Starfield outpost building guide and tips

Building a Starfield outpost might not be an essential task, but it certainly makes exploring the space game’s galactic wilderness easier in some ways. Starfield’s outpost building has scant few tutorials, and it’s easy to feel lost as you try and make a home in the stars.

Outposts in Starfield are more than just a way of mining resources in abundance, too. You can assign companions to them, store things you can't fit into your ship or pockets for any longer, and set up some tricky albeit impressive cargo links if needed. Without further ado, here's how to build an Outpost in Starfield.

Starfield outpost building

How to build an outpost in Starfield

You can build an outpost as soon as you get your own Starfield ship. Open your scanner, and press the “F” key to enter build mode. The first time you enter build mode on a planet, Starfield prompts you to place an outpost beacon.

You can’t do anything else until you place the beacon, and since the beacon does actually show up as an object after you place it, you might want to stick it somewhere it won’t clash with the rest of your outpost.

Starfield outposts are loose concepts. Just dropping the beacon counts as an outpost, so you’re free to add anything you want after that – housing, furniture, or even just a dozen harvesters. Everything requires resources, though. You can buy a broad range of them from any general store, including Jemison Mercantile and the store on Cydonia, which should be enough to get you started.

Starfield outpost modules

The things you can build at an outpost fall into several broad categories.

• Extractors: These are where you get your resources from
• Power: This is what powers your extractors and other power-hungry stations
• Storage: Containers for resources harvested via extractors and one to dump all your extra junk in, the latter of which you can use to create cargo lines
• Crafting: Research stations and workbenches
• Defenses: Turrets and the like to fend off pirates or particularly curious wildlife
• Furniture: It’s furniture
• Structures: Basically every kind of building you’d need – housing, recreational areas, greenhouses, and more
• Decorations: Smaller furnishings
• Displays: Shelves and other, y’know, displays
• Miscellaneous: Anything else that doesn’t fall under the other categories

There are a couple of exceptions to the “anything you want” rule behind outpost building. Harvesters and some other modules require a power source – usually one power source per harvester – so plan on acquiring the materials for a few solar-powered battery sources before plunking down harvesters.

The second one is that if you want to assign crew members to your outpost, you need to build a Crew Station. The station can go anywhere, even without proper shelter.

Starfield outpost locations

You can build an outpost on any habitable planet. As you unlock skills in the Planetary Habitation branch of the Science tree, you can gradually settle in more dangerous places as well – planets with “frozen” or “inferno” environments initially, then those with higher air pressure, and finally, planets with corrosive atmospheres as you rank the skill up.

Where you build your outpost doesn’t really matter unless you’re after a specific kind of resource. Perform a planet scan before landing at a site to see what resources are available and whether it’s worth spending the time and materials to set up there.

Starfield outpost tips

Here’s a few other handy points to keep in mind while building.

Some of the modules come with caveats. The power switch under “Power,” for example, doesn’t actually provide power. Some containers only work with certain kinds of materials. There’s no subcategory or way to filter modules, so just make sure to read the descriptions before building. There's also some great Starfield mods for changing how your menu's look if you fancy trying those.

Most mineral extractors have to sit on a mineral vein of some kind. Bear that in mind when deciding where the beacon should go, and use your scanner to figure out where the best, mineral-rich spots are.

Starfield says you need to set links between your extractor and the container where you want the materials to live afterward. Open build mode, and follow the on-screen prompts to do that – but know that you don’t have to use storage containers unless you’re establishing cargo links between outposts. You can just collect materials directly from the extractor if you want.

You should build an inventory storage container at every outpost, though. These are massive bins that expand your storage by quite a bit, and you can access them from your ship or other outposts once you set up cargo links.

Pay attention to the bottom right corner of the build mode screen. The interface there shows how much power you need and what cargo links you've established.

Finally, just because you can build somewhere doesn’t mean you should. Planets with unusually aggressive wildlife - Eridani II, for example, home of the terrifying spiders at the top of this section - are really just a pain to build on, even with the right defensive setups.

If you need money for more furnishings, consider selling your ships you don't need anymore or offloading Starfield weapons and armor that aren't up to snuff.