If you want to survive in Starfield, whether it be in the Frontier or down on New Atlantis, you will need a pocket full of Credits. This universal currency is going to fund any and all activities you do in the game. Need new guns or ammo? You’ll need Credits. Want to purchase supplies to build outposts? You’ll need Credits. Looking to buy a new ship or upgrade your current one? You guessed it, you’ll need a ton of Credits. There are dozens of ways to earn yourself a decent income in Starfield, but most are slow and inefficient if you want to really splash some cash around. While you could just go around looting everything not nailed down and sell it hoping to raise a decent amount of money, here are the fastest ways to earn Credits in Starfield.
Fastest ways to earn Credits
Before we get into any of the specific strategies, there are two things you should invest in (or not invest in) to maximize all the methods below. First is to get specific skills that increase your Credit-making potential. These include Commerce, which decreases how much things cost and increases how much you can sell things for, Deception to make ships more likely to surrender and pay you off if you’re being a pirate, and Outpost management to increase your outpost efficiency.
As far as what you don’t want, either avoid picking or cancel your Kid Stuff trait. This will automatically take off 2% of your income each week to send to your parents. While small at first, if you’re amassing a small fortune, that percentage will only become more and more impactful on your bottom line.
Take assignments from all mission boards
In most major locations, usually where different factions are headquartered, you can find kiosks called Mission Boards that offer different sidequests you can select for (usually) easy credits. You can see exactly how much each one is worth, plus what type of mission it is in its description before taking it on. If you’re planning on running these, go ahead and mass-accept as many as there are and knock them all out in one trip to really maximize your time and collect a giant pile of Credits at the end.
Build Outposts and sell your goods
Building Outposts is completely optional in Starfield, but it’s an amazing way to passively earn resources you can turn around and sell. This does take a bit more legwork, and is less exciting than going on missions, but once you’ve established and refined multiple Outposts, you can rake in tons of credits almost automatically. Simply set up your Outposts to collect as many rare materials as possible, haul them to a vendor, and start selling them off. Just be aware that each vendor only has so much cash on hand, so eventually you will be forced to sell to multiple people to get rid of your entire stock, which is another downside.
Be a pirate!
We kind of gave this one away, but there are tons of Credits to be made by stealing from the various factions roaming the stars. Technically, you can steal from any ship, but some are less advisable if only due to you making enemies with specific factions and ending up getting a bounty. Of course, if you’re a true pirate, that may not matter, but you can always attack and raid other pirates without much consequence. The downsides to this method is that sometimes ships will just fight back rather than give in to your demands, though you can still board and loot them, and that space encounters are somewhat random, so you can’t exactly rely on this method all the time.
