[Starfield] Outpost Guide 4.0: How To Connect and Organize Perfect Outposts 

tip for when you’re searching for two biomes on a planet. when you land before you exit the ship or pilot seat and you’re at the “exit, take off, leave seat” screen go into photo mode and you’ll be able to look around the area with the higher camera view and find the different biome if you’re close, if not then take off and land somewhere else and look around.

This world is full of differences, opinions and challenges. Please ignore the negativity other RU-vidrs are directing at me. We’re here to have fun. We’re here to play Starfield. I’m going to continue to be kind, thoughtful, and energetic about life no matter what negativity is baselessly directed at me. At the end of the day, we’re all just a bunch of dudes having a good time.

Also pro-tip: If you are mining on a planet where you get raided by animals or bounty hunters/pirates, you can build an impenetrable wall around your base using raised storage containers, which have no limit. When you build up a stack and delete the ones below the top box, it fills in with cement foundation which becomes your wall.

Another tip: if you are going to take resources from transfer stations, you can do it from your ship’s cargo hold. You just have exit and enter it’s menu to refresh its inventory. In case anyone is too lazy to exit their ship like me

What I would love to see is an additional console that you can build at your outpost that not only shows a galactic view of shipping lanes but allows modifications without having to travel.

If you enjoy the videos please hit the like button! This helps with the RU-vid Algorithm. I encourage you to watch the whole thing as a lot of information and ideas are covered. Thank you for watching!

Thank you for making a guide like this. I'm so tired of every guide being the basics for beginners. One suggestion...rather than wire the stacks of boxes together, take the one that you feed from the extractors, place it 30 feet behind the stack of boxes, then wire it to each individual box. This makes it so much easier to see which boxes are wired and which aren't. It also allows you connect/disconnect individual boxes easily.

Dude this is incredibly helpful! I have about 80 hours into starfield, but haven’t messed with outposts much because of how intimidating it is. Thanks a ton man, I can truly tell that you put incredible effort and incredible amount of time into this guide. This is my first video of yours, but you’ve got yourself a sub in me. Love from Ohio!

Thank you very much for this guide. It has made this confusing issue make a lot more sense and it has been very helpful in recognizing some of the mistakes I made. I really appreciate you explaining everything as well as your suggestions.

Cargo links are not based on UT, they are based on in-game time. You're best off setting it all up and going off to quest for half an hour to an hour. This will ensure your operation is well underway.

If you're crafting in an outpost it automatically can pull from all storage chests at that outpost. No need to manually grab materials unless you're gearing up for massive crafting sessions that need more than all your storage can hold at once.

Thanks so much for putting in the hard work to cover this subject ! I hope the algorithm rewards you!

dammittttttttt... yes! I deleted all outposts, recreated all links, and even doing the specific storage for outgoing or ingoing yes everything goes in circle around my outposts. well thats actually fine, sometimes i need some materials here and there, so make my life easy. thanks for the very well organized explanation. thanks keep up the good work

I have found that creating links between points of shipment tend to get bugged when you make connections while an outpost is in the process of manufacturing. The way to avoid this is before making the connection to transport out allow your storage to just completely fill up everywhere in the outpost and can speed this process up by waiting. Once all of your outpost containers are full then create the outgoing link. I also try not to interfere with production. So I place a main kill switch between power and my manufacturing because most of the time unless your are frequently pulling your inventory then your storage will fill up and only be relieved from a transport. That way I can shut down manufacturing at the outpost, pull all of the inventory to my ship and then turn it all back on at once allowing each piece of machinery to fire up at the same time. You will even notice at that point all of your extractors are operating 100% tangent with each other meaning you see them go up and back down synchronized. This allows each machine to be producing the same amount and sending it to their respective storage with better efficiency. This is another layer of work because you are wiring each machine up rather than the passive power but this method also allows complete control of operation and is more efficient. I like to wire each of my power sources together in a daisy chain, then the last to the switch. Then from the switch to each of the extractors separately. So you shut that switch off and everything shuts down. In my experience this can prevent a lot of the bugs. I mean they included power switches for a reason. And rather tear everything down you can just reboot it

I love some of these suggestions. You have put some significant effort into gathering these ideas. Thank you, bruh.

Appreciate the vid, the positivity, and the diagram!

I found a nice trick to have my containers spaced out. Build a 2x2. Place a 1x1 at the bottom left. Place a 1x2 to the left, and it will be off set by a 1x1 square. Place another 1x1 at the bottom left and then another 1x2 on the bottom left. It's offset by another 1x1 unit. Now all your rows are lined up perfectly. Thanks for the 60 limit conection tip!

Thanks for all your info. I think that two things are the main issue. One is the separation of time with production and the cargo ships. This causes massive build ups of resources waiting to get shipped. Then, with the inter system links, ships will pick up 500 cargo and only be able to drop off 300 (probably the source of the bug) the extra 200 cargo seems to get stuck in the ship, meaning that it will no longer release that 200. Something then happens each subsequent shipment where it seems to pick up the resources but will no longer drop of the resource types that are stuck in the ship. This causes the scenario where you have multiple resource types but only one is getting dropped off. I say that because I noticed that when you break the link between stations and quickly exit the menu, you see that all the stuck resource types get sent to your inventory and the ship's storage goes back to 0/500. I think the best and most optimal setup is what you show here. Link resources to your transfer station and run the resources manually between planets and then go to your main base and craft for the mad xp boost. It sucks that the cargo links don't work and hopefully will be fixed soon, but until they run on the game time and not real time, they will never be as productive.

I had no idea about the command console on the cargo link. That’s the one nugget I needed!

Thanks for link graph at 8:55!

I have a lot of outpost work to do this weekend. Thanks man

A few Building tips if interested; The only limit for space is really where you want your initial extractors, so place all those first and build right up to, and around them later. You can then fill up the base over the resources without affecting extraction! Room for cool and useful stuff like a decked out hab/watchtower/work stations/turrets etc! Build it up slowly best jump in test and plan certain placement as; 1. Storage linked stacks are the hardest to move. 2. transfer/ship platforms require the most space and should be as close together as possible for easy getting around. But it’s all easy to move! (Except large storage stacks) You can always shuffle around later to better setups, that’s what I did. I Love 💕 my highly productive beautiful main outpost now! Ty @Tacticat!

Thanks man, this was really helpful in troubleshooting my cargo links.

Nice work, very well done. Really liked the diagrams

I believe your problem is your trying to use your transfer station for incoming I believe it is ment to be used for you to transfer your product directly to your ship (out going ie: automated manufacturing) without you leaving your ship. just run a link to a set of cargo boxes directly from the cargo link incoming. Do not use the transfer station that way the incoming ship will continue to fill the boxes until they are full.

Learned a lot

Yeah, when you sleep, it plays catchup with deliveries after you wake. So, you if you sleep and then just wait a moment, you'll see the containers fill pretty quickly. I actually stack the containers high at my depot base for this reason. I can just look out of the cockpit and see the green bar is full/load the ship/fabricate/sell.

you need a distribution base, where resources from other outposts come in, and they all go to 1 cargo link, linking everything directly to main base.. and in fact you need multiple distribution bases that collect from many extractor outposts.. and the main base only has connections to these distribution bases. Other wise you'd need multiple main bases because there aren't enough cargo links allowed in 1 base for all the resources. So Extractor->Distibution->Main base

Great job, sir!

Thank you for your work. Subed!

By creating a flow diagram really explains a lot with less words. Been thinking the same how to create clean designs. Subbed.

Something I haven't seen mentioned in these base building videos: According to an in-game popup, bases receive increased production rates if you FULLY survey the planet they are on. Don't neglect your scanning

For sake of ease of linking containers in isometric view I put every container in single row not putting containers on each other. Then I link from left to right or vise versa. And after connection made I move containers to stack them in columns. So you get zig zag linking without doing zig zag manually. That's faster for me.

great video

The ship builder has a "flight check list" that gives you hints if something breaks. The intersystem cargo links has nothing like that and it constantly breaks. Spending time trying to understand why your network of intersystem cargo stopped working is frustrating. You can try different things: Save and reload. Restart the game. Tear down and rebuild. It seems completely random when it works or not. Even when you get things working they may break again even if you leave your "working" setup unmodified. My advise: Ignore this part of the game unless you enjoy traveling back and forth and trying random things. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Good luck everyone - Enjoy your adventures :)

This is all amazing, still need a way to transfer multiple resources through a cargo link without one resource overcrowding the storage and preventing other resources from coming in.

The small stacks of storage was game changing. I’d been building huge walls of storage and spent hours troubleshooting crappy links. Getting the four main resources from one outpost was great. I tried initially but gave up and had 3 outposts with some overlap. The crater/mountain thing let me consolidate it all to one outpost.

Thank you 😮

Dude you’re an outpost genius 😂

The man's a genius

Yes thanks you!!!!!!!

Nice video I took away a few things from it, My thoughts is that if this is first resource gathering outpost then by all means place down your storage containers, that's a given, but... if this is just a distribution outpost then I would suggest forgoing the storage containers all together and link your extractors straight to the outgoing of the cargo links along with the helium needed for the intersystem cargo links. Due to storage limitations I would also suggest creating two outpost with 3 - 4 cargo links "distribution" having all of your other outpost going to the distribution and then two cargo links at the home base and have the two distribution linked outpost aimed at the home distribution that way it would help relieve the bottle necking and hold up along with the noise.

quick tip press right click for both starting and and selecting the links

Wish i found your channel days ago before i went through all this bugged cargo link stuff. I must have spent 10 hours just messing with cargo links trying to figure out what i was doing wrong.

20:10 I was having the same exact issue. I had my last storage box linked to the outgoing of the cargo link but it would not pull from the last storage container in the chain. I just had the idea to try the second to last link of the cargo box chain and it suddenly worked. I just re-did the links to everything and it works fine now.

I learned and laughed nice vid

Place the workstation next to ship platform in main base. Also create a lot of buffer storage in main base (30x conteiners) and in farm bases when usin cargo links. I personally avoid transfer station.

I would also always place the large round ship landing platform straight away. If later you have a ship too big it will not land at the outpost, it will land at “the original landing site” much further away. The large platform is also great for ship building and modifying so win win. NOTE: you can switch current active ship to the original starting frontier or a small ship you own at the platform to not have to run back to that big ship you landed on but this can also bug out and require a save and reload. To avoid I recommend just setup the bigger ship platform on initial build. 👌👍

Nice work

The infinite storage chest in the basement respawns if you leave it for a period of time not sure how long I would put anything in there safe in bedroom is SAFER

You also get a room in the lodge that has no cap on weight in a locker

Excellent video! I wish I watched this before making a total hash of my first 6 outposts. Got so many red laser links it’s like a scene from a movie where the burglar is trying to steal the jewels and having to get through the laser security system lol honestly a criss cross of red lasers. I didn’t know about the daisy chain tidy way you do it. Also my cobalt and nickel outposts are on a harsh planet with loads of restricted areas. Did that twice on the same planet 🙈 Got 2 of my 8 left so will make those 2 fails only nickel and find mainly cobalt. Then one more for tungsten and hopefully lead. Thanks for showing me the way 🚀

ok so one cargo link transfers 300 materials to it's destination every 4 game minutes. unless they fixed it in the .36 update sleeping doesn't affect that. it just means that the link that is exporting is actually filling up before transfer, which is not the same thing as the actual transfer of the good.they also take a minute to load and a minute to offload with a 2 minute flight time.also i only ever use the transfer station for final product parts from fabricators since that is where your money is really coming from. also using power switches helps with power issues and upgrading to larger storage as you research and skill up. it's a fun process and i actually love it. i just wish that the links were based on UT and not real time.

Nice appreciate the tips time to fix my cargo links…I follow your other video and didn’t realize that cargo links had outgoing and out coming boxes

I didn’t know about the storage bug but it makes sense, I have been having issues getting more resources from my other outposts. Kind of been putting my outpost building to the side as I work on getting more levels.

2 things. 1. do not put anything into storage from personal inventory could cause problems. 2. every system receiving/shipping MUST have HE3 connect to the back part. make it separate HE3 even if it comes threw different planet.(ive done it and it works. make sure to use enough of it) you need 5 HE3 for each one. do not use HE3 from your main storage that you are shipping to feed it.

Just a caution, but be careful when placing the robots. There's a bug that causes the game to freeze when you place them near an object. If they disappear next time you visit a base and you activate the scanner, the game will freeze/crash and render that base unusable. It's possible that even by leaving and attempting to go back that the fast travel point for it may disappear.

4:59 Of course it doesn't matter. I drink your milkshake.

I remember seeing another youtuber saying that the cargo links ONLY work in real time, and they will not work whilst you are waiting or sleeping. When you wait or sleep, the cargo link system pauses, until you start "playing" again. I've not used the cargo link system myself, so I can't comment on it myself, but it was something I did see another youtube guide mention

To not have to worry about deleting the entire structure you have to remove the link from both locations not the entire cargo

Thank you I was wondering why I was producing a lot of copper and iron

I have to constantly remind myself that this is a bethesda game and not factorio or satisfactory. The lack of efficiency is killing me and no sorting makes my brain melt. There is so much missing in the outpost system but I enjoyed your guide! Thanks!

another tip for linking storage faster, rightclick links them too. So you just look at the starting container and then find your rythm for rightclick start link, rightclick place link

I like your focus on "gaming the system." Most videos seem limited to very basic guides. I'm glad it's there for other people, but I don't really need basic UI functionality and game mechanics explained to me. What I hadn't grokked, though, was how to turn those basic skills toward making a profit or in the case of your farming legendary items, getting the best gear. Keep it up!

Build the perfect outpost and then do it 10 more times. One for each NG+ cycle.

From what I noticed, when a cargo ship lands, it makes all the storage boxes flow when connected to cargo links. 11:58

This is harder than algebra. I think I’m not even gonna bother building an outpost.

Late as always, I know... I think the drill head is the 'center'... or rather the point preventing overlap...

I just wanted to say that your thumbnail is the reason I clicked on this video.

in my opinion this game lacks a ressourcefilter-module.

I've never seen a RU-vidr cite his sources so well lol😂

Another trick for outpost item placement; if you cant get the rotation right you can scroll to the next item and back and it will alight it perpendicular with your character. IE you can position yourself instead of the item to get a clean angle.

I fixed my cycling of resources by untracking all of the resources so that my cargo ship would dump all of it to my main base. I also build storage next to the incoming container and put output link from incoming container to the storage then output link from storage to outgoing container from my outgoing cargo inter link so it would recycle if ever my main base is full

nice video, fairly clear and way better than I started out with, should help loads ... my question if you have had this problem .... how to sort multiple item types ie iron and copper on one system interlink ... I can get the items to the new interlink but sorting them ??? it goes into one storage and you are unable to separate the incoming types ie I have 6 items incoming from 1 outpost but I can only sort them into solid/gas/liquid not say iron and copper in the solid

IN the menu (tab) you can go to your inventory, and directly swap to cargo ship and then you can swap to the " inventory outpost " , you don't even need to leave the ship

14:47 Linkage map

if you have a manufacturer connected to storage, it will make resources flow fast too

The main question is still: Why would you even build outposts? I made my first character focuses around outpost/the science skill tree and I regretted it: Don't get me wrong, I would enjoy to build up a logistic network, which automatically produces all the components needed to build an advanced nulcear plant, but this is extremely tedious on so many levels. I would still like to go through all of that, if there is at least a real benefit in doing so, but it seems, that there are only two main benefits from outpost: - You can cheese yourself massive amounts of xp with crafting (but this doesn't require a big network of outposts and ruins the fun (i didn't do that)) - you can build "better" outposts (and even here is the question: what is "better"? They may be able to produce stuff faster, but it is already producing stuff so fast, that you don't need it (except for the xp-cheese, but you could just wait longer for htis one) On the other hand, the list of things you can't do, is rather long: - You can't craft ammo - You can't build a ship with ressources (only with money) - You can't automatically sell stuff from the outposts - you may be able to gather the ressources needed for weapon mods, but honestly, it is not worth spending real life days on the system for that, since you can just buy the ressources needed in minutes Am I missing something here? I have to say I am disappointed with the system and started a new char, I might come back to the system, if there is some use to it

With cargo links being so buggy, the best possible thing to do is not use them. Build the largest cargo ship you can and travel to each outpost and manually transfer resources yourself.

i wonder if it is also possible to make one super hub locationwhere u send all the resources to so like 1 system hub conecting 6 outposts that then sends its resources to ainter system hub where they get stored in an even buigger storage yard and transfered to a supra system hub where u actualy place the manufacturing macines? i am already trying to do that but so far my system hubs get swamped by mats so fast that i dont know if all the garthered mats actualy reach the 2nd hub !

You can also toss all your mats on the floor of your ship and it keeps them there.

Hey TactiCat, great info ty! Question: Transfer Containers: I can pull items out that are linked to my storage containers but I can't seem to scroll items or see my current inventory. Is this a thing or am I missing something?

Hey, is there any chance you can make a video that shows the best locations for outposts to gather all resources to the main base?

Dude. If you think that 5 hour production is good then you need to go to Bessel III-b in the Bessel system. 65 hour production rate. Sleep one hour and you have infinite Iron, Nickel, Colbalt, and Aluminum.

Question If you pick one place with he3 and place nothing but cargo links all linked to storage can you have each link set to outposts across the galaxy bringing all those outposts goods to one central outpost?

dont know if anyone else mentioned this but there are actually 4 infinite storages in the lodge two more in the basement if you go thru the door by the mission terminal there is one on a table then another one in the room to the left and then the safe in your room

Ive started using the big containers. They hold 600 per. Less links and easier to maintain. Thanks for the vids. Not a fan of the outpost building and id never have the patience to test it. Your videos save me time and hair hahaaa. I think the transfer container should show that outposts complete inventory instead of it getting full like it currently does. Sometimes my transfer container is full of something I dont need and i have to pull it to get to something I need. I mean it looks like a lift that would go get what you need, and it should supply what you need... not just what it pulls randomly. Outposts management is designed so weird.

These videos are great bur just a note my cargo links bugged on my main base so i deleted all of them and remade them all they worked for 1 sleep cycle and then budded again so be aware they bug a lot I just decided to go outpost to outpost

See I never made rhe mistake of routing anything through the Transfer station, and in your main base I'm not even sure why you would link your storage as outgoing into it? I only have the transfer station as output to all my storage blocks ro unload the ship. This is a great guide though! I guess a lot of my cargo links must be bugged, but im too lazy to reset all dozen or more that I have 😂 but once i get around to NG+ Im gonna try and build something less cluttered maybe

If spa e is tight, can you put storage boxes all on top of the ressources? Ie inside the Extractor bubble.

How do the ships moving the cargo work? Are they from your fleet, or did the game just provide animation of a ship that's not in your fleet? Also, do you have to assign a companion to shift cargo?

Thank you for the explanation since it is very thorough how ever, I have one dumb question: once everything is in the outpost do I need to transfer it to the ship or what do I do with the material ? besides getting xp what else can I do with it ? I am only level 14 coming from shooting looting game so please bear with me.

How do you get the resources in the area to show on the top left side of your screen ? Is that a specific skill that we can acquire?

Nice video! I have been trying to land on a site where I can have the 4 resources like you did, and even when I do it on a perfectly similar spot, the mountains will never have iron, is this maybe something that got patched in the game?

Very cool guide series very helpful! Thanks! Just wandering the utility to put an installation to farm so hard because with just half this I over flow with basic resources. I’m not sleeping just doing missions and look like cheating when you comme back and craft all of this, this is so much xp and credits. Doesn’t it make the game to easy?

The bottom line is the cargo link system is way too bugged to be worth the time actually doing it in its current state. I’ve spent dozens of hours fiddling with it and in all cases it ends up a big mess that doesn’t work. It’s sad because this would have been my favorite aspect of the game. I just can’t justify putting any more time into something that is completely broken.

Man i wanna see the home base now

@tacticat My biggest issue is that all the inter-system cargo links run out of H3. I have it setup so my home base accepts all incoming resources. The problem is that only one of the other outposts has h3, so that H3 never gets to the other outpost (they are both linked to the home outpost, but not to each other). Even if I change it so I have h3 outgoing from my main receiving base from a dedicated storage unit that only has H3 inside , it ends up sending whatever other gases my base has in stock. And eventually the storage in the remote facility fills up with things other than H3 and the ships stop coming.

Thank you for this. Can you make a video explaining power generators. I can't seem to make these work efficiently at all despite having 6 extractors all going to helium production. It seems the generators take every bit of the helium despite having solar arrays also running the helium extractors. It has been an absolute headache trying to figure out the issue. Or is it that helium power generators need a buff in an update? It almost makes no sense to even have them. I have 0 helium production because the generators consume everything. It should not be this hard to figure out

I didnt get how that Helium buisiness works - can you explain that in more detail please?