Starfieldhas an almost endless combination of biomes, atmospheric conditions, flora, and fauna, but one geographical feature that’s consistently hard to find across its roughly 1,000 planets and moons — at least,those with bodies of water— is a coastline.
While you can use your planetary scanner to find landing zones in coastal regions,the procedural generationof each landing zone you establish means you won’t necessarily be landing in a spot where you can see the actual coastline upon exiting your ship. This is particularly annoying when you’re trying to scan all of a planet’s resources and you can’t fill out the fauna category, often because there’s some sort of sea creature that you can’t possibly locate on land.
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Can’t See The Ocean For The Trees
A lot of players have used different strategies to try to locate coastlines once landing in a zone where one should be, such as climbing on top of their ships to get a higher vantage point. However, one player,posting on Reddit, has recently revealed a much more reliable method of finding the ocean.
Whether you’re searching for a coastline to help you complete a 100% survey of a planet or you’re just looking for a picturesque place to build a home base, these are some really useful tips for finding your way around Starfield.
Using the method laid out by Reddit user imaginarysprite, a player needs to have landed in a coastal region and exited their ship, then open up the scanner. Once the scanner’s already been opened, you can then open up the surface map of the area you’re currently in by hitting right bumper on Xbox. Once you’re in that screen, you’ll be able to use the surface map to look around a digitized lay of the land, which includes terrain height.
As should be expected, areas covered by water will have a consistent height that’s lower than the earthen terrain surrounding it, especially in hilly or mountainous biomes, so finding these flat areas and heading towards them will usually result in heading towards a coastline.
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But How Do You Scan Ocean Creatures
Even if you’re lucky enough to stumble upon a coastline, if you’re trying to scan the creatures that live in the ocean, you may still have a chore ahead of you. As pointed out by some people posting in the thread, a lot of fish and aquatic creatures have a tendency to stray too far from shore to be scanned from the coastline. While this isn’t a problem in areas with clean water, Starfield’s oceans are often dangerous for the player to enter,resulting in a loss of healthand negative lingering status conditions, like frostbite or microbal infection.
An obvious solution to this problem would be to just wander along the coastline with your scanner open, but that can be tedious. Reddit user ChickenScuttleMonkey popped in with a helpful tip for getting around this problem, suggesting using a boost pack to leap over the ocean and get close enough to the creaturs for your scanner to register them without actually taking a dip yourself, saying “it was so stressful, but I 100%‘ed the planet and it was so worth it.”
Whether you’re searching for a coastline to help you complete a 100% survey of a planet or you’re just looking for a picturesque placeto build a home base, these are some really useful tips for finding your way around Starfield.
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