What are inorganic materials in Starfield?

Starfield features tons of explorable star systems, with unique events, areas, and resources found across each planet. Whether you are building your outpost and performing research, you will likely require inorganic materials, or resources, at some stage.

There are countless forms of inorganic materials waiting to be found in Starfield. Each planet boasts a different selection of resources that you can harvest. Unless you have been frequently using your Cutter, you might not know what inorganic materials are or how to gather them, let alone what they could be used for.

Inorganic materials in Starfield, explained

Inorganic materials are just another word for natural resources. These can be found either on the surface of a moon or terrestrial planet, or underneath the surface inside of deep caves and caverns.

Before landing on any given planet, I highly recommend scanning while still in orbit. This will give you an overview of all the planet’s available resources.

From Argon to Tungsten, you can find almost every element in Starfield, though you will need to scour the galaxy and upgrade several of your skills to farm the exotic materials. Other than inorganic materials, there are also organic materials that are often harvested from alien plants or animals, as well as manufactured and crafted resources such as Fuel Rods or Adaptive Frames that are used for similar purposes, largely purchased from merchants or found across the galaxy.

How to acquire inorganic materials in Starfield

Once you have landed on a planet and discovered a material deposit, you can use your Cutting Laser to get pieces of the material. Your Cutter is an important tool, and the first item you will pick up in Starfield, so I suggest you keep it handy.

If you do not want to manually farm a particular resource that you might frequently need, you can always set up an outpost. Outposts act as a home base in Starfield where you can station crew members and farm necessary resources. All you need to do is construct an extractor and supply it with a power source. While you are gone, the extractor will passively farm nearby inorganic materials for you.

What can you do with inorganic materials in Starfield?

Now that you have acquired inorganic materials and other resources, you might wonder what exactly you can do with these items. Most resources are used for crafting and research purposes. These tools allow you to create new crafting recipes, modify weapons and aid items, construct outpost buildings, and take on various other similar endeavors.

In order to better use the resources you have gathered, I recommend upgrading your crafting skill in Starfield with skills like Research Methods, Spacesuit Design, and Weapon Engineering. Though you might have plenty of exotic materials, you won’t be able to use them unless you have unlocked the correct recipes.