Starfield has countless different vendors in countless different settlements across the universe, so you’ll never run out of buying and selling options. But each vendor has a finite amount of Credits, and you really don’t want to be running around the galaxy because the vendor on your planet is out of money. Thankfully, Vendors refresh their inventories from time to time.
Because Starfield has intergalactic travel, the frequency of vendors refreshing their Credits and items isn’t actually as simple as it is in most games. This is because time is relative to specific planets in Starfield, so if you aren’t accounting for Local/Universal Time differences, it can appear vendor resets are inconsistent.
How often do vendors reset their inventories in Starfield?
Vendor resets are actually completely consistent and regularly scheduled—it is time itself that is inconsistent in Starfield. Vendors will refresh their Credits after 24 hours of Local Time, and refresh their inventories after 48 hours of Local Time.
The Local Time caveat absolutely matters. In Starfield, time passes differently on each planet. In theory, if you go to a planet where time passes 10 times quicker than it does on Jemison, you would have to wait for 10 days before Jemison vendors would reset their credits. The flip side is also true—if you’re on a planet where time moves 10 times slower than it does on Jemison, you would only need to wait for two and a half hours for Jemison vendors to reset.
This attention to Time Zone detail is what can make it difficult to tell if vendors reset at regular inventories, because where you do your waiting absolutely matters for how much time is passing. Your best bet is to wait on the same planet as the vendor you’re trying to reset the Credits of, and just bank on needing 24 hours to do so.
When a vendor resets their Credits, it will be back to the amount they had before you bought or sold anything to them. When they reset their inventory after 48 hours, they will sell different items. The theme will be the same (doctors will be doctors, tailors will be tailors), but slight variations will be made each time.
How to speed up vendor resets in Starfield
With that said, you can get creative. If you find yourself on a nice little planet in which time moves extremely slowly, you can keep it in your back pocket as an option to reset all vendors, as waiting just a couple of hours on that planet should reset practically all vendors on any other planet.
If you build an outpost on a planet where time moves much slower than Universal Time (take Titan, one of Saturn’s moons in the Sol system, for example), then returning to that outpost and spending a bit of time there will almost guarantee that vendor’s inventories will have refreshed by the time you return to whichever city you were shopping in.
Personally, I’ve found that crafting Resources is the most common reason that I’m eager to reset a vendor’s inventory. Taking advantage of Universal Time and Local Time has allowed me to buy out a vendor’s entire inventory on New Atlantis and then pop over to Titan to use those new resources for crafting. By the time my crafting session has finished on Titan (a few hours locally), a full day will have passed on Jemison, meaning this process can be repeated as many times in a row as you need.
Granted, taking a seat and waiting for 24 hours really isn’t very much trouble, but it is still faster to use travel to do the work for you. Plus, taking advantage of relative time passage just makes you feel so clever, and I’d rather watch the grav jump animation than stare at the Wait Screen any day.
