Planet Surveying

Planet Surveying is a gameplay mechanic in Starfield. While surveying, a player explores a planet and identifies resources and other features.

Overview

When initially landing on a planet, it is largely an unknown.

Surveying the planet identifies the following properties of a planet:

• Resources
• Flora (i.e. plants)
• Fauna (i.e. animals)
• Planetary Traits

All planets will have resources, but not all will have flora, fauna, or traits.

Scanning

Planets can be scanned from orbit. Orbiting reveals which minerals are present, but does not identify fauna, flora, or traits. Scanning from orbit can be significantly enhanced with the Scanning and Astrophysics skills.

The player can land without scanning from orbit, but as scanning is fast and easy, there's little reason not to.

Surveying

The handheld scanner can be utilized while on foot to scan resources, flora and fauna, anomalies and planetary traits. Survey completion information is displayed bottom left of screen when the scanner is activated. The planet map shows broader survey information, including different environments and the survey completion percentage for that environment.

Mineral resources can be either solid rocks or gasses from vents. The player only needs to gather these once to be considered surveyed. Some gas vents are hazardous to the player's health. The player may also find subterranean (underground) deposits. These can only be exploited with an Outpost.

A planet may have multiple biomes that need to be surveyed to complete the survey of the planet. Some flora and fauna will be biome-specific. The game will display when all the fauna and flora of a biome have been scanned. The player will need to take off and land elsewhere to change biomes.

A planet may have no traits or several planetary traits. Planetary traits can discovered by visiting anomalies on the planet's surface. Natural anomalies are more likely to give trait data than human settlements. Some traits are beneficial and others are not.

Scanning on foot can be made easier or faster with the Surveying, Botany, and Zoology skills. Surveying planets with life is usually more time consuming.

Benefits

A planet that is 100% surveyed will grant the ability to construct Outposts to get more value out of the planet. For a more immediate gain, the player will be granted the planet survey data, which has considerable credit value. The player will also get a one-off XP reward.