Starfield – How to Secure Your Outposts from Invasion

Pretty early in the game you learn that 6 turrets and 6 robots aren’t likely to stop an invasion of your Outpost if you built to the very edges of the building radius with extractors of 5-6 different resources. When you get invaded, generally if you aren’t directly in combat they’ll damage all of your extractors, manufacturing, power generators, and robots to the point you’ll return to an outpost with 0 power usage out of 0 power capacity. You’ll recognize their visit to your base when you hear loud explosions, a spaceship landing near your outpost, gunfire streaking across the map in overview mode, or see buildings suddenly catch on fire. This isn’t ideal if you’re trying to link Outposts across several systems with inter dependencies and have babysit each outpost.

If the screenshots do not match your experience this may be because I have added some QoL mods from NexusMods that introduce color highlighting, key mapping, and more functional UI menus better suited to the scale of work hundreds of hours of gameplay entails. While the warning messages or how position text the UI appears to you may seem different, the game mechanics will still work the same.

So how do you protect your foundry of precious resources from getting randomly attacked? You could build a barrier of containers that stack just high enough for enemies to walk away when they can not find a decent path to attack your buildings (they generally don’t boost pack into your base but that doesn’t stop aggressive native flying fauna). The simple thing is to create a simple rectangle of containers stacked about two containers high around a limited starter base setup then mount some turrets high enough to attack enemies that get a little too close like a fort.

However, if you want to really maximize the full perimeter of your allowable building radius with one contiguous wall of containers there’s a could of tricks you can leverage. One word of cautious about this journey is as great as having a massive bustling Outpost with ships flying in and out like a Spaceport with an industrial farm of resources and manufacturer can be, it may murder your Frames Per Second (FPS) once you have built like a dozen+ outposts pushing the build limits.

There’s generally just 4 potential error messages you’ll have to deal with while building your walls:

• Intersects with an existing object
• Outside the build area
• area is restricted
• foundation is too tall

The following strategies provide some tips around these limitations.

You can build up to the last tile where a very faint border (usually a thin circle or straight line if restricted area) is towards the end of the building radius. After you push into outside of the line it may throw one of these messages preventing any type of build. In general you probably need to build up and around the edge. Sometimes that may mean building inwards away from the line or more generally keep clicking left or right clicks to find something that will snap into place without hitting a warning wall.

In general when deciding where to lay your first container, I suggest starting at the lower elevation of your build radius and building something like a spine through the base that maintains the lowest elevation possible until you’re forced to fork into higher grades and building up the edges of the building radius. It will be a bit clearer how effective this is when you start seeing the foundation is too tall message a lot.

So the first trick you might find looking at Youtube clips about building a settlement wall out of containers is there is a hidden trick where if you have an elevated outpost component like lets say a Large Solid Container sitting on top of the small Solid container, when you remove the small container underneath, it can generate a solid mass wall underneath. Like instead of that component falling to the floor with gravity, they just substitute a wall platform underneath it. If you wanted to you could create a wall dozens of containers tall to have a wall that pratically touches the sky around your base.

When you create a container side by side they only snap on the left or the right side. So what if you wanted to position your containers above and below on the same elevation? The trick would be to use a combination of small and medium containers. since small containers are basically one tile and medium containers are two tiles large you can snap them together in alternating patterns to go up or down. Like if I wanted to go down I can start like this (each x is small piece, two | is medium piece, and o is empty space) :

o x | o
o o | o

Then create something like a ladder or steps to move down

o x | o
o x | o

to

o x | o
| x | o
| o o o

NOTE: If you use the ladder pattern, you can actually take the small container piece from the top by toggle the edit mode then just leave the target build on mediums as you work your way down the ladder. For example (each x is small piece, w is first small piece, two | is medium piece, and o is empty space)

o w | o
| x | o
| x | o
| x | o
| o o o

move first small piece to bottom

o o | o
| x | o
| x | o
| x | o
| w o o

The pieces naturally want to shape in like an L pattern between small and medium. If you run into a obstacle preventing you from completing the sequence one trick is to add a small on the opposite site, remove the medium and add back the medium on the newer small so it continues in the direction you need. (each x is small piece, two | is medium piece, z is obstacle, and o is empty space) :

o x | o
o o | o
z o o o

to

o x | o
o o | x
z o o o

then

o x o o
o o o x
z o o o

finally
o x o o
o o | x
z o | o

As long as there’s one small container to snap to the medium container can snap to the piece.

When you snap pieces together sometimes the ground you start your first piece on is vastly different elevation than your 20th snapped piece. You’ll be able to recognize this issue with the intersects with existing object message and the piece you’re trying to snap in looks like it sinks half way into the visible surface. The good news is you can mitigate a gap of around 1 small container height difference fairly easily by stacking a small block on top of your last placed container and snapping a piece directly adjacent to it sort of like a step in a staircase. This works great if there is a gradual incline. NOTE: while you can build up there isn’t a way to build back to lower elevation.

Based on the notes from the impenetrable wall trick, when you stack a large container on top of a small you can continue to stack with that pattern to the edge of your building radius map. The great thing about this model is it can ignore existing objects error because you’re building above that object. For example if you wanted a wall to surround an extractor, you could stack about 3 smalls on top of each other to clear the height and use a large container. When you remove the nearest stacked small under that large it will drop in the impenetrable wall directly below it. You can also use this trick to cover hard to reach gaps so long as you dont run into a outside of build area or area restricted message.

The great thing about small to large container snapping is as you left or right click to “rotate” it attempts to find a compatible snap alignment. You can pick the best match that doesn’t error out. Rule of thumb is to position the container as close as possible to final destination and reduce number of click iterations.

Since rotation goes in a circular pattern, left clicks may move in one direction to alignment, while right clicks go in the opposite direction like to walk back a step if you clicked too fast through your options and missed the perfect option. Keep in mind as rotations cycle through containers of different elevations the pattern of left or right clicking may seem confusing. Also in some cases two objects adjacent to each other may take more than a few clicks apart before you see the best match option.

For example test up to 12 left clicks then try reversing using up to 20 right clicks in case that algorithm finds best fit faster. This will make more sense as your wall scales with more potential snap configurations.

I have spent at least 150 hours on creating epic sized interconnected outposts because I like the challenge of min max optimizations. The first few outposts I built were all based on the sky platform technique where if i ran into a problem, I just built up so most of my first outposts were lopsided and dozens of containers high. If you love the challenge of building something of your own design and explores your creative and logistics potential.