"If it moves, kill it." - The Road to Level 100

[chefcook90]

On my journey to level 100, I've learned some interesting stuff about the game that could help you out, so if you want to skip to that, check out the bulleted section after the paragraph here.

I've got 1 achievement 'till 100% perfect completion, and it's turning out to be by far the most grindy one: Reaching level 100 on a single character.
Now, you probably know by now that different systems have different difficulty levels, and that the enemies in this game scale to those levels and NOT to the player's level (the exception being enemies you encounter during major quest lines)
The highest system level in this game is 75, so once you exceed that amount by 10 levels and hit level 85 or so, your exp gain slows down CONSIDERABLY.
I've thus begun to resort to quantity over quality when it comes to killing stuff - instead of hunting the highest-level enemies possible, I just kill anything that moves.
And I mean ANYTHING.
I've got currently got bounties in excess of 2 million credits EACH with the United Colonies and Freestar Collective!
Anywho, thanks to this I've learned quite a bit regarding the mechanics behind bounties, space combat, difficulty settings, and exp gain, so I'm going to share them below:

1. Difficulty setting and EXP gain
- I can 100% confirm that raising the difficulty does absolutely nothing to improve exp gain. Enemies are the exact same level and give the exact same amount of exp on Very Hard as they are on Very Easy - the only difference being that they're MUCH harder (and thus much slower) to kill due to only taking scratch damage from your weapons while hitting you back 10 times as hard.

2. Mass murder is a great way to earn money and stock up ammo
- turns out even wimpy level 5 civilian ships can end up having thousands of credits when you loot them, and for some reason EVERY civilian in the United Colonies carries an Eon pistol and a supply of 7.77mm caseless, so if you're a fan of the Beowulf and Kodama, it's basically free ammo.

3. You can still fast travel to the Lodge even if you have a colossal bounty on your head

4. Clearing bounties
- Getting captured by UCsysdef and meeting Ikande will wipe your bounty with the UC regardless of how high it is at no charge, but it only works once. And for some bizarre reason, they STILL wipe your bounty even if you choose to attack them and shoot your way off the Vigilance!
- Surrendering to patrol ships doesn't work if there's more than one ship, since combat with secondary targets doesn't stop and being attacked immediately ends your hail.
- No matter how high your bounty is, it seems like the prison sentence is one week in jail lol. The downside however is a MASSIVE Exp penalty. I tried getting around it by waiting until just after leveling up to surrender to the authorities, but all that did was give me NEGATIVE exp.
- Don't rely on killing witnesses to remove bounties, because unless you're only dealing with 1 or 2 witnesses, there's a 95% chance it won't work, and even then it only removes the most RECENT bounty.

5. Neon is a safe haven for criminals
- This is probably the biggest one: Neon doesn't care if you have bounties with the UC and FSC. You're free to fast travel to the Neon core and do all the shopping you want at any time, regardless of your criminal history (just so long as your crimes weren't committed against Neon itself)

6. Space combat
- Your grav drive is your best friend. Remember, you can always jump away and recharge your shields in another system if things get too hot
- Auto turrets are OP. They absolutely mulch enemies ships while all you have to do if focus on flying. Just be careful not to position them too close together or they might not fire properly.
- Ships around planets will respawn every time you jump in and out of a system. If you're wondering why there are so few cities in the Settled systems, it's because the vast majority of the human race is living on space ships apparently lol

Hope that helps!

[alanc9]

Interesting.

I'm a little confused about why just NG+ing again and fighting scaling enemies isn't the efficient solution, though.

[chefcook90]

Originally posted by alanc9:

Interesting.

I'm a little confused about why just NG+ing again and fighting scaling enemies isn't the efficient solution, though.

Eh mostly because if I wanted to fight enemies that scale, I would need to do the main story again - regular randomly generated enemies don't scale with NG+

[Mommy💋LipStick]

so character only goes up to level 100 ?

You've spoiled it for me BIG TIME :(...

I thought the level wos capped at 999 :/ !

[Cutlass Jack]

Originally posted by LipStick:

so character only goes up to level 100 ?

You've spoiled it for me BIG TIME :(...

I thought the level wos capped at 999 :/ !

There was someone who cheezed his way to level 302ish on this forum and was complaining the game was too easy. So I wouldn't worry.

[Mommy💋LipStick]

Originally posted by Cutlass Jack:

Originally posted by LipStick:

so character only goes up to level 100 ?

You've spoiled it for me BIG TIME :(...

I thought the level wos capped at 999 :/ !

There was someone who cheezed his way to level 302ish on this forum and was complaining the game was too easy. So I wouldn't worry.

actually , iam at lvl46 playing at very hard dificulty, and defeating legendary enemies is already eZzzz for me at that level ^^

i guess, i won't miss anything then ..

[Pagan]

Originally posted by LipStick:

so character only goes up to level 100 ?

You've spoiled it for me BIG TIME :(...

I thought the level wos capped at 999 :/ !

level 100 is to get the achievement not the max level

[pike]

What traits ?
How’d it work out ?

[Solardream]

Um, there's no level cap in Starfield. That's already a a fact from Bethesda. (I don't know where some dolts got the misinformation thinking there us, as you can easily look it up that there isn't). I just made it to level 105. No mods, no console.
You could eventually max out every skill with no level cap. You'd probably just need to play everything, over and over in more NG+s. That would be...a long time.

[Mommy💋LipStick]

Originally posted by Pagan:

level 100 is to get the achievement not the max level

That too... but your missing my point.. When i wrote Capped , by that i meant to know how strong you realy could get ingame by reaching END LVL ...

Originally posted by Solardream:

Um, there's no level cap in Starfield. That's already a a fact from Bethesda.

REALY 0_o ? No capp at all? so, you can level your character up to lvl xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx so on and on ?

I mean how does that number appear / translateson to your screen in game ?

cheers,

[chefcook90]

Another thing I'm learning about space combat:
Moving faster doesn't actually decrease your odds of being hit.

Best thing to do is to cut your engines so you can divert more power to shields and weapons and act like a stationary turret - you'll be able to fire on your opponents 100% of the time, while the AI will only be able to fire on you half the time, since they'll need to take time to come about every time they fly past you.

[Mommy💋LipStick]

Originally posted by chefcook90:

Another thing I'm learning about space combat:
Moving faster doesn't actually decrease your odds of being hit.

Especially when there's strong AIM assist in the game .. for controller players LoL ^^

[Goof]

Originally posted by chefcook90:

- Your grav drive is your best friend. Remember, you can always jump away and recharge your shields in another system if things get too hot

so maybe im doing it wrong, but I can never grav jump once I'm targeted. I even tried to fly away one time, to try to jump, and the enemies seem to keep you locked on forever even if you're significantly faster than them

[chefcook90]

Originally posted by Goof:

Originally posted by chefcook90:

- Your grav drive is your best friend. Remember, you can always jump away and recharge your shields in another system if things get too hot

so maybe im doing it wrong, but I can never grav jump once I'm targeted. I even tried to fly away one time, to try to jump, and the enemies seem to keep you locked on forever even if you're significantly faster than them

You gotta make sure your grav drive is powered up - the more power you have invested in it, faster it charges.
Remember your Grav Drive is different from your Engines - on your power distribution it's the bar on the far right.

[sarcastic_godot]

A Bounty-less way from Lvl 85 to Lvl 100: Go big-game-hunting. With a big gun, preferrably one with Penetrator ammo...

Find a place in a nice, lush savanna landscape with big bad beasties. Ideally they have "herding" and/or "hunting" in their name. Climb a high-ish rock somewhere. Shoot one, wait a bit for many others to appear. Backpedallng / kiting can line them up nicely, which is where the Penetrator modification comes in handy.

...but yeah, quantity rulz.

[chefcook90]

FINALLY - just hit level 100 and got 100% achievement progress!

Now to never play this game again lol.

Unless they add more achievements with future content, but seeing as how it took 8 years to get the content the game currently has, I'm not holding my breath.