Supply Missions inStarfieldare a bit of an undertaking for not much of a reward, so players might be wary of them altogether.
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But, in the process of building everything players will need to fulfill the requirements of most Supply Missions, players will find that they’venow learned the Outpost Building mechanicsand are flush with hundreds of minerals/resources (depending on the mission). However, it can be incredibly confusing to get to this step, so let’s go over howStarfieldplayers are meant to complete Supply Missions.
Understanding & Accepting Supply Missions
First of all, players are going to need to accept a Supply Mission to get started. To find these missions, players will either need to craft a Mission Board in their Outpost or find one in a major city. Cydonia on Mars, for example, has one right when players walk into the bar near the entrance. Once players are looking at the Mission Board,below all the Bounty Missions, they should see a couple of missions that all use some similar verbiage of ‘Create Cargo Link to supply…’ with a mention of this mission ‘requiring a Cargo Link’ at the bottom of the description. Remember to check the Mission Boards at multiple locations, as that does seem to have an impact on what’s offered.
In any case, these Supply Missions are simply asking players to supply some City (such as Cydonia or New Atlantis) with X amount of a material/resource (such as 440 Adaptive Frames or 100 Vanadium). Accept this and the mission will be ‘In Progress’ and able to be tracked at any time from the missions menu.
Why Players Tend To Drop Or Avoid Supply Missions
Once the mission is accepted, here’s where things get complicated and whereplayers will need to learn how certain aspects ofStarfield’sOutpost crafting works.The strategy varies a bit from Mission to Mission, so for the sake of this explanation let’s use the ‘Supply 440 Adaptive Frames to Cydonia’ mission as an example. So, first, if it’s an Industrial Resource or ‘Manufactured Resource’ the mission is asking for, players will want to go to an Industrial Workbench and see what goes into crafting the required resource.
There are two ways to mine resources inStarfield. One is to find the small chunks of ore sticking out from the ground or walls and use the Cutter to mine that. The other is to use the Hand Scanner to locate underground veins of different minerals.
Following the example, it’s asking for Adaptive Frames which each require 1 Iron and 1 Aluminum. So of course, this means players will need 440 Iron and 440 Aluminium. From here, it becomes a search for the perfect planet and or planets to mine these resources from. In this example, the ‘dream’ situation would be finding a planet that has both Iron and Aluminum deposits underground so they can set up an Outpost that includes both these deposits. But, the majority of the time the player won’t get that lucky and will have to manufacture a mining Outpost for Iron on one planet and manufacture another for Aluminum on a second planet.
Making A Mining Outpost
Before moving on to the next step of the Supply Mission process, players will need to know how to go about setting up a mining outpost for a specific resource. To put it as simply as possible, players must travel to a planet with their desired resource, find a vein of that resource underground, set up both an Extractor and power source, and then set up a Cargo Link. However, for players who are still confused by this process, let’s go over it step-by-step:
Description
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Land on the planet with Iron or Aluminium and use the Hand Scanner to find an underground deposit.
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Place an Outpost down somewhere near this deposit.
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Craft an Extractor (or multiple) for that resource and place it somewhere above the resource vein.
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Craft a power source of some sort such as a Solar Array, Wind Turbine, or Fueled Generator, and make sure it’s linked to the Extractor.
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Once the Extractor is active, it can only hold a small amount of the resource in its storage, so players will also want to craft a Storage Container, place it down, and create an Output Link from the Extractor to the Container.
Follow this process for both the Iron and Aluminum and players should quickly find they are now the proud owners of hundreds of chunks of both resources. However, it’d be absurd to weigh down any Cargo Holdwith hundreds of pounds of Iron, so this is where players are meant to use Cargo Links.
Cargo Links & How They Work
Once players have the mining Outpost(s) all set up, it’s time to move on to the final step,setting up Cargo Links. This is the step where a lot ofStarfieldplayers get confused, and rightfully so, it’s a bit obtuse (hopefully this will eventually be fixed).Essentially, if the two planets the player is mining Iron and Aluminum from are in the same ‘system’, they can use the standard Cargo Link. Also, for anyone confused about the definition of a ‘system’ remember that both Mars and Earth are in the ‘Sol System’ inStarfield.
However,if the two planets are in separate systems, they’ll need to use the Cargo Link-Intersystem.The only real difference between these is that the standard Cargo Link doesn’t use any resource in order to function, while the Carog Link - Intersystem uses 5 units of Helium-3 for its Operating Cost.
After placing the Cargo Link, pick either the Aluminum Planet or the Iron Planet as the ‘hub’ to build the Adaptive Frames on, and place Cargo Links in both Outposts. For the sake of this example let’s say the Iron Planet is the hub that the Adaptive Frames will be built on. After the Cargo Links are placed, players can either use the image gallery above or these steps below to get through the rest of the process:
Walk up to the console panel of the Aluminum Planet Cargo Link, and interact with it to see a list of other Cargo Links it can ‘Link’ to.
Select the other mining Outpost in this menu and create a Link between them (look for that green icon to the far right of the name after Linking).
Back away from the panel, go into Build Mode, and create an Output Link from whatever object all the Aluminum is being stored inside to the red ‘Outgoing’ container on the Cargo Link.
Grav Jump back to the Iron Planetand build an Adaptive Frame Fabricator (there are multiple Fabricator variants).
Supply that Fabricator with power.
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Place another Cargo Link - Intersystem down, separate from the Iron Outpost to Aluminum Outpost Cargo Link, and interact with that one’s console to link it with the Cydonia Outpost. This is where the Adaptive Frames will be sent for mission completion.
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Create an Output Link from the storage container for the mined Iron and link it to the Fabricator.
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While still on the Iron Planet, create another Output Link from the blue ‘Incoming’ container of the Iron Planet to the Aluminum Planet Cargo Link. this will send the incoming Aluminum from the Aluminium Mining Outpost straight to the Fabricator.
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From here, the Fabricator should start crafting Adaptive Frames automatically over time.
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Players can then connect the Fabricator to a Warehouse (Storage Container) and then connect that Warehouse to the ‘Outgoing’ container of the Cargo Link connected to Cydonia.
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Or, alternatively, they can create an Output Link from the Fabricator itself and connect that to the ‘Outgoing’ container of the Iron Planet to Cydonia Outpost Cargo Link.
From here, the process should be entirely automated, with the only remaining ‘task’ being to make sure the Intersystem Cargo Links are being supplied with Helium-3 (which follows theexact same process as Fueled Generators). Players don’t need to follow the steps or process listed above exactly, and there are likely tons of ways to compress it even further, such asutilizing Transfer Containers for a bit more convenience. But in general, this is how the whole process works.
Supply Missions That Don’t Require Manufactured Resources
Not every Supply Mission requires Manufactured Resources, a good chunk of them just ask for a big haul of a certain Mineral such as Silver or Vanadium. In those instances,players can just skip the part of the process where they send Resources from Planet A to Planet B(and then from Planet B to the Mission’s Outpost) and instead will only need to makeone Intersystem Cargo Linkon whatever Planet they mine the required Material on.
Supply Mission: Completed
After all this is done, the mission will complete itself, it’s just a matter of time. However, if players notice that the X/440 amount hasn’t been updated in a while, it’s probably worth going back and checking to verify everything is working as intended.
Once it’s all said and done, players will be gifted with a couple thousand Credits and some EXP depending on the mission which, let’s be honest, is absolutely not worth all the time and effort it took to gather all the building materials and figure all this out.
However, players can at least repurpose their new automated system to craft endless Manufactured Resources, most of which sell for at least a bit more than what the parts used to make them can be sold for. It won’t be a huge profit at first, but once players build up thousands and thousands of Manufactured Resources to sell, they’ll be going back and forthbetween their Hub and the Denmaking loads of Credits. Also, players forget that crafting gives XP as well. When crafting one item, the XP gain is basically nothing, but when players are crafting 99+ items over and over again, they’ll be unintentionally power-leveling.
Starfieldis available now on Xbox Series X/S and PC.
