Are you wondering how long is Starfield? Here’s the answer:
Starfield Story Length:
A story-focused playthrough on Normal difficulty or lower will take around 25-30 hours. With how open-ended the game is, it will vary a lot depending on how much side content you do.
- 20 Hours for a “rushed” story-only playthrough ignoring all side tasks on ‘Very Easy’ difficulty
- 25 Hours on ‘Easy’ difficulty for a story-only playthrough
- 30 Hours on ‘Normal’ difficulty for a story-only playthrough (if you temporarily switch to lower difficulty during high-level endgame sections)
- 35-40 Hours on Hard for story-only playthrough (if you temporarily switch to lower difficulty during high-level endgame sections)
These times assume you completely ignore all side content. If you go for side content during the story, see the next section for time estimates and add that amount to the story-only time. E.g. doing all 4 Faction Questlines as you play through the story would add another 20-30 hours. So your full playthrough would then last at least 40-60 hours, plus any extra time spent on exploration. Because of this we’ll break down the times by content type so you have a better idea how much there is to do. A very thorough playthrough could last 100 hours if you do lots of exploration and don’t focus much on the main story.
Faction Questlines
There are 4 faction questlines, each lasts for about 5 hours (doable in 3-4h if you skip dialogues).
- 20 Hours on Very Easy – Easy
- 25 Hours on Normal
- 30+ Hours on Hard
Miscellaneous Missions (Side Quests) & Activities
There is so much side content and no way to track completion (quest givers aren’t even marked) so it’s hard to say exactly how many missions there are. There are also some missable Missions that have specific unlock requirements, but they aren’t needed for anything important.
- 50 Hours rough estimate (mainly because of the searching required to explore cities for quest givers, they aren’t marked and there’s no proper in-game map or completion tracker)
Exploration
Technically there is an “infinite” amount of time you can spend on exploring all the solar systems, planets, and moons. But in terms of actually meaningful content for completion purposes:
- 2 Hours to visit all Star Systems (just a matter of using the Grav Jump to fast travel everywhere and some spaceship fights if you get attacked)
- 5 Hours to scan all planets (if you buy the Astrophysics skill that lets you scan them from 30 Lightyears distance it goes much faster)
- 3-5 Hours to experience every type of “Point of Interest” at least once (these are premade structures, their locations are randomly placed around planets but it’s the same couple types of objects pasted repeatedly. When you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all as they are just copies of the same thing over and over again.)
100% completing the surveying of all flora and fauna on every planet is hard to determine. It would take several hundreds of hours, probably 500h+, assuming you have the Surveying Skill to speed it up.
You can also spend vast amounts of time on leveling, crafting, building outposts and customizing your spaceship and exploring the main cities. It all depends how in-depth you want to get with these things, it’s not mandatory for story or quests, just an optional thing to do.
Doing a bit of everything once
- 100 Hours to have experienced a bit of everything that Starfield has to offer
After 100 hours you will have a good grasp of everything the game has to offer and have seen most of the meaningful content. After that it’s just more of the same.
1000 Gamerscore Time Requirement:
- Around 100 Hours total (25h Story, 25h Faction Questlines, 20h Misc Achievements, 30h+ grinding XP for Level 100)
For more Starfield guides check out Starfield Wiki & Strategy Guide.
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