How to Fast Travel to Your Ship, Quest Destinations, and More - Starfield Guide - IGN (2024)

Starfield’s galaxy is a big one, and you can expect to be traveling impossible distances quite often. This will likely involve a lot of fast traveling — even if you enjoy taking in the sights of each star system. It may sound surprising, but fast traveling works in several different ways depending on where you are and where you want to go.

When Can You Fast Travel?

The most important rule to remember is the obvious one: You can’t fast travel to a place you haven’t been before. This applies to everything from City Districts, to points of interest on a planet, or a new star system. However, this isn’t the same as traveling to a new planet or system for the first time, which requires a different type of fast traveling.

You also cannot travel past a star system that you haven’t visited at least once before, which is why all systems past your closest unexplored star system are marked in red on the galactic star map.

How to Travel Between Systems

When you wish to explore a new planet or system, you’ll need to get in your ship and head into orbit. You can do this manually by entering your ship, sitting in the pilot’s seat, and lifting off into space — or you can simply open your galaxy star map and select the system and hold X to jump to it. You won’t be able to view the solar system in detail until arriving for the first time.

Important Note: Traveling across star systems requires two different things that aren’t explained that well: the Jump Range of your Grav Drive, and the Fuel Consumption of your He3 Tanks. At first glance, it can be difficult to figure out which is more important, or why you can’t reach a certain system. The easy way to remember is:

Your Jump Range is the max distance you can travel between two single star systems. This distance resets for each jump, so even if you jump a total of 50 light years, as long as each individual jump is within your limit, you’ll still be able to make it with no problem. Your Fuel Consumption measures the total distance traveled across all of your combined jumps.

This may mean that the 50 light years of multiple jumps may still be out of reach because it uses more fuel than your ship contains. The good news is that your fuel apparently regenerates after each fast travel is complete, so there’s nothing stopping you from making a few stops along the way first before you reach that far off destination instead of one single shot.

Fast Traveling to Planets and Your Ship

Once you’ve arrived in the system, you can select a planet or moon, which may display a small variety of points of interest that your scanners have picked up. This can include both structured areas like settlements, and randomized points of interest like abandoned facilities that may be different for each player. You’ll need to hold X again to fly into orbit around the planet before you can select where you want to land.

Thankfully, the return trip will be much easier, as you can fast travel as much or as little as you want to head home. After you’re done exploring a planet, you can choose to fast travel directly to your ship in a few different ways. When opening up the Surface Map, your ship will be listed as point of interest, allowing you to either click on it, or hit the button to Fast Travel to Ship (R on PC, Y on controller). There’s also the option to pull out your Scanner and highlight the ship’s icon in the distance, and use that to fast travel instead.

You can also bypass going to your ship entirely and simply select the planet you want to return to, and the city or point of interest you wish to go back to. Even if it’s several star systems away, you won’t need to stop in each system if you have the required fuel or grav drive. However, you’ll be stopped in orbit of a planet with a city to be scanned for contraband, requiring you to wait until the scan is complete to select the place to travel to once more.

Fast Travel Using the Scanner

Note that when you arrive at a planet that you cannot fast travel directly to a point of interest on the surface and are pulled into your ship’s view of the planet, you don’t need to pull out the map again if you have already selected a place to land. Simply press (F on PC, LB on controller) to pull up your scanner while piloting the ship and center your view on the point of interest, and you can fast travel directly to the surface.

This also works while traveling around on foot, as you can travel to any city district, point of interest, or your ship instantly by highlighting the map marker as it appears on your Scanner and choosing to fast travel to the point.

Fast Traveling By Mission

If you are ever unsure of where to go next for a quest, there’s a fast travel option for that too. All you need to do is open up your Mission Log (L on PC or select the bottom of the menu screen on controller), and select a quest you wish to pursue. There will be a prompt to travel directly to wherever the quest is guiding you towards, and will find whichever planet and system you’re being directed to, and bring up the map screen to show you where you can travel to.