The outpost system in Starfield is quite interesting. Although it is optional and nothing forces you to engage with this system, those who do can gain various benefits that make their life much easier. The outpost system has two primary uses.
First, you can set up your base on some cool planet you found. Second, build a productive base that passively earns you resources while giving you extra cargo and inventory space. This guide covers everything you should know before building outposts in Starfield, including the suitable planet, required skills, and other relevant aspects.
Building outposts in Starfield Explained
Most of the time, you build an outpost to mine some specific resource. This can be done using a Resource Extractor and an energy/ power source. The extractor works like a cache, where you can store a small amount of resources. However, you must create a storage system if the extractor cannot contain things anymore.
Before building an outpost in a particular place, you must remember some important things. For example, a new outpost should always be close to your home base. That way you do not have to go for complex cargo systems and generating resources in Starfield.
Whether it is a home base or a place for you to mine resources, some universal basics work for both types of outposts. The detail is explained right below!
Best Outpost Skills In Starfield
Like many aspects of Starfield, building an outpost can be enhanced if you pick up the right skills. Some important ones include:
- Outpost Engineering (Science): This skill allows us to make better modules for our outpost, provided we have researched them first.
- Planetary Habitation (Science): This increases the number of active outposts you can have while also allowing you to build outposts on more hazardous planets.
- Outpost Management (Social): This allows us to conduct more convenience items such as Cargo Links and robots who will work for us. Similarly, we will be able to assign more crew to our outpost.
Choosing the right planet
The first thing to consider is that you cannot build outposts universally on the Starfield map. Many places on each planet are restricted areas for building factories or bases.
When approaching the surface of a planet, you can scan and find what types of non-organic resources such as iron, titanium, and aluminum are present there. This way, you can save time by not trying to build a base at planets where you cannot capitalize on your benefits.
Additionally, ensure the planet doesn’t have extreme weather conditions that can hinder your building process.
Setting up a Beacon
Once you have selected a planet, you only need to place a beacon in a suitable area. This beacon shows the range where your outpost will be built. The default key for building outposts is R on PC and X on Xbox. Once you hit the key, the beacon will hang over the screen, which you can place wherever you want.
While you have the beacon up, it will also show you the resources on the current planet. After placing the beacon, pressing Tab will show you different modules to select for your base. You can navigate between them using the Z or C keys and press E to build a certain module.
Hitting Tab again will allow you to readjust the placement, or you can also do so to place another module.
Power and Resources
To fuel or provide power to many of the modules that we can build for our base, we need to build the appropriate power sources, such as Solar Arrays and Wind Turbines. We do not have to connect them, though; only building them does the job perfectly.
After you are done with power sources, you can move on to build other things that will work once you have the power to use them. All of this is going to cost us resources. You can get resources by either mining them or just finding them at random places.
However, I believe the most convenient place to get this stuff is in the middle of Atlantis City. Right past the star post of that area, you can spot a famous shop known as Jemison Mercantile. This shop sells tons of resources and other things used in player outposts.
Extractors and Storage
The extracting tab of the build menu is based on what resources you have to extract for your outpost. You can use these extractors to pull resources out of the ground or air before we can use them. Once an extractor’s inventory is full, it will stop producing.
This is where storage comes in. You can set up a storage facility and auto-assign the extractors to put what they produce into the storage. These cargo bins you made can also be used to dump your inventory into, providing an extra place to store things and making your outpost much more useful.
Cargo Links
If you want to get particular resources at individual outposts and then transfer them between each other, it’s possible with something called a Cargo Link. This will allow you to connect outposts, and with some skill upgrades, you can even do so between Star Systems.
You will effectively build one cargo link at each outpost, and then connect it to other outposts. It will let you share inventory and achieve efficient resource farming.
Fabricators
Once you are done building other base components, it is time to use a Fabricator. Fabricators can produce various things, as long as you have the power and resources.
Assign Crew to the Outpost
Assigning a crew to an outpost is quite simple in Starfield. The first thing to do is to build an appropriate amount of crew stations. These are effectively where your crew members will work. Crew members and robots will make things more efficient, as they allow us to increase our production rate.
Once you have your crew station, go to the ship section of your player menu and click the crew button. You can then assign them to the appropriate outpost from that screen.
Finally, you can move on to make the interior of your base/ outpost according to your liking.
