Better items in Starfield are gained by leveling up, completing missions, exploring high-level planets, and improving your skills, particularly in combat and crafting.
Want to improve your gear in Starfield? Well, understanding how to obtain better weapons and armor is key. Getting ahead in this expansive universe requires strategic gameplay.
You’ll find superior items by increasing your level; challenging quests often award good equipment. Don’t forget to explore dangerous planets, and developing specific skill trees also allows crafting of more powerful gear.
Starfield: How to Get the Best Gear
Getting good stuff in Starfield is super important if you want to explore all those cool planets and fight tough space pirates. It’s not just about finding random loot; there are clever ways to improve the items you find and get the most powerful gear possible. This guide breaks down the best methods to get better weapons, armor, and resources in Starfield.
Understanding Item Tiers and Rarities
Before we jump into how to find great gear, let’s talk about how Starfield organizes its items. It uses a system of tiers and rarities, kind of like many other role-playing games. The items will have different colors to indicate how rare or strong they are.
Basic Item Levels
In the game, you will notice that items are classified as:
- Common: These are your everyday items, pretty basic and not too powerful. They’re often white in color and easily found.
- Rare: These items are a step up from common gear. They will have blue color and a little better stats, and you will find them more often than the items in next category.
- Epic: With purple color, these items have good stats, often come with some unique effects, and they’re good to keep and use.
- Legendary: The most powerful items are legendary, coming in gold color. These items have the best stats and multiple cool effects. They are the hardest to find.
You might see these classifications on weapons, suits, spacesuits, and even resources that you gather while you travel. Higher-level items mean higher damage, better defense, or more potent resource effects. So the higher the level and rarity of an item, the more potent that item will be.
Leveling Up to Get Better Gear
Your player level is one of the most important things that affects what kind of items you will find. As you level up, the game will give you access to more powerful gear. This means that those pesky space pirates that you are facing will drop better loot, and the shops will have better items to sell. It’s always a good idea to complete quests, explore planets, and take part in combat encounters to level up fast.
How Leveling Impacts Loot Drops
The higher your character level, the more chances you have to find better items when you loot enemies or chests. If you’re still in the early game and your level is low, you can expect to find many common items and only a few rare items. But if you level up, you’ll see more rare and epic items in those same loot spots.
Where to Gain Experience Fast
To quickly gain experience and thus access to better gear, try focusing on these activities:
- Completing Main and Side Quests: Quests give huge chunks of experience. You get to follow an interesting story, and you get better items.
- Exploring New Locations: Exploring each new location on a planet will give experience. So keep discovering new areas.
- Combat Encounters: Take on every enemy encounter. These can be small groups of pirates or large groups of aliens. Each time you win, you will gain some experience.
- Scanning Planets and Creatures: Scanning a planet and all the plants and animals on it is a great way to get experience.
Improving Your Skills for Better Item Drops
Your character’s skills have a direct effect on the item drops that you receive. Certain skills can increase the chance of finding rare and legendary items. Skills are in the form of perks that you earn when you level up. So you will want to keep leveling up your character to get the right skill set.
Essential Skills to Invest In
Here are some skills that you should try to focus on, as they will improve the kind of items that you get:
- Scavenging: This skill will increase the chance of finding more credits, resources, and ammunition. This skill will help you keep your inventory filled.
- Commerce: This is another important skill for better items. This skill will allow you to get better prices when you trade items. With this skill, you will spend less money to buy items and get more money when you sell your items.
- Stealth: With this skill, you are more likely to sneak past enemies and loot the containers that you want. If you are good at stealth, you will get some really good loot from hard-to-reach places.
Investing in skills early on can make a big difference in what kind of items you will find throughout the game.
Where to Find High-Tier Gear
Knowing where to go is just as important as knowing how to level up and what skills to get. Some locations in Starfield have higher chances of spawning high-quality items. These locations have better loot and resources, but they might be hard to reach. Let’s go over a few types of places to explore.
Exploring High-Level Star Systems
The higher level systems usually have better loot. As you explore different systems in Starfield, you might notice that some of them are marked as “high-level” locations. These star systems are the best locations to get amazing items and resources.
- Look for Red Skull Icons: These marks on the star map tell you that there are hard enemies and also a high reward. These locations are challenging, but the loot is worth the effort.
- Check the Level of Planets: In high level systems, the planets will have a high level of creatures. It is usually hard to explore these planets, but they also have better loot in containers.
Looting Military and Corporate Locations
Places like military outposts, research facilities, and corporate offices often hold valuable items. These are usually the type of places that have some kind of story behind them. They often contain a main building, and some smaller outbuildings, often protected by some kind of security force.
- Military Bases: These are often protected, but you will find powerful weapons and armor inside.
- Abandoned Labs: These places often have special items and resources that might be rare.
- Corporate Headquarters: Places like these might have experimental gear and good credits.
Special Stores and Vendors
Certain vendors across the settled systems will have high-level gear available for sale. It is a good idea to keep checking the stores to see what items are available. You will need to keep going to higher-level vendors to see more powerful items on sale.
- High-End Vendors: These vendors tend to be in the bigger cities like New Atlantis, Akila City, and Neon. They tend to have more items with better rarity.
- Specialized Shops: Some stores focus on a certain type of item. For example, some shops sell weapons while others focus on selling armor. You will want to check these stores out, especially when you need a certain type of item.
The Art of Looting Effectively
Knowing where to look is not enough. You also need to be smart about how you loot. There are simple rules that will increase the amount of good loot that you get.
Check Every Corner
Don’t just run through an area and check the most obvious containers. Check everywhere. Look at areas that you think that the developers might not put any loot into. You’d be surprised what you might find. Check behind crates, on top of shelves, and even in small containers.
- Use Your Scanner: This tool can sometimes highlight nearby containers, making sure you don’t miss any hidden loot spots.
- Be Patient: Don’t rush your looting process. Take your time to explore each area.
Pickpocketing and Stealing
If you have good stealth skills, you can get very powerful items by pickpocketing and stealing from people. This approach is risky, but the rewards can be huge. Be mindful of your surroundings and who is watching you as you perform these activities.
- Steal from Vendors: Some vendors might have very rare items on them that are not for sale. If you have a good stealth skill, you can get away with taking these items.
- Pickpocket High-Level NPCs: High-level non-playable characters are often carrying very high level items. If you are good enough, you can take some of these items.
Modifying Your Gear
Finding awesome gear is cool, but making them even better through modifications is even better. You can improve your weapons and spacesuits at workbenches. These workbenches can be found at any big city or you can place your own on your ship or outposts.
Weapon Modifications
Workbenches will allow you to add scopes, change the barrel, add mods that will change the kind of damage that your gun does. The more you use your guns, the better the modifications you can use.
- Damage Mods: Increase damage to certain types of enemies, or increase damage in general.
- Scope Attachments: Can improve accuracy and make you more effective at long range.
- Capacity Increase: Add more bullets to your gun. This will allow you to stay in combat for longer.
Spacesuit and Armor Modifications
Like weapons, your spacesuits and armor can also be modified to improve their function. These can give you more armor protection, more resistance to certain kinds of damage, and even boost some of your character’s stats.
- Damage Resistance: Reduce the damage from the enemies you are facing.
- Carry Weight Increase: This will give you more inventory space, and allow you to carry more loot.
- Boost Pack Mods: These will improve the movement of your boost pack and allow you to travel farther and faster.
Crafting Your Own Gear
If you want to get truly powerful gear, you will want to look into crafting. Crafting can give you a custom piece of gear that fits your character well.
Resource Gathering
Crafting takes time and also resources. So you need to gather the resources you need to craft your items. You will want to scan planets to find out the location of resources, and then use a mining device to get them.
- Survey Planets: Look for planets with good resources that you can gather.
- Use Mining Gear: You need a mining tool to extract resources from the planets.
- Set Up Outposts: You can set up an outpost on planets that have good resources and use them to farm.
Crafting at Workbenches
Once you have enough resources, you can go to the workbench to craft your item. The items you can craft depend on the skills that you have and the resources you have gathered.
- Research: You will need to research items at research workbenches first. The more you research items, the better items you can craft.
- Create Custom Gear: You can create specific types of armor, spacesuits, and weapons using crafting.
- Experimental Projects: Some types of equipment can be made only through experimental crafting, which gives you access to even more powerful items.
By understanding how item tiers, your level, and your skills all affect each other you are able to collect the best gear. By exploring all the different areas, and making use of workbenches you can get the best items possible. With some practice, you can have the best character in Starfield and be ready for any challenge that you face. Now go out there and get some good loot!
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Final Thoughts
Crafting, higher skill levels, and vendor progression all significantly influence the quality of gear you find. Increase your skill in specific crafting areas to build improved items. Higher levels also affect the loot that drops.
Vendors will stock better equipment as you progress through the game and reach new areas. Focusing on these areas provides the best path to better equipment in ‘Starfield how to unlock better items’. Playing often helps with finding what you seek.
