21 things you should know before starting Starfield

polygon.com:

Starfield is a whole lot of game. There are ships to fly, stuffed animals to smuggle, outposts to build, and, oh yeah, artifacts to collect (and great mysteries of the universe to solve). The game itself, though, isn’t really forthcoming about a lot of the details of playing it. We’ve collected 21 tips, tricks, and pieces of advice we wish we knew starting Starfield.

Sure, there’s the whole “your choices have consequences” part to any sprawling RPG, but, in Starfield, the variation goes a little deeper. The settled planets and major cities you’ll visit are all predefined, so they won’t change or differ between players, but some smaller things on planets (like caves or bases) do appear to be randomly generated and randomly located. And that means some missions will have you visiting different systems, planets, and moons than other players.

We won’t go into any details due to spoilers, but we do recommend you play through the main story missions until you complete “Into the Unknown.” After you beat the first two missions, you get three missions you can tackle in any order. “Into the Unknown” rounds out the story of Starfield, and not playing that far before you wander off the critical path leaves out a huge part of the game.

It’s worth mentioning in the same breath that you should also maybe step away from the main quest for a bit after this mission. The main quest is doable at a low level, if you just want to mainline it, but you’ll have a better time if you don’t get randomly killed by a high level enemy mid-campaign.

Starfield’s skills do more than just improve abilities. A lot of the game’s mechanics are locked behind the first level of an associated skill — which means you’ll have to put at least one skill point into