I’ve posted a couple screenshots of Starfield here and there where I’ve left the HUD on, and when I do, I keep getting the same question:
“How do you have so much ammo?”
I’m not surprised, given that ammo does often seem like it’s in short supply in the game, though that’s not all that dissimilar from Fallout. However, there are only two ways to get ammo in Starfield, buying and looting, and no matter how much you rank up crafting, you cannot craft ammo right now. I kind of expect that to change in the future.
But I think there’s more specific advice to prevent you from chewing through all your ammo all the time and being left with nothing. Here’s what I’d considering doing:
- You can’t stick with just one favorite gun. At least not right away. You may have a great one, but if you only use that, you are absolutely going to run dry on ammo no matter what it is until much later in the game. I would also not spend thousands of credits buying ammo for it either. In fact, I would probably never buy ammo period if you can avoid it.
- You need to diversify your ammo use across guns. I only specialized in two types of guns to start, ballistic pistols and ballistic rifles. But as you use those, you need to keep an eye on the kind of ammo they use. You do not want say, three different weapons with .43 ammo, as switching between them means you’ll burn all of that fast. You want multiple different types of ammo across your wheel, so when you run low in one, you can start using another.
- Keep some things on hand you are not specializing in, as when you are desperate, you can pull out a laser or beam weapon or shotgun and find oh hey, you have a thousand ammo for it because you never use it normally. Even if you don’t have a 30% increased damage specialization increase, it will still kill things.
- Obviously you are going to have to loot everything you see. I don’t care what type of ammo it is, do not hunt for just your favorite gun’s, pick up all of it. Loot every corpse. Again, you never know when you’ll find a sick gun of another type and want that ammo, or like I said, switching to a different unused gun when you need to. Ammo weighs nothing, so there’s no reason not to.
- Keep in mind full auto versus single shot. You will see that sometimes something like an assault rifle may share the same ammo as a semi-automatic rifle or pistol. In that case, you are going to want to lean much more toward the lower fire rate weapons as they will burn through ammo much slower, outside of special occasions where the AR really fits. You don’t have to hamstring yourself by doing this, but again, if you’re running low, it helps.
- Farm ammo with melee. I spec-ed at least a little bit into melee at the start so at the very least, when I ran into low level enemies I could just knife them instead of spending valuable ammo on them. Eventually, when I powered up further, I would go through entire bases with mostly melee, stockpiling ammo for harder encounters down the road (there are a few uh, secret “skills” that help with this tactic too). There’s no weapon durability here, and no downside.
That’s my advice on ammo, I hope it helps.
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