thirty meters away from where you’re supposed to start.

Just a heads up for the Scan Booster, was trying to figure out how its range worked exactly and from my testing it didn’t seem to be planet wide. I had a Scanner vision of 125m, then placed down a Basic scanner to make sure it doubled that to 250m, then fast traveled to a map on the other side of the planet and it was back to 125m. Didn’t do that same test with the Industrial Scan Booster so maybe that extended area of effect it mentions includes the whole planet, but these things do seem to have a range to their effect.

The main problem I have with the outpost system in Starfield is that it is entirely inconsequential. You can do literally everything in game aside from crafting the very best equipment, that you don’t actually ever need, without ever building a single outpost module. At least in Fallout 4 they made the settlements actually mean something to the game. You were saving people. If Starfield had outposts where NPCs would just show up, and eventually you would have a town or city on your hands then that might be something. As it stands now this system is entirely too deep for no reason.