A Starfield Player Has Already Surveyed All the Planets in the Game

Authored by twinfinite.net and submitted by TheAppropriateBoop

Much akin to past titles, Bethesda Game Studios’ galaxy-spanning RPG Starfield offers players plenty of activities to engage with. From swashbuckling space pirate to intergalactic bounty hunter to cosmic smuggler, there’s so much to do in Starfield it’s enough to make your head spin. And that’s without mentioning the five major factions in the game, with each one boasting their own distinct questlines.

Nevertheless, one incredibly patient Starfield player has gone off the beaten path and done the seemingly impossible: they’ve managed to fully survey every possible planet in the game. We’ll let that sink in for a second.

In essence, this is a monumental task as fully surveying one planet to 100% completion typically takes around three or four hours to do. Not only does a player have to visit every biome on a planet to achieve that exhaustive process, but it’s also heavily reliant on RNG as well due to the randomly generated nature of planet exploration. Outside of gas giants, which take approximately five seconds to fully survey, netting a 100% survey completion can take a lot of time and patience.

Specifically, Reddit user DoomZero has fully surveyed 1,694 planets in Starfield, and according to their estimates, it’s taken them around 180 hours to do this challenge. With some quick math, that equals over a staggering nine planets per hour. How did they do it so fast? Well, we imagine that those aforementioned gas giants skewed the numbers in a big way as you can achieve a 100% scan of them almost instantly, as long as you’re in orbit around said planet.

In addition, another tip that was shared in the thread is the fact that killing lifeforms on a planet’s surface automatically surveys them, so you don’t need to use your hand scanner. In other words, your gun can serve as your hand scanner, which is pretty handy. Lastly, another useful tidbit lies in the skill trees. Essentially, unlocking ranks in Astrophysics, Scanning, Botany, and Surveying all help speed up the process of getting that elusive 100% survey completion.

Still, this is an amazing achievement as Starfield has only been out for around a month now, so managing to nab full scans of every possible planet is mindbogglingly impressive. Heck, most folks would probably find the challenge a bit too boring and monotonous to see to completion. As a result, we tip our cap to DoomZero for genuinely going where no man has gone before.

Rigman- on October 4th, 2023 at 23:42 UTC »

In essence, this is a monumental task as fully surveying one planet to 100% completion typically takes around three or four hours to do.

Okay, so the person who wrote this article never really played the game, because once you understand how the game works, it took me no more than 10-15 minutes to fully survey the most active planets, and I'm sure someone 'speedrunning' this could likely figure out how to do it faster.

Specifically, Reddit user DoomZero has fully surveyed 1,694 planets in Starfield, and according to their estimates, it’s taken them around 180 hours to do this challenge. With some quick math, that equals over a staggering nine planets per hour. How did they do it so fast?

The math checks out.

RadRhubarb00 on October 4th, 2023 at 20:13 UTC »

Andrew Panton ??

demicus on October 4th, 2023 at 19:18 UTC »

"Already"? The game's been out for almost a month. I'm surprised someone didn't do it in a week. (Not a criticism of Starfield, just a comment on how insane some speedrunners are!)