How to Mine Asteroids in Starfield

As you journey across hundreds of planets in the vast galaxy of Starfield you’ll run into all sorts of interstellar surprises, from enemy ambushes by the Crimson Fleet, to a hilarious hail from a booze-filled party ship, abandoned satellites, and everything in between. Every now and then you’ll of course come across asteroid fields drifting along the orbit of certain planets, and while the game doesn’t tell you outright, you can actually harvest from them. If you’re wondering how, here is our handy guide for how to mine asteroids in Starfield.

How to Mine & Gather Resources From Asteroids in Starfield

There are asteroid fields scattered across the galaxy, but it’s not always easily clear where they are. One of the earliest ones you’ll automatically come across (unless you immediately deviate from the Main Story with Constellation) is hovering around Neptune in the Sol Star System, which you’ll visit while trying to track down Moana during the Main Story quest “The Old Neighborhood”.

Once you’ve taken care of the hostile threat there and fulfilled that section of the quest, you can turn your attention to the asteroid field all around you. In terms of how to mine, or break up an asteroid, it’s actually very simple. You can use any weapon in your ship’s arsenal, be it your lasers, ballistics, or your missiles. A few hits or so will shatter a big asteroid into small pieces, some which will have a salvage icon, similar to when you destroy enemy ships that typically have a number of floating supplies to grab afterwards.

Take your ship towards the mined salvage, labeled “Mineral Deposit” (as seen above), and grab what you need from it. The items can be various common minerals like Iron and Nickel, to other resources like Water and Tetraflourides. It’ll go straight to your ship’s cargo, which you can then sell or use for whatever purpose you need.

Granted, it’s not the most efficient way to gather such resources, especially compared to purchasing them from a vendor or mining them via Outposts, but it’s simple enough to hit a couple rocks or so on your way to another planet, if just for a few items to add your stock.

That concludes our guide for how to mine asteroids in Starfield. We hope you found this helpful, and let us know your preferred way of resource gathering, or which you think is the best overall.

Be sure to check out all of our other guides for Starfield, as well as our official review of the game.