Starfield’s best side quests emphasize deception and discovery

polygon.com:

There is no shortage of things to pick up in Starfield — lots of curious little items that serve no other purpose than to decorate and delight. United Colonies scientists neatly stack research materials in cabinets and drawers, research binders lining shelves on the wall. Down in The Well, in a restaurant called Kay’s House, everything’s a lot more dingy; empty bottles and dirtied plates sit idly waiting to be picked up. There are pens on desks, forgotten tools tucked into corners, and half-eaten sandwiches abandoned on tables. Everything hums with electric possibility: Pick me up!

And so I do. I don’t like to steal — I crave the approval of my Starfield companions — but it’s so easy to grab things that it’s near impossible to resist the temptation. That, readers, is how I landed myself in United Colonies jail very early on in my Starfield journey, taken hostage by the government military in exchange for the theft of a literal piece of trash — a Styrofoam cup.

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[Ed. note: This story contains minor spoilers for several of Starfield’s faction quests.]

Instead of being sent to a regular jail cell, I landed on the UC Vigilance, where I was interrogated and then coerced — by the threat of jail time — into an undercover operation to infiltrate the infamous Crimson Fleet band of pirates. Very quickly, things spiraled into a complex storyline that took me across several galaxies in order to gain the pirate captain’s trust: I led a heist aboard a luxury spaceship before uncovering the secrets of a legendary Crimson Fleet pirate, and even made a few friends along the way. It’s not easy to walk the line between space narc and actual pirate, and I’ve already had more than a few slips back into a life of crime.

This quest is