How to Fast Travel in Starfield

Jul 09, 2023

How to quickly jump across space.

Fast Travel is an important mechanic in Starfield in order to get to different destinations quickly.

Sure, you might want to take the scenic route and perhaps just walk or run to your next objective when you’re in the middle of a Starfield side quest. However, you’ll likely want to save time just simply Fast Travel and finish it quicker.

There are plenty of ways to Fast Travel in Starfield, and the mechanic is very flexible, with a few restrictions. Below you’ll learn how to Fast Travel in Starfield, as well as when you’re not able to.

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If you’d like more help in your galactic adventures, visit our Starfield guides, tips and tricks page.

If you want to Fast Travel in Starfield, simply open up the menu and go to your Starmap at the top right. This will open up your current map, depending on where you are. If you’re on a planet, you’ll pull up the surface map and if you’re in space, it’ll pull up the Starmap. You can switch between the maps by pressing RB on the Xbox controller for the surface map or continually pressing the B button to zoom out further from the Starmap.

Just click on a location you’ve already discovered on the surface map and a confirmation will appear asking if you want to Fast Travel to it. It’s that easy! There’s also the option to Fast Travel straight to your ship by pressing the Y button.

Additionally, you can also travel straight from the surface of a planet to being in front of another planet before landing on it. When pulling up the surface map, zoom out to the Starmap, select a different planet, and then hold X to set a course to it. The next screen will be you, inside your ship, in front of the designated planet.

There’s also a smart way to quickly get to your next destination in a side quest that you’re pursuing. In the menu screen, go to the bottom and select your Missions tab. Select a side mission and either press Y or X. Pressing Y will just show you where your next destination is on the Starmap. Pressing X is a quicker method as it will immediately pinpoint you to the exact location of your next objective and will provide you a prompt to land there.

This section explaining when you can’t Fast Travel in Starfield is actually more complicated than how to do so itself. There are three main situations where we found that you can’t Fast Travel: being overburdened with too many heavy items, being in combat, and not having enough fuel to make a warp jump on your ship.

Each item that you carry, whether it’s a gun or a simple coffee mug, has a mass assigned to it. Guns and equipment have heavy mass, while every day items like coffee mugs have very little. You have a mass limit that can be viewed in the Inventory screen in the bottom right of your menu. Once you go over that mass limit, you become overburdened. Not only does running drain even more of your oxygen and stamina, but it also prevents you from Fast Traveling at all.

Just simply offload some items you need in order to make sure you don’t go over your mass limit, and you will be able to Fast Travel again. You can invest skill points into the Weightlifting Skill, which increases your mass limit, allowing you to carry more items at once.

Being in the middle of combat or nearby enemies will also prevent you from Fast Traveling. You can worm your way out of a fight!

In terms of Fast Traveling between galaxies, you’ll need enough fuel and also have discovered planets along a specific route in order to cross those long distances. For example, in the picture below, my ship doesn’t have enough fuel capacity. To make the warp jump between my current location, the FOLII galaxy and the Kryx galaxy.

This isn’t a huge deal, as you will just need to make some extra jumps in between closer planets to inch your way closer to the Kryx galaxy. You’ll just have to suffer through a few more loading screens than usual as you bounce around planets.

To solve this problem, you need to either add more HE3 tanks to your ship, or invest skill points into your Astrodynamics Skill. Increasing the Skill's rank will increase the grav jump range of your jumps by a certain amount of percentage points, as well as reduce the amount of fuel needed to make the jump.

That’s it for now! Have fun Fast Traveling throughout space in the universe of Starfield.