Leveling in Starfield is extremely fickle. You can spend hours grinding the same mission, only to find that it rewards you with just 50 experience by the time you turn it in. Contrarily, you can get triple that amount of experience just by taking down a few bugs on a distant planet.
In a thread posted on the Starfield subreddit earlier today, players discussed this conundrum and reached an agreement on the best ways to level quickly in the game.
Players on Reddit concurred that the best way to level up quickly in Starfield is by simply killing things. Like many RPGs, grinding mobs is a tried-and-true way to power-level in Starfield, far more so than completing faction missions or playing through the main story. While questing and completing various tasks from the game’s mission boards don’t really give too much XP, finding a pack of mobs on a far-away planet and farming them over and over can get you dozens of levels in one sitting and will make the high-end levels feel a lot less like pulling teeth when you’re out of major missions to complete.
In many cases, you’ll find that you’ll be gaining more experience in Stafield from killing enemies than you would by actually turning in major quests. Only certain main story quests and faction missions give adequate experience relative to the amount of effort you put in.
One of the most deflating experiences in Starfield is to embark on a mission deep in the galaxy—such as a Constellation exploration mission or a Freestar Rangers’ hostage rescue mission—and pour time into it, only to be rewarded with 50 to 100 experience. Along the way, though, you’ll likely make up all that experience by killing mobs. In Starfield, the raw experience is usually found along the journey, not at the destination.
To really grind experience in Starfield, you’re going to want to find a planet that’s rich with fauna (animals, alien life, etc.) and farm it until you’ve exhausted every corner of the planet. A Reddit user named DruVatier also noted on the Starfield subreddit that aggressive fauna yield more experience than passive fauna, so keep that in mind when you’re slaughtering alien lifeforms out in the galaxy.
Players on Reddit also cited strategies like crafting items en masse and scanning planets from space via the Astrophysics skill to level up quickly.
In our experience, we found that the best way to power-level in Starfield was to continuously kill roaming packs of mobs until you physically can’t anymore—be it due to population thinning or you running out of ammo. After you find yourself at an impasse, go back to New Atlantis and restock on ammo, take a 24-hour rest, and prepare to get back out in the world.
