A YouTuber may have found the quickest way to gain experience and level up in Starfield, and it involves a whole lot of crafting.
Starfield has only been out for a couple of weeks, but inventive players are already finding ways to game its systems and level up much faster than the Xbox Series X|S title may have intended. Case in point, content creator Maka91Productions posted an experience farming guide to YouTube to help players climb to level 100 in a mere five hours.
Maka notes that you will need to do some prep work ahead of time, though. You’ll first need to unlock the Outpost Engineering skill, found on the third row of the Science skill tree. This will unlock Power Generation and Resource Extraction projects at research lab stations. This is perhaps the most crucial step, as it will allow players to mine for resources vital to the leveling up process.
Maka also recommends building a ship with around 2,000 – 3,000 cargo hold space. You can buy additional cargo modules from ship technicians in every major hub area. The video then tells players to head over to Jemison Mercantile in Atlantis City to buy the resources necessary to build the experience-farming outpost.
Once at the target destination for the outpost, Sumati’s Androphon moon, Maka instructs players to scan the planet, then land at a spot where Iron and Aluminum resources overlap. Once there, players will need to set up an outpost featuring six Iron and Aluminum extractors each, ten solar arrays, a handful of solid storage bins, an industrial workbench and a bed.
The neat thing about this trick is that time progresses six times faster on Androphon, so a 24-hour sleep equates to roughly 140 hours of in-game time. Once you’re awake, you’ll have storage bins loaded with extracted resources. Those resources are then used to craft Adaptive Frames at the industrial workbench.
Each frame crafted is worth a single experience point. However, this adds up as you’ll have thousands of resources piled up in your storage bins. Maka notes that by doing this, players can accrue around 1,500 EXP every minute.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen exploits or oversights being taken advantage of to level up in Bethesda Game Studios titles. Skyrim, for example, had a broken speech check in Riften, which could be activated on repeat for a lightning-fast way for players to max out new builds.
What I like about this Starfield trick, however, is that the setup process isn’t quite so easy. Unlocking the prerequisites does require some effort, and outpost management has a bit of a learning curve. It’s still a superb way of earning bags of experience quickly, but there’s at least a good bit of preparation to handle first.
Need a break from your spacefaring adventures in Starfield? Consider reading our guides to the best Xbox Game Pass games and the best single player games to find your next fix.