10 Starfield beginner tips and tricks

If you’ve just started Starfield, or plan to jump in sometime soon, you will quickly realize there’s an awful lot to get to grips with.

While Starfield offers tutorials on some of its key mechanics, there’s plenty that the game doesn’t tell you. So I’m here to tell you the top 10 beginner tips and tricks I wish I knew before I started Starfield.

1) Keep an eye out for logs, books, and notes

If you’ve played a Bethesda game before then this may not be new information to you, but it’s definitely worth picking up ‘notes’ scattered around the world. These notes come in the form of books, logs, computer documents, and more, and provide extra context on the characters and world of Starfield. These notes are gathered up in your inventory as soon as you pick them up, so you can go back and re-read them when you need. So if you’re looking to indulge in Starfield‘s lore, then keep your beady eyes peeled.

2) Pick up Credstiks, Digipicks, and Medpacks

As well as keeping an eye out for notes, I advise looking out for Credstix, Digipicks, and Medpacks too. These are all critical items in Starfield, as Credstiks offer large amounts of credits (money), Digipicks are literally the key to lockpicking, and Medpacks, well, they have kept you alive. There are plenty of these in the early game so make sure to hoover up as many as you can.

3) Don’t pick up everything

While it’s important to pick up certain items in Starfield, it’s also important to know when to not pick up items. It can be enticing to grab everything you see in the early game, especially if it has a good value attached to it, but it’s important to not overload yourself with junk. It’s also work keeping in mind that value doesn’t equate to sale value, so that golden statue you picked up may not be worth stashing after all.

4) Watch your capacity

Another reason you should be mindful of what you pick up is that you don’t want to go over your max mass capacity. This is easily done early on as your max capacity is only 135kg. If you do go over, then you expend oxygen with every step and, if you take in too much CO2, you are hit with health damage.

5) Get to grips with lockpicking early

Lockpicking in Starfield isn’t like in other Bethesda games. To lockpick a chest, door, or otherwise in Starfield you first need a Digipick then, frankly, a lot of patience (at least initially). To pick the lock, you need to insert different keys into patterns in the right order, filling the gaps in the pattern as you go. You can’t use the same key twice, however, and only get a certain number of chances to undo mistakes before you simply need to quit and start again with a new Digipick. I honestly found this infuriating initially, but have gradually gotten the hang of it as the game has gone on.

6) If you hate flying, make use of fast travel

If, like me, you aren’t a fan of flying in Starfield then you’ll be pleased to know there are fast travel options. Whether it’s fast traveling to your ship, to your mission point, or to another planet, fast traveling makes traversal in Starfield much quicker (even if it’s maybe less fun for some). Make sure to check out our guide on how to fast travel in Starfield to find out more.

7) Don’t get caught smuggling

Every time you enter a United Colonies or Freestar Collective space, your ship is scanned to check for contraband. If you happen to have picked up said contraband on your adventures, you will be thrown in jail and made to pay a hefty fine. To avoid this, you can either smuggle contraband or sell contraband in Starfield. Or, you know, you could not put your grubby mitts on illicit items at all, your call.

8) Make use of trade kiosks

To help avoid the aforementioned capacity issue, and to get some extra credits, I advise making use of every trade kiosk you come across. Make sure to sell the items you don’t need to get more capacity for your next mission, you don’t quite know when you will find another kiosk to sell at. Plus, those extra credits go a long way to buying a new ship.

9) Load up your quick slot menu

I didn’t realize this for an embarrassing amount of time, but you don’t need to go into your inventory to select a new weapon or item every time you need one. Instead, you can go to your inventory and ‘favorite’ certain items, which allows you to add them to your quick slot menu. There are a number of quick slot spaces so you can fill them with all the gear you need to hand and save yourself some time.

10) Go off the beaten track

Much like other Bethesda RPGs, Starfield is a huge game. And while you may want to focus on the main mission, I advise going off the beaten track as much as possible. Complete side missions, explore, and get into shenanigans, that’s what these games are all about. The Constellation missions will still be there when you get back.