How to wait in Starfield

Even with all of the space-age tech at your fingertips in Starfield, sometimes the timing just isn’t right and you need to wait around.

While it doesn’t figure in the moment-to-moment gameplay of Starfield very much, every planet you visit has its own day and night cycle. Days don’t always last 24 hours on far flung planets, because they orbit their stars differently than the Earth does.

However, there’s a standardised universal time that keeps everyone on a roughly even keel - similar to what real-life astronauts adhere to today. NASA astronauts keep to UTC if you were wondering, which is the same as GMT give or take daylight savings time.

Unlike previous Bethesda games where shopkeepers would keep rigid schedules on opening times and everyone would stand up and go to the pub as soon as the clock struck 5pm, in Starfield, most cities never sleep.

But with that said, there are a handful of quests which ask you to be somewhere at a specific time, which you have to wait for. And since it doesn’t come up as often, this makes it even more confusing when you eventually do have to use the wait function.

Here’s how to advance the time to when you want.

How to wait in Starfield

To wait in Starfield, sit on a chair and press “Y”. This brings up the classic bar which lets you select how long to wait for. However in Starfield, the slightly different wrinkle is that it will display both the current local time for the planet you’re on as well as the UTC clock the rest of the galaxy is running to.

Alternatively, you can sleep in a bed to advance the time. However, the player-owned houses and beds tend not to be in very convenient locations for this. For example, the Dream Home is on its own planet. Whereas your Mom and Dad’s house from the Kid Stuff trait is tucked away in the residential area of New Atlantis.