Starfield - How to level up fast (Xbox Series X|S) | XboxAchievements.com (2024)

If you actually wanted to level up to 100, for theReach for the Stars achievement in Starfield, you still might be here come Christmas time. To say levelling up is slow in Bethesda Game Studios’ first new universe in over 50-years is an understatement. It’s glacial.

To put it into perspective, when we finished the story for the first time, after doing a fair bit of side stuff too, and a hell of a lot of Outpost building, we came in at a paltry level 37.

So, you’re going to have to get creative to get to level 100 in a reasonable amount of time. Below is quite easily the easiest and quickest way to level up on Xbox - the below method is even easier on PC, as the keyboard and mouse input beats the controller for ease of input when it comes to selling. So, whether you’re on Xbox or PC, this method works (although the directions below are for Xbox players).

Anyway, on with the show!

Step 1 - Building a Aluminum and Iron mining operation

If you’ve been following our guides since launch, we’ve been screaming from the rooftops about how you should create an automated Iron and Aluminum Outpost early on. Now is the time to say it again: make an Iron and Aluminum Outpost!

We've already created the guides for each, so just follow those and you'll be golden. You're going to need a lot of Iron and Aluminum for the next stage, so the early you get started on this, the better.

• Starfield - Here’s the best planet for Aluminum in the galaxy
• Starfield - Here’s the best planet for Iron in the galaxy

The only thing that might differ from the individual mining operation guides above is where you send the resources. If it helps, we sent them to our main base as the guides suggested and flew them to our destination from our home base.

You can, however, if you feel inclined, just build an Outpost next to your XP farm and ship them there via the Cargo Links (or even build 3 Cargo Links at the XP farm too), but that overcomplicates things when they're not really needed after the initial set up. We’ll get onto how to transport resources to the XP farm in the next section.

Step 2 - Gathering your resources

So, you’ve got your steady flow Aluminum and Iron steaming in, now you need to assemble the materials you need to farm XP until the cows come home. Below is the grand total of stuff you’ll need for your XP farm, which will build the following:

• 20 x Storage - Solid - Large (1 = 10 Adaptive Frames / 16 Aluminum / 20 Iron)
• An Industrial Workbench (4 x Aluminum / 3 x Iron)
• 7 x Solar Arrays (1 = 4 Aluminum / 2 Beryllium / 3 Copper)
• 5 x Cobalt Extractor (1 = 4 x Aluminum / 2 x Tungsten / 5 x Iron)
• 5 x Nickel Extractor (1 = 4 x Aluminum / 2 x Tungsten / 5 x Iron)

In terms of totals, that is (including the Aluminum and Iron to make Adaptive Frames at your outpost):

• 653 x Iron
• 392 x Aluminium
• 21 x Copper
• 14 x Beryllium
• 10 x Tungsten

In order to craft the ‘Storage - Solid - Large’ crates you’ll need to have invested in the Outpost Engineering Rank 2 skill, and also have researched Manufacturing 3 at a Research Lab. That said, if you are nowhere near that, you can absolutely use the smaller versions, but you’ll have to create an insane amount of Output Links to make it work, and also may need a lot more materials (not if you’re crafting medium sized ones, but definitely if you’re crafting small ones).

With 20 large storage modules you get 6,000 mass as standard. In order to get that from the small ones, you’ll need to craft 80, and for medium, you’ll need to create 40 - so, more work, but definitely possible.

For the Copper, Beryllium and Tungsten, if you have it, great. If not, try Jemison Mercantile, the Trade Authority or the UC Distribution Center in New Atlantis, on Jemison, Alpha Centauri. If they don’t have any or enough, buy what they have and then wait on a bench nearby for 24 hours until they’ve restocked.

Now, before we press on with the XP farm set up, let’s talk about transferring the goods to where we need to go.

• My favourite tip is that you can store 130 kgs worth of resources on each crew mate you have in your crew. So, if you have 1 companion with you, and a crew of 3, you can store 520 kgs on them without even turning to your storage or your ship’s storage.
• Secondly, invest in either/both of Weight Lifting and Payloads. The former allows you to carry more, the latter allows your ship to carry more. If you’re pretty deep in the Social skill tree as well, Leadership Rank 2 allows your companions to carry more; and Ship Command allows you to have more active crew members, which in turn, means more pockets to fill with resources.
• Finally, you can of course upgrade the storage of your ship, although with the above, that’s not necessary. 4 crew members x 130 + 240 for you = 760, which is almost enough on its own. Then, obviously use the Ship Storage - which you access by going to the menu screen → bottom left to “Ship” → to Cargo Hold → and to bounce back and forth between you and your ship. This, however, only works if you’re on your ship or within 100m of it.

So, now you have the materials, and you have a way to get them all on your ship, let’s go and build an XP farm.

Step 3 - Building the XP farm

First things first, we need to make our way to our XP farm planet. For this we’re choosing Altair I in the Altair system, just up from Sol. This is for 3 reasons: firstly, it has both Cobalt and Nickel; secondly it’s near to Sol and Venus (more on that shortly); and thirdly it’s near to New Atlantis, should you need the odd material here and there.

Then, you need to find a plot of land that has both Cobalt and Nickel in it. You can do this by looking at the planet and then hitting to show the resources. Then, you need to land on the border between a Cobalt rich region and a Nickel rich region - like below.

And finally for the preparation, you need to build an Outpost where it says both Nickel and Cobalt in the top left corner under “Available Resources.” Once you’ve done that, whack it down and it’s time to start building.

• First things first, let’s place down the two sets of 5 Extractors (the 5 x Cobalt Extractors and the 5 x Nickel Extractors). Now, depending on the size of the extraction areas you might struggle with this, but if you can’t place 5, then place as many as you can.

• Next up, it’s time to place down the 7 Solar Arrays. This will power the Extractors. It doesn’t matter where you put them.

• You’ll need to place the Industrial Workbench next, as you’ll need that to create the Adaptive Frames for the storage. Craft 200 of them.

• When you’ve done that, start building and stacking the storage crates - 10 across and 2 up works perfectly.

And that’s the actual build done, per se. All you have to do next is link everything up with Output Links. Output Links are quite simple to use. You click on a module that you want to send goods/services from, and then you click on where you want them to go. For us, this part is two-fold.

• The first part is linking the Extractors (every Cobalt and Nickel one) to 1 crate in the stack.

• And secondly, you need to link that one storage crate with every other storage crate in the stack. So, you’ll be linking 1 crate to all the other 19.

What this does is it uses the first crate as a hub, of sorts, so that everything comes into it, and then that fills the other crates as the original crate fills up. Clever, huh?

Right, that’s the farm built. Time to get some XP!

Step 4 - Advancing time

The next step is a short and simple one: it’s to advance time, and this is why we chose Altair I, and mentioned Venus earlier on.

The thing about time in Starfield is that there are two measures: UT time, which is the universe’s standard time; and planet time. An interesting fact about Starfield is that resource mining works on UT time, and not planet time.

Because Venus has a planet time to UT time of 1 to 100, that means 24 hours on Venus is equivalent to 2,400 hours in UT time. Meaning, that if you fly to Venus after setting up the pipeline, and sleep for 24 hours, 2,400 UT hours will pass. And that, my friends, is enough to fill up all the storage crates at the XP farm on Altair I.

So, go to Venus, land, and then sleep 24 hours in your bed. It’s important that you sleep and not wait, so you get the Well-Rested bonus, giving you a 10% XP boost for the next 24 minutes.

Once you’ve done that, head back to Altair I.

Step 5 - Crafting thousands of magnets

All you need to do now is craft as many Isocentered Magnets as you can - each one uses 1 Cobalt and 1 Nickel. So, head to the Industrial Workbench, go down to the Isocentered Magnet, click , and then use to move the counter to 99 and click to craft. This will next you 108 XP - 99 XP for each item, and a bonus 9 XP for the Well-Rested bonus (Bethesda clearly does round up its XP). And that’s it. You just keep doing that until your resources are all used up.

One bit of advice I would offer is to go to the Start menu ( ) → System ( ) → Settings → Bindings → Then scroll down to “Menu Navigation” and change the “Next Tab” bind to a face button (may I suggest ). This will put less strain on your hands and wrist, as slamming thousands of times can take its toll and hitting face buttons is easier. Don’t worry about the clash of buttons warning that the game gives you, just make sure you restore the default binds when you’re done farming.

Now, how much XP can you realistically make in an hour? Well, we timed it…

In roughly a minute, we crafted 12 batches of Isocentered Magnets (99), which is 108 XP per batch, coming in at 1,296 XP a minute. That equates to roughly 77,760 XP an hour. Which, you have to admit, is pretty insane.

And that’s it. All that’s left now is to offer some more advice RE the whole process:

• Firstly, once you’ve moved away from the workbench, donot run, as you’ll be severely encumbered - you could have as many as 20,000 kgs of items on you. Yikes! If you run, you could unwittingly kill yourself, as the oxygen meter drains super quickly, and you’d have to do that all over again.

• What do you do with the Isocentered Magnets? Honestly, just drop them. They’re not worth the hassle or the money to try and sell them.

• Also, if this process takes you over 24 minutes to get through your batch, head back to the ship to sleep to regain the Well-Rested bonus.
• And finally, if you’re left with a lot of resources of one type at the end, then try deleting one of the Extractors of the overperforming resource, and seeing where you are next time. I’d also honestly recommend clearing out the excess too, so that they have a good chance of it evening out. It’s a little unclear how it works sometimes, as we started with 5 and 5; and went down to 5 and 3 to even it up; but after a few cycles, it got out of sync again, so we went back to 5 and 4. Nothing to panic over, just keep an eye on it.

Step 6 - Rinse and repeat

Step 6 is simple. Do it all over again. And again. And again. And again.

So, after dropping the Isocentered Magnets, jump on your ship, head to Venus, sleep 24 hours and return to do it all over again. Rinse, and repeat.

My advice would be to space this out a little. Do a few rounds, gain a few levels and get some skill points, and then go and do a few missions, and then come back. This will break the strain on your fingers and wrist.

Step 7 - Expanding Storage

The seventh step is optional. If you want to get more resources, to create more Isocentered Magnets in one run, then you can always grab more Aluminum and Iron and create more storage crates.

In fact, after a while we went from 20 Storage - Solid - Large to 40 (which is probably the max I’d go to). All this does, really, is it cuts down on the trip time to Venus and back, which is great, but that rest time might actually be a welcome break.

With 40 full containers, in about 10-15 minutes, we went from level 49 (with 919 XP towards the next level, which was at 4460 XP) to level 52 (with 3061 XP past level 52). Now, if each level needs 105 more XP than the previous level, that means that realistically, with wear and distractions, we made a whopping 15,837 XP per batch in about 12-minutes.

Now you know what to do, get out there and start on your journey to getting to level 100 and unlockingStarfield’s Reach for the Stars achievement. You’ll have earned this one! Incidentally, there’s no level cap in Starfield either, so you can use this method to unlockall the skills if you want!