Quick guide to collect all 39 inorganic resources with outposts in just 7 systems.
Contents
How to Collect All Inorganic Resources
Сrеdit gоеs to Ilzow!
Introduction
After some initial frustration with the outpost system i challenged myself with extracting all 39 inorganic resources in a more efficient and less mindboggling way. I traveled to all systems and scanned all planets to obtain the data needed for this endeavour.
The resulting setup process i ended up with is aimed at making the outposts easy to establish and to allow a swift reproduction of the system in NG+.
Inorganic Resource Families
H2O and He3 are found in abundance throughout the universe and are only losely linked to the other minerals. They can often also be collected from the atmosphere, omitting the need of a resource node.
Every other resource is divided into 8 families with each of the different common resources as a base. Copper, Chlor and Lead also split into 2 mutually exclusive lines further down, bringing the total amount of families to 11.
Node Spawns
Each family occupies a biome exclusively, with all resources within that family being able to be found anywhere in the biome, but more easily obtained near the center. The ‘Scanning’ skill provides aditional information about the exact location of higher density areas, but its not a necessity to find them.
As seen here on Lantana 6, despite having a whopping 8 ressources on the planet, they are split between 4 different biomes (Fe in Mountains, U in Rocky Desert, Ni on Plateau and Cl in Frozen Plains).
H2O can be collected from the Atmosphere in addition to extractors in the snow.
The Wrong Way
Resulting from the spawn behaviour, ressources of different families can only be combined in one outpost by landing on the exact border between the biomes by clicking for a landing area, checking the biome result on the righthand side and then moving the mouse pixel by pixel until the biome swaps. Then alot of running along the edge in search of a good overlap is required. This is an extremely time consuming process and can result in multiple hours of wasted time. Sadly i know this too well. It also requires some serious luck to even find planets with the correct resources to overlap.
The Good Way
A much more reliable way is to limit outposts to just one biome and placing them in a high density location near the center of the scanned mineral area. To keep the amount of outposts needed low, we simply search for planets that contain a complete resource family to compensate for not doubling up on biome borders.
This example on Lantana 8-d contains the complete Nickel Family (Ni+Co+Pt+Pd). With higher ranks of the “Scanning” skill, you can just place the landing zone in the highest ranked material (Pd in this case). Without it, you might just need a few attempts jumping arround in the common material.
With some practice this process should only need a few minutes, in this example i did not even have to move away from my ship and found a good spot on the first try. Remember you can just move arround with your camera and even your character while having the outpost placement menu open. This is by far the fastest method to scout for a good spot.
After placing the outpost you can go into the build menu, press V to zoom out and then select the different extractors to find your ressource nodes. Adjust your outpost placement by deleting and replacing it to improve coverage if needed.
Planet Selection and the Sheet
For the described placement method to work, its beneficial to find planets with full resource families and only extract those biomes. Sadly those planets are few and far between the universe, i counted 38 to be precise – i might have missed one or two, but you get the point. For 3 of the families i even found exactly one suitable planet only.
Grouping for Links
A further consideration is to group the outposts in as few systems as possible, as the usage of inter-system cargo links requires He3, which – while abundant and available in every system – might not necessarily be on the same planet or in the same biome as our outpost. This obviously is only a concern if you plan to send all your resources into one central outpost to ease the burden of collecting your spoils. With 11 outposts needed for the extraction of minerals, you’ll have room for one more with a basic skill of 1 in “Planetary Habitation”, which is needed to settle the sole Argon Family option on Charybdis 8-b anyways.
The Sheet
Ive compiled my scan results and analysis into one sheet and included a suggestion of systems to settle. The level of those systems is mostly irrelevant for settling if you dont go out of your way to startle the local inhabitants or linger long enough afk in your outpost to trigger a raid.
The silver planets are perfectly viable candidates so you could as well try to find your own – and possibly better – combination of outposts!
Outpost Setup
As you are not constrained by time, the sole limiting factor for your outposts is energy consumption.
With that in mind i recommend to only build one extractor for each mineral, place a storage next to it and link it up. Build a landing pad to reduce travel time and place a few more storages near it. Link those together to create one big storage chain and funnel all 4 resource storages into the first storage of that chain.
Then you need to generate 20 energy (5 for each extractor) or more if you built more. My advice is to avoid the fueled one, because production and consumption rates of He3 are a mess. Simply build a nuclear reactor or spam wind/solar depending on which is available or more profitable.
Finally build a bedroll, bed or bench next to your big storage and landing pad. You can fast forward time there to generate resources if needed.
Everything above that is luxury, although its fun to play arround with the building options.
You can always upscale your outposts if specific resources are in high demand – that will mostly be Iron and Aluminium at start, followed by Copper and Tungsten. You should start with those outposts first or even build temporary outposts just to gather materials. Unlike Ship or Weapon upgrades the destruction of outposts or outpost modules is fully refunded.
Conclusion
The Starfield universe is vast and Bethesda will most likely release some patches which might affect the mechanics, expand or even reduce the available options.
Also the information contained in this guide is based on human observation and vulnerable to errors and misconceptions. Nevertheless i hope this guide helps at least a few of you.
Nice guide. But for the nickel, cobalt, platinum and palladium I recommend Fermi VII-A. It’s lvl 75, but animals are just peaceful flying jellyfish. And one of them allows farming Memory Substrate that is used for crafting Substrate Molecular Sieve.
So just for my clarification, if i wanted to extract lead the best way I would need to find the highest tier of the lead family and extract that? Or would i need to create an outpost on top of a lead deposit.
If you want Lead, you extract Lead. The familie thing is just to make it more efficient, you can extract Lead, Tungsten, Titanium and Dysprosium in 1 outpost. The main concern is that there are 39 inorganics, but only 8 outposts (up to 24 with skills), so you’ll need some way to combine them if you want all, thats what this guide is for.
Thanks for the guide, I love the concept. I will say though that over time locations will be discovered and shared by the community that contain inorganics from multiple biomes, and should reduce the total planets needed, as well as make for some pretty amazing outposts.
Possible, you could integrate some families into other outposts (eg. pick an overlap between Iron and Nickel, grab all of the Iron family there and maybe Nickel and Platinum, then find another overlap between maybe all of Aluminium and Cobalt + Palladium). But that requires setting up exatly at borders and then running arround ALOT to find a proper overlap. It also pretty much cant be reproduced from a guide since you’d have to click the same pixel when landing.
Since it seems you don’t mention it, it would be worth noting that Inara has a database of every system and planet in the game now, if you want to find even more planets that fit the bill for these.
This is a great guide and take my points, but it is probably worth mentioning that nearly all of these planets require extreme colonization
where H3
go Lantana 8-d for easy atmospheric He3 on a outpost already in the list
Else just pretty much everywhere, He3 and H2O are independent from resource families (although they each seem to favor some of them when given the option between multiple biomes, e.g. He3 often with Al or Fe, H2O often with Pb or Cu)
node spawning mechanics explanation is extremely helpful, i was doin exactly the wrong way until now lol