Building your first outpost in Starfield means selecting from one of more than 1,000 planets. Here are the best planets to build your first outpost — and why.
Choosing a location for your first outpost in Starfield can be daunting — 100 systems! 1,000 planets! — but it’s a critical part of the process. If you want to build a helpful and, eventually, profitable base, you’ll need to find the ideal planet to build your first outpost on.
In this Starfield guide, we’ll walk you through how to find the best planet to place your first outpost on, and offer a list of the best planets to build your first outpost on.The best planets for outposts, at a glance
Below, we’ll give you a planet-by-planet rundown of the places we think you should make your first base, and the things you want to look for when making that decision for yourself. But, for your convenience, we’ve also created this table, which lists out seven great choices for early outpost locations in Starfield.Choose your outpost planet based on resources
The most important qualifier when selecting a planet in Starfield is the resources it has available on its surface. When you hover over a planet or moon, you’ll see what resources it has that you can mine. (These display with their abbreviations from the periodic table of elements, but you can hover over the icons to get the real names if you can’t remember them from chemistry class.)
You can only see which elements you can gather from nearby planets and moons if you’re in their same solar system, so you’ll need to spend quite a bit of time grav jumping to different systems if you want a good look at the planets. You’ll also only be able to scan a planet — where it shows you the exact location of its resources — when you’re in orbit around it.
Early on, you’re really looking for a combination of two resources: one of the major building resources (iron or aluminum) and helium-3. With that combination, you can keep your base harvesting 100% of the time.
Once you find a combination of resources you like, it’s time to see if the planet is actually habitable or not.The best planets for outposts don’t have extreme environments
Some planets have “extreme environments,” which limits what you can do with them — at least early on in the game. These planets or moons are normally particularly close or far from their star, leading to extreme heat or extreme cold.
