Starfield has a massive expanded the amount of things you can build and craft. From entire Outposts to weapon mods and research projects, everything you want to craft will require specific materials to create. These materials will be found all over the various planets, either as lootable objects, ores you need to mine, or even as items you can purchase from various vendors, but some will always be harder to find than others. Structural Materials, while not the rarest resource, are used in nearly every aspect of Outpost building and upgrades. If you’re running low on this crucial building block, here’s how to get more Structural Materials in Starfield.
Ways to get Structural Materials
Like any resource in Starfield, there’s more than one way to get your hands on Structural Materials. The easiest, but most expensive, will be to simply buy them from one of the many shops around the galaxy. Vendors’ stock is slightly variable from day to day, but you can typically rely on any of your more “general” stores to carry this common material, such as the Jemison Mercantile in New Atlantis or Shepard’s General Store on Akila. Each vendor will only hold a specific amount, so if you need a lot, you will need to do a little legwork. After buying out everything a vendor has, if you wait for 24 hours at a chair or bed, you can go back and their stock will be replenished.
If you’d rather get your hands dirty and actually find your own Structural Materials, there are two ways you can go about it. Visit a planet and start scanning the various flora and fauna. Once you’ve fully cataloged them, see if any have Structural Materials as a lootable material. If it is a plant, you can simply approach and interact with it to pick up some, while alien creatures will need to be killed and harvested for their goodies. This can be time-consuming, and quite dull, but once you’ve found a planet with what you need, you can always fast travel to and from of the planet to reset the map and gather as much as you need.
If you want to automate getting Structural Materials, you will need to invest in several skills related to Outposts, Botany, and Zoology to make it happen. If you do, you can build specific modules at your outposts that will generate Structural Materials for you. While this is fantastic, the time and material investment you need to make to actually reach this point will probably cost you way more Structural Materials than you would spend on whatever you needed it for in the first place.
The last way is the least reliable and recommended since it is all down to chance, but all the random bases and outposts that spawn on planets have a decent chance of having at least some Structural Materials free for the taking. There’s no guarantee you’ll get what you’re looking for, and you won’t find a huge amount when you do, but it is just another reason to explore those random locations when they pop up.
