Starfield: Tips for busy people

Many people can spend hours and hours exploring the cities, planets, and secrets of Starfield. Many others cannot. In this guide I will explain some tips that may be useful if you do not have a lot of free time but still want to move to Starfield.

Starfield is a massive RPG with over 1,000 planets, a shipbuilding system, companions, quests, an outpost builder, a surprising number of items to scan and pick up, charge combat and traditional RPG elements like skills and attributes. It’s enough to make your head spin.

This is especially true if you consider yourself a gamer, but don’t have a lot of time to play due to work, your partner, the kids, or something else entirely. you are not alone.

Like you, I can only spare a few hours (if that) each day, but I don’t let that waste my time. You don’t have to do that either because you can still play and enjoy Starfield in difficult times.

There’s no wrong way to play Starfield, but there are some ways you can maximize your time when you can pick up a controller, board your ship, and wander around the galaxy.

With that in mind, I want to offer some tips that should come in handy for those who only have a few hours each night or week to play Starfield on Xbox or Windows.

These are the strategies I used while playing the game and hundreds upon hundreds of hours of playing previous Bethesda games like Fallout 4, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and more.

Turn on automatic updates

This is an important and often overlooked tip that can save you a lot of time and help you jump right into the game.

Bethesda will occasionally release patches for Starfield. In some cases, these updates will be very long and can consume your playing time.

This is exactly why you should enable automatic downloads/updates on Xbox or Steam if you are playing or planning to play on a Windows PC. This way your game will update automatically and you won’t have to wait for the multi-GB download to complete before you can play.

Keep your devices charged

Pretty simple tip, but you’ll need to make sure your Xbox controller (or whatever device you’re using) and headphones (if you’re using them) are charged and that you have extra batteries.

Choose a good place to stop

When it’s time to end your session, make sure you choose a smart place to end your session. Here’s what I mean by that.

Before you leave Starfield and crash your system, I recommend traveling to the nearest city to sell the items you don’t need and store the items you want to keep.

This way you won’t have to waste 10-15 minutes selling and storing your items for the next time you play. You’ll be ready to go out into the world without any restrictions.

I also recommend writing down what you did the last time you played. I usually jot down a quick note in the Notes app on my iPhone.

If you usually go a few days between gaming sessions, it’s easy to lose track of where you did the last time you played. A short little note will help you refresh your memory.

Have a practical guide

One of the most fun parts of Starfield is discovering new cities, planets, items, and characters, but it can be helpful to have a handy guide.

Although traditional printed guides have fallen by the wayside, there are plenty of guides available online that will give you relevant information on characters, loot, quests, and more.

Fextralife And Starfield wiki They are just two of the many resources available to you. It covers everything you need to know about the game and is worth bookmarking.

Although using the guide may seem like cheating, it will save you a lot of time. I mostly use guides for crafting/upgrading (it can be quite a pain to find certain materials), but there are times when you can call up a guide for a quest or a directive to a specific location.

It’s easy to get distracted in Starfield which is definitely part of the fun. However, if you only have 30 minutes or an hour to play the game and want to make progress, the guide will help you know exactly where you want to go and what you need when you get there.

Use the in-game help menu

The online guides are helpful, but if you don’t have time to enable the web or don’t want to, try using the in-game help menu provided by Bethesda.

To access the in-game Help Guide, go to the System menu, which is the same menu where you save your game. The Help section powers many components of the game, including companions, offense, damage types, and more.

These guides are very useful and you don’t have to go far to access them.

Save your game often

Starfield is a beautiful game, but it’s also very dangerous. You can die, and if you’re in too much difficulty, you can die a lot.

If you die, you’ll have to go back to the old save process. And if you’re the forgetful type, saving will likely hold you back. There is an autosave function, but it saves infrequently.

If you don’t save your game often, you may have to replay a large portion of a quest or dungeon. Repeating these tasks is not ideal if you have a tight schedule.

If this sounds frustrating, you’ll need to save and save your game frequently. You may be scolded by your friends for saving trash, but that is a small price to pay.

Play with purpose

When I only have an hour or so to play a game like Starfield, I usually choose something specific to do during that hour.

Sometimes I use it to focus on building or building settlements. Other times, I might spend the whole time searching or just exploring the world and seeing what I find. I suggest choosing a task to do in advance so you don’t have to give up in the middle of it.

It doesn’t matter what you do. The important thing is to decide what you are going to do 20 minutes, 30 minutes or an hour in advance.

You’ll be surprised at how much you can accomplish, and how much XP you can earn, in a short period of time if you have a plan (or even one).

Have patches at the ready

Starfield is much less complex than previous Bethesda games, but it’s not perfect. If you play enough, you’ll eventually run into trouble.

Problems have the power to slow you down. It may be a task with errors. Maybe it’s an NPC or item that won’t appear. It might be a performance issue. Whatever the case may be, it can consume your time trying to fix it.

That’s why I recommend getting a list of fixes so you’re prepared for whatever the game decides to do to you.

We have a growing list of fixes for Starfield issues here, but there are many great resources available.