Earning Starfield XP is pretty easy as you can get it from almost anything, from killing enemies to completing missions and exploring. Although, if you want to quickly power level, an efficient XP farm will help you climbing through the levels and will help you get some great Starfield Skills early on. However, there are a few methods for quickly earning XP to consider, from material crafting to mass-murdering high-level fauna, so here are some tips for farming XP in Starfield.
Recent updates
As of November 10, 2023, the Starfield XP information and farming methods in this guide are accurate and usable, helping you quickly get through each level and get those crucial skill points.
How to earn more XP in Starfield
You can earn XP in Starfield by doing pretty much anything in the game. For the early levels, completing missions in Starfield is a reliable way of earning chunks of XP, but killing enemies and creatures, travelling to new systems and planets, discovering and exploring locations, and crafting and researching at workbenches will also grant varying amounts of XP. Skill-based actions such as lockpicking with digipicks and successful persuasion attempts can give you a little XP reward too.
There are a few ways you can temporarily buff your XP gains too:
- 10% Well Rested XP bonus from sleeping.
- 15% Emotionally Secure XP bonus from sleeping with a Starfield romance partner. Note that this replaces Well Rested, so you don’t benefit from both buffs by sleeping.
- Up to a 2% XP bonus from consuming certain food items (often tea drinks) such as Alien Tea, Tranquilitea products, and The Strip steak which can be bought from the Whetstone in New Atlantis. Choosing the Starfield trait Kid Stuff also unlocks a family recipe for a 1% XP-boosting Meatloaf.
Based on some testing, it seems like you can only have two Starfield XP buffs active at once – one from an Aid item, such as food, and one from resting. These seem to add together too, and you can see your active buffs under the Status menu. However, you can’t stack buffs of the same type and the most recently applied buff gets priority. For example, eating The Strip steak and then drinking an Alien Tea does not add together to grant a 4% XP buff, as the buff from the tea just replaces the one from the steak.
Starfield XP farming by killing wildlife
Certain higher-level planets can be XP goldmines due to abundant flora, fauna, and resources. Thanks to Reddit users u/Canatee and u/1Bot2BotRedBotBluBot, we know that bringing your best Starfield weapons to planets like Schrodinger III and Celebrai II to massacre the local wildlife will get you loads of XP.
You'll need a decent ship to even reach these planets as these sorts of high-level planets are usually quite far from starting star systems like Sol and Alpha Centauri. A good set of weapons and even the right Skills will be important for this sort of farming method. In Canatee's clip, they make good use of stealth-based Skills and sneak damage to easily kill creatures at range.
Looting your quarries after killing them means you can get a whole bunch of resources necessary for Starfield crafting and research. Use them to craft items at a relevant workbench and you'll get a little more XP - just so long as you're fine with exterminating a lot of creatures to get to this point.
Starfield XP farming using outposts
This Starfield XP farming method comes courtesy of Maka91Producitons over on YouTube, and while I’ve broken down their advice here, be sure to check out the linked video for some thorough guidance on how to set up this farming method. Be aware that you’ll need a lot of materials – mainly lots of iron and aluminium – before you get started as you'll be crafting lots of Starfield outpost components:
- Head to the Narion System, then fly to the moon of Sumati called Androphon.
- Scan Androphon, then land at this spot (see below image) near the south pole of the moon. It’s a point where an aluminium-rich crater biome meets an iron-rich mountain biome.
- Once on the moon’s surface, open your scanner and follow the ‘Outpost’ button prompt to pull out an outpost beacon.
- Start wandering towards the mountains to find an area that has deposits of both iron and aluminium, then place your outpost beacon. You can see which resources are extractable in the top-left corner.
- With your beacon placed, build a bed, an Industrial Workbench, and several Aluminium Extractors, Iron Extractors, Solar Arrays, and Solid Storage containers.
- Switch from Build Mode to Modify Mode by pressing B once on an Xbox controller, then link your extractors to one storage container by pressing RT and drawing a line. You can now link that storage container to all the other containers to create one massive storage unit.
- Go to bed and sleep the full 24 hours. This works out at 140 hours in universal time on this moon, which means that loads of iron and aluminium will be generated while you sleep.
- Using the iron and aluminium you just extracted, construct as many Adaptive Frames as possible to earn a little XP.
- Sleep, build Adaptive Frames, repeat, profit.
You get 1XP per frame, but you can build literally thousands of them with this outpost setup, getting you a lot of XP overall. Combine with some of the previously mentioned XP boosting tactics to get a little more Starfield XP per crafted Adaptive Frame, which can really add up when crafting in bulk like this. You’ll easily hit the Starfield encumbrance limit with this many Adaptive Frames so either drop them or sell them if you’re able to make it to a shop that will pay for them.
Don’t worry if this sounds like a lot too, as you can quite easily start a very basic extraction outpost and build it up over time. Furthermore, investing in the Outpost Engineering Skill and completing Outpost Development Research Projects will help you build bigger and better equipment for your extraction operation. Maka91 also explains that another good spot for this Starfield outpost XP farm is on Venus, where you can extract cobalt and nickel. Although this is for higher-level players as it requires the Planetary Habitation Skill because you can’t build an outpost on Venus without it.
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