Three things sent me into the deep end of outpost madness. When I first realized you could ship materials between outposts on different worlds. The second was the ability to unlock research. Finally, the massive amount of experience that could be gained.
Once I had the aluminum flowing it did not take long before I realized what I was going to need a lot of was iron. I also wanted a far better spot. Yet again most spots I wanted were on planets or moons where I lacked the skills to set up an outpost for the time being.
While I had so many places, I wanted to spend any spare skill points I would acquire from slowly leveling up. I decided despite how slow leveling up to this point had been I better start investing into things for outposts so I could expand my operations.
This came to a head after a couple of manual trips of moving resources between my first outpost and the second one I ended up setting up. While this second outpost was not the best place to set up an outpost like the first one. It gave me access to iron and more importantly helium.
This second base would end up being on the moon Luna. If I had to do everything over again, I would surely not pick this place. It was however in another system that I went to quite a lot. I would for a time end up calling this place my home base. It would later on get outdone by a different outpost that I'd slowly end up making my actual base.
This second outpost, however, ended up having exactly at the time what I needed. Since my two outposts were in different solar systems, I'd need helium. Setting up cargo link inter systems required helium as fuel to gas the starships that would go in between the different solar systems to bring back resources.
I did find it a bit annoying that I'd have to set up a cargo link on both moons each time I wanted to ship something back to my new home outpost. I found it a bit silly that I could not just link all the cargo link buildings to a single landing pad at my outpost.
With how massive this building area is. I was going to have to start thinking about how I was going to use the larger area an outpost claim allows you to build. There is no way, as far as I can tell, to extend the area either.
Once you start adding in massive rows of storage and many other buildings. These places could start to feel overcrowded. It, however, did at least feel like progress was being made as I started to spread out and put-up outposts in more and more regions of space so I could ship back all kinds of different resources.
I was still for a while going out and manually mining planet side any of the stranger resources, I'd need to build things. At one point I was going out and farming beryllium at such a rate I decided I might as well try and find a planet that I could put an outpost on and start getting as much of it as I could. Which I ended up doing as my next outpost. Also picking up copper as well.
I was hoping at some point to have enough different kinds of resources to be coming in so that I'd feel I no longer needed to go out on random mining operations looking for just odd small amounts of particle resources. The deeper I had dived into outposts the more different kinds of resources I'd need. It seemed like an impossible task the further along I went.
While my ship has a research laboratory on it. I just felt it was handy to craft one down on my home outpost as well. I also quickly discovered how I could take advantage of research as well. I went to research something and suddenly I lucked out and had a bonus overflow of research that finished off at the time materials I did not even have.
I felt I was quite lucky to have worked that out so early. At the time I was just taking the bulk resources I was mining and applying them to every single research project that would take them. I soon realized I could take things like iron and aluminum and spend them on research, sometimes finishing off much harder requirements such as zero wire and sealant.
One thing I kept running into needing a lot of early on was adaptive frames. This ended up being my first experience on the farm as well. While I did not have the most ideal setup at the time with my aluminum being shipped from another moon.
I ended up crafting just an insane amount of adaptative frames before moving on to other things. I ended up having so much that I'd be over encumbered and even my ship was maxed out in storage trying to hold them all.
I started going off and just dumping them on the ground at different planet cities that I could sell them to. This was also when I decided after hitting around 100k credits that I’d had my fill and fun of going out every single time I needed a couple of research and mine it myself to just buying it.
At the time vendors had such a limited number of credits on them and I wanted some rather experience things. However, with all the frames I now had to sell. I could buy out a vendor's ammo and lots of resources. Those credits spent would go back into the amount that they could then spend to buy all the frames I had.
It was somewhat thrilling to gain lots of levels in a short amount of time. I had so many places I wanted to spend skill points in. Once in a while, I'd come back to my main outpost and just spend all the resources, I had for crafting frames before moving on to other parts of the game.
Other times I could not wait. I’d just go and sit down and speed up time. Over the long run I ended up finding out one of the best places to for moving along massive amounts of time was on Venus. Every hour that sped up on that planet would end up being 100 hours of UT time.
I ended up being on Venus so much that I decided one of my goals was to unlock enough skills to be able to build there. It took quite a lot longer than I was expecting.
There is, however, quite a large and annoying downside to being so into outposts that I was. I always found myself encumbered by trying to carry too much weight. It seemed no matter how large of a storage facility I created it was never enough to hold it all.
When you move while being over encumbered your oxygen gets used up almost in an instant once you end up carrying 100k+ weight. I’d had times when I was carrying so much a couple of steps and not only did, I have a red bar of CO2 all, but the last bit of my health was gone as well from taking damage.
At least you can’t die from trying to carry too much. That, however, did mean quite a lot of hours of gameplay. I was running around low on health with my screen blinking and it being blurry as I walked around. At some point, I'll have to upgrade to hold massive amounts of resources. That still, however, would be nothing compared to how much I was trying to carry.
Being in low health all the time also created some interesting situations. Since I was spending so much time with outposts it was bound to be a raider attack on one of them, I was at. They almost instantly damaged my extractors and power grid. At the time I did not want to spend resources on having a turret up to help combat this issue.
On one such attack of many, I ended up getting killed about half a dozen times. At one point I ended up just dumping my massive inventory on the ground so I could properly heal and move around to deal with the situation at hand.
Final Thoughts
At one point I expanded to having over 12 outposts in the game mining all kinds of things. I also slowly started expanding and upgrading my old outposts to have much higher-tier buildings. Perhaps at some point, I'll create an outpost guide. That however won’t be for a while till I have a lot more time spent in the outpost system.
Other Content
Information
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Starfield.
Disclosure: Starfield received for free through AMD rewards from the graphics card I purchased.