1. Surveying - you either love or hate scanning, but a complete survey will dump a load of XP onto your character. Obviously, the more complex and biodiverse the rock is, the more XP you receive.

You have to pick and chose your targets, weigh up how long it’s going to take you to track down all the critters, the plants and the resources, as well as the planetary traits for the full complete survey - against how badly you want to the XP, and the cash from Vlad.

(I have further surveying tips that will probably need its own post, ha).

But yeah, huge pots of XP can be earned from surveys. Especially if you’ve picked up the corresponding Constellation side-mission (from the mission board in the basement of The Lodge).

2. Speaking of which, pick up as many side quests from the various mission boards. If you’re like me you’ll only do the ones you enjoy.

I ignore the ‘supply a certain resource’ missions (at least for now. They’re tied to supply-chain base-building. You can fall down that particular rabbit hole whenever you like. I haven’t done so yet.😬).

3. Remember to visit Commander Tuala often after you’ve completed the Vanguard questline. Those Terramorph hunts pay nicely in XP. Plus, those flying missions are useful for boosting your ship command skill too - as is the vanguard flight simulator- however, you still need XP for those skill points.

4. Hunt some Starborn. Each Starborn ship kill is worth 400xp. After a point in the game, if you chose to keep a certain lure item on your ship, the Starborn will turn up more whenever you jump to a new system, or fly between the planets within it.

I recommend not flying in the Mantis’s ship for this one. As fun as it is, it will result in more ‘It’s the Mantis!’ encounters, which isn’t helpful if you’re hunting Starborn.

5. There are food items that increase your XP, it’s a tiny amount, but might add up if you remember to consume them before a fight (I never do, lol). The Gastronomy skill isn’t hard to grind - especially if you’ve been looting every single food item and storing it you know where.

Out side of those, the fastest way to earn XP is the main questline. You’ll almost always lvl up after every chapter.

If anyone else has any good XP grinds, let me know!

Say, for example, I’ve just dropped off all my resources and collectables at The Lodge. I should now have a nice empty inventory, with all the crap I wanna sell still in the ship’s hold.

Next let’s find a good store. It’s a short run down the left-hand path as you leave The Lodge to one of the best gunsmiths in the New Atlantis.

Centurian Arsenal is located in the posh district, and they usually have a running cashflow of 15k. It’s a great place to start, but let’s get those numbers up. Especially if there’s a lot to sell.

You might not have a huge amount of creds to begin with, but very soon you’ll have more than you’ll ever use, if you stick with me.

Even if you haven’t found that nice weapon yet, you’ll soon start to recognise which ammo types you need to stockpile. If this is new game+ you’ll definitely know the ones. They are usually the rarest and most expensive.

Buy as much as you can afford, preferably all of it. It doesn’t weigh anything, so why not?

Centurian only buy weapons, remember, so try to only build up their cash to how many weapons you need to sell.

If you’re like me, the vendor should now be on about 30k.

Now sell as much as you can from your ship’s inventory. Leave the vendor with close to no creds. From there, open the surface map (damn, that was a nice update), and fast travel to the Commercial District. Rinse and repeat at UC distribution, Outlanders and then fast travel to Jemison Mercantile.

At each store, stock up on all their useful ammo. You could even buy up all their resources if you’re dedicated enough to hoof it back to The Lodge and store it- you know where.

If you somehow still have more crap to sell, just outside Jemison Mercantile is the elevator to The Well.

Pay a visit to Antonio at UC Surplus, say hi to him from me, he’s lovely, remember he’ll buy pretty much anything if it isn’t stolen.

Buy all the useful ammo. Sell him everything he can afford.

Visit Henrik - stock up on electronic components, they’ll be useful later too, and digipicks - always buy the digipicks whenever you see them without exception.

There’s a guy, Vicente, who is also a vendor you can sell to. He’ll offer you a little side-quest first, just keep bothering him until he does.

Then finally, the Trade Alliance - they’ll buy your stolen goods, and even contraband- assuming you got it past the scanners.

The Trade Alliance is the best place to find to good chems - Paramour and Hippolyta - you’ll need those to pass early persuasion tests, I always buy those.

You and your ship’s inventory should be nice and light now, and your cred amount shouldn’t be looking too bad, either.

You can also use the same method with merchants at any location, such as Akila City, Neon, Cydonia, Gagarin, Hopetown, Homestead, the Scaled Citadel, or at certain points in the game - The Key.

Just remember to store it all in your hold until you can get back to The Lodge.

The point is, all that junk is now theirs and you have a nice little stockpile of useful ammo, more resources than you’ll ever need, and almost every cred in town.

The best part about this method is the resources- if you’re buying all of theirs you’ll never have to mine a single thing outside of a quest.

Unless you find mining oddly relaxing, in which case, you do you.

Go off, do some quests and the odd dungeon, and by the time your inventory is full of crap again a few days will have passed, and the vendors will have replenished their creds.

some of it you definitely need to stockpile from the start of the game. You’ll soon work out which ones they are, because they’ll match your favourite weapons.

Later, if you get fed up with scrolling past the ones you never use, sell them in huge stacks - you’ll make a load of dough.

Trust me, it’s worth it. You need to get past that need to manage a tidy ammo menu, you don’t. You don’t even have to look at it. It’s not weighing you down. You can just ignore it.

Weapons/Suits/Helmets/Boost Packs: There’s a lot of crap, especially at the start of the game. Soon you’ll train your eyes to notice the coloured items, you’ll automatically sell the rest. Then you’ll get used to comparing a new item to what you have equipped and selling the items with the lower stats. It’s just like Skyrim in that regard.

The only exceptions I make is for named items. I like to collect those, but that’s personal choice.

Note: I will also treat all the above as a crafting resource if I’m boosting research and crafting skills.

Resources: drag them back to the ship and dump them in the hold, but make sure the next time you arrive at Jemison, you exit your cockpit before you land, and take all the resources into your own inventory. Health and Food items too.

This step is hard to get used to, but important. We’re not going to sell these, we’ll need them later, but we need a fast easy way to get them to The Lodge - and this is how.

Inventory groaning, sit back down in the cockpit. Open Jemison’s menu, hover your cursor over New Atlantis and select The Lodge. This is one of the only instances where you can fast-travel with your pockets ridiculously full.

The game will place you directly in front of The Lodge (yey!) and you just have to crawl through the door, down the stairs immediately to your right, and locate the small storage box on the table in the centre of the room.

This is a bottomless pit. A secure, endless space you can hide all your resources, and conveniently it’s right in the centre of all the research and crafting stations. Almost like it was intentional - and I’m sure that it was.

Starfield will not hold our hands on this stuff. Personally, I think it’s part of the charm and why some struggled to get into the game. It’s a very old-school in that sense. There’s a load of tricks like this that you just have discover for yourself through trial and error. Or pick up from experienced players like me.