Making a profitable outpost is rather easy. While some activities like moving contraband or doing the faction quest lines make more credits faster, outposts are a way to have a steady income. Even a low-level outpost can harvest materials to give you a passive income, but you’re likely wondering if it’s worth the trouble to set an outpost up just for making credits. The guide below goes over whether or not outposts can be profitable and how to increase the amount of money you earn from harvesting materials.

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Placing a basic extractor can set you on the path to making extra credits.

Can Outposts Be Profitable in Starfield?¶

Yes, outposts can be a great way to passively farm money, provided you’ve made the right preparations and have extractors set up. Outposts can be used to automatically harvest resources from ore veins. These can then be sold to vendors all over the universe to make some quick cash. Of course, there is quite a bit of math and a host of variables to consider when undertaking this process. Even if you just have an outpost that harvests an easy-to-find cheap resource like Aluminum though, you can still turn a nice profit from it. As vendors and the prices of items can vary based on several variables, you will want to focus on ensuring that you are both increasing the amount of credits you make when selling a product and the number of resources your outpost is producing every hour.

How to Make Quick Credits With an Outpost¶

If you are looking to start raking in the credits with your outpost, then there are a few steps you will need to take to maximize your profit. For starters, you should go ahead and start investing in the Commerce skill located in the social tree. This skill decreases the amount you pay for goods and increases the amount goods sell for with each rank you buy.

While this may seem like a small amount, at rank 1 of Commerce you are making an extra 10 credits for every 100 you sell. Every rank you unlock increases this bonus earning by five. By the time you reach rank four, you are increasing the profits of every item you sell by 25 credits per every 100 credits you make. This means that if you originally would have made 1,000 credits without the skill, you would now make 1,250 for reaching rank five, or gain 1/4 more credits per transaction. Here’s the increase you can expect with each level of the Commerce Skill.

• Commerce Rank 1: Purchases decreased by 5%, and sales increased by 10%.
• Commerce Rank 2: Purchases decreased by 10%, and sales increased by 15%.
• Commerce Rank 3: Purchases decreased by 15%, and sales increased by 20%.
• Commerce Rank 4: Purchases decreased by 20%, and sales increased by 20%.

Once you have commerce ranked up you can start focusing on selling the resources your extractors are pulling from ore veins. If you don’t have the points to invest, then look into stationing a crew member who has the Outpost Management skill. We highly recommend you have a storage system set up to collect the harvested resources. You can also up the resources collected by your harvester by having a rank 4 Outpost Management skill. This will double the resources harvested by extractors. That means that if you are making 1,000 off of the current stack you are getting, this will easily double to 2,000 as you are getting twice as much product. This coupled with the 25% bump in credits from Commerce gives you a huge increase in profits without even focusing on which materials are the most valuable.

The most valuable mineable resource to sell in Starfield is Vytinium, but other resources are much easier to find and easier to start out with. All resources sell for a different amount of credits, but the rarer the resource the more money you can make. For example, Iron, an easy-to-find resource is only worth a single credit. While this may seem pointless at first, if you’re harvesting several stacks an hour, the credits you make from Iron can add up quickly. That’s because the main thing you want to focus on is production. There are three levels for each type of extractor base, commercial, and industrial. In addition, the type of resource you are harvesting also seems to affect production rate and time. With each level, you need more resources to make the extractor and more power to make them move. Here’s a basic breakdown of yield per extractor type, keep in mind that they harvest in real-time, not in-game time. Keep in mind this is before reaching rank four in Outpost Management which will double these numbers.

Extractor Level	Resource Yield (Two Minute Intervals)	Outpost Management Rank Four	Resources Per Hour
Base Level	1 Resources	2 Resources	30 - 60 Resources
Commercial Level	2 Resources	4 Resources	60 - 120 Resources
Industrial Level	3 Resources	6 Resources	120 - 240 Resources

By having an Industrial level extractor, you are getting three times the product every two minutes than you would with the base level. If you want to go a step further then you can even set up fabricators to mass-make items like Adaptive Frames. This way your resources are getting turned into items that can sell for an even higher value. If you like this system, but don’t feel like you will want to return to your outpost to transport goods then make a vendor cargo link. You will make a smaller profit off of your items, but this way you will be passively making income as you play the game, which can be a huge help. By combining all these skills together, running multiple extractors, and setting up multiple outposts, you can start pumping out tons of credits every hour.