CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN

A Starfield player surveyed every single planet, and it only took 180 hours

As a reminder, there are more than 1000 planets to find in the space-faring RPG.

News by Oisin Kuhnke Contributor

Published on Oct. 9, 2023

Starfield has only been out for a month, yet one player has already managed to survey every planet it's possible to do so on.

Easily one of the biggest selling points of Starfield is just how many planets there are. There's a lot of them! More than 1000, in fact, a pretty ridiculous number, and one that very quickly made me think "yeah, I'm probably going to visit 30 of them, maybe." But other people are a bit more ambitious than me, and by a bit I mean a lot, as Reddit user DoomZero shared last week that they had in fact fully surveyed 1694 planets. Which, to be clear, is essentially every single planet in the game, with the only reason that a couple aren't fully surveyed being a bug.

It's a surprising accomplishment, especially considering that they shared in the comments that of their 200 hour playtime, 180 of that was just surveying planets, a length of time I expected to be a lot longer. In an interview with IGN, DoomZero shared how they achieved this accomplishment, as well as their reasoning behind starting the quest in the first place. "Once I started playing and learned about the surveying and fully surveying planets the idea just kind of got stuck in my head," DoomZero said. "I am a bit of a completionist and thought that it would just be a cool personal accomplishment."

According to DoomZero, the biggest challenge they faced was to do with all the different kinds of fauna there are to discover. "There can be flying creatures and small beetles that you need to find. The most difficult one was learning that there are actually aquatic creatures to be scanned in the ocean biomes and those can only be accessed by landing in an area that has the (coast) descriptor attached to it. Another thing I realised early on was how important all of the scanning skills were going to be."

DoomZero also spoke of how the vastness of it all could feel overwhelming, but noted that "some of my favourite places that I surveyed were moons that may have only had a couple of resources on them but they were extremely close in proximity to large planets and the entire landscape is just a visual of that planet on the horizon." It sounds like even though not every planet is meant to be interesting, there's still something special to be found on plenty of them.