Starfield’s economy makes no sense, and fans think its hilarious

Starfield has fantastic attention to detail in sci-fi elements of the game, like Local and Universal time zones and faster fatigue on planets with higher gravitational pulls. While it appears that scientists were likely consulted when designing the game, it is abundantly clear that economists were not.

The logic and continuity (or lack there of) behind the pricing of different items in the game is laughably bad. So bad, in fact, that many players have come to cherish the oversight.

Just last week, I was exploring an abandoned settlement on some moon or another when I came across a vending machine that priced a snack at 100 Credits. I selected the Kid Stuff trait during character creation, and it just so happened that my biweekly payment to support my parents came at the exact moment that I was looking at this vending machine. The payment was 400 Credits (two percent of my total Credits).

This chance timing made the realization dawn on me—you can support two grown adults for two weeks in New Atlantis, the largest city in the galaxy, for the same cost as four candy bars. For 400 Credits, you can get 14 days of food, shelter, and incidentals…or an afternoon of snacks. I’m not the only one who realized the wackiness of prices in Starfield, either.

On Sept. 21, Redditor u/DragoVolcar pointed out that he encountered an NPC who had defaulted on a loan of 10,000 Credits—the same amount that he had just made on a single mission. Other players flooded the comments with personal anecdotes on absurd pricing they had noticed, and each one is more ridiculous than the last.

I thought my candy bar vs two weeks’ rent debacle couldn’t be topped, and boy was I wrong. Here are just a handful of the funniest comparisons noted in the thread:

• A night at the Hotel Paradiso, a destination casino resort, costs less than a handful of ammo.
• An apple is worth 100 Credits, and a ship hab module is worth about 500 Credits. Five apples go for the same price as an outer space-friendly mobile home.
• Ryujin Industries (a massive corporation) covers incidentals up to 1,000 Credits during a mission. 1,000 Credits is also the amount given as a reward to a street grifter as compensation for petty information about the neighborhood.
• During the Charity of the Wolf mission in Akila City, Amira Wolf begs the player to donate 100 Credits to support less fortunate citizens, stating how huge of a difference the money would make. Upon completing that mission, Amira gives the player 5,000 Credits as a reward.

The economy in Starfield is hilariously nonsensical, and it can be made even wackier with the help of the Commerce skill, which increases the amount the player can sell items for while also decreasing the amount needed to purchase items. By maxing out this skill, you can get your apple to starship conversation rate down to 1:3. Not bad.