Turns out you don’t need to scan all that Flora and Fauna in Starfield after all

Starfield offers a plethora of activities to dive into but completionists may have encountered frustration in the quest to fully survey planets—though there is a massive shortcut you may have missed.

Fully scanning a planet on Starfield requires you to scan every Mineral, Fauna, and Flora available, which can be a daunting task—particularly with the latter pair, who have to be scanned multiple times for completion.

That’s likely meant that, at some point in your experience, you’ll have spent far too long trambling across the surface of a planet looking for the last Flora you need to scan or wading through the water trying to get the elusive fish to appear again so you can tick it off.

In news that will serve as a massive boost to completionists like myself, however, it turns out you don’t have to manually scan everything after all and there is a quicker way that also provides valuable materials.

As pointed out by YouTuber LtBuzzLitebeer, Flora is automatically scanned when you harvest it, while killing any Fauna also results in a scan—which is a far safer method than wandering up to a hostile creature and shoving a scanner in its face.

I’ve lost count of the times when I’ve been scanning and have been attacked by a random creature, so I was delighted to check out the tip for myself and discover that it is correct, so I started a slaughter spree.

An effective method I found was to lure a group of hostile creatures towards you and then throw a landmine at them, which killed many instantly and significantly bumped up the scanning percentage of the Fauna on the planet.

While that may seem overly aggressive and a bit harsh, Fauna in Starfield seems to have an issue staying alive as I’ve encountered many, many corpses in my adventures across the stars, so I’m merely speeding the process up.

The method for Flora works the same. You just need to harvest it to get the resources and it automatically scans, though this can be more time-consuming as you need to get right up close to it, so I’ve still mainly been sticking to scanning from 20m away.