Starfield Inventory Tips: How to Expand Your Storage and Not Be Encumbered

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

One of the things you’ll learn real quick in Starfield is that your pockets are only so deep. And by that I mean, unless you’re very particular about what you loot, you are going to find yourself encumbered a whole lot. Increasing your storage space both on your person and on your ship should be an early priority, along with learning some easy workarounds so don’t have to play the game of “what should I throw away so I can fast travel back to my ship,” Here are our tips on how to increase and deal with Starfield’s Storage.

You Have an Infinite Storage Locker in The Lodge

It may not be obvious, and the game definitely never tells you this, but let’s get this out of the way first: You have unlimited storage at The Lodge on New Atlantis. You can leave stuff in your personal safe in your bedroom at the Lodge, once you become a member of Constellation through the main quest. Take the stairs up, head through the third door on the right, go all the way down the hall, take a left, and it’s the second door on the left. Or if you need a second box of infinite storage, there’s one right on the desk in the basement in the form of an unassuming storage box.

Increasing Your Personal Storage

When it comes to increasing your own inventory space, there’s really only one way to do so… Well one that doesn’t involve hunting down a whole bunch of Freestar Collective Magazines. You’ve gotta add to the Weight Lifting skill when you level up. At the first level, it’ll increase your max weight by 10 kilograms, which isn’t much, but will at least let you equip a few extra weapons, giving you some other options if you run out of ammo with one of your main guns in a fight.

You can add more points into the Weight Lifting skill, but in order to do so, you’ll first have to level it up. Fortunately, the way to level up this particular skill is actually fairly easy: You just need to sprint a certain amount of distance while at 70% or higher carrying capacity. Chances are, you’ll do this without even trying to, but nonetheless, make sure to keep an eye on your equip load and make sure that if you do want to further this skill along, you’re carrying a relatively heavy load and running around a whole bunch.

By maxing out this skill, you’ll be able to increase your personal weight limit by a total of 100kg, which makes it a very worthwhile investment if you plan on using heavy weapons, heavy armor, and plan on hauling a bunch of heavy resources. Or maybe you just don’t want to deal with the pain in the ass of being over encumbered, which hey, I get it. If that is the case though, and you’re just carrying around a bunch of non-essential items that you don’t want to just throw away, there’s another option.

Using Your Companion as a Mule

In classic Bethesda fashion, your companion can also double as a secondary backpack. If you find yourself over encumbered and you just need to offload a few things to allow yourself to fast travel, the easiest option is to chat with your companion, ask them to trade with you, and then just give them whatever you don’t want to carry.

Then when you get back to your ship you can store the excess items in your ships cargo hold. There’s a handy feature that lets you automatically drop off all resource materials, which you absolutely should because they’re easily among the heaviest things you can carry and all that weight adds up quickly.

That said, if you do that, you’ll run into another problem, which is:

Increasing Your Ship Storage

Your ship has a storage limit as well, which you will likely quickly reach if you’re just offloading all of your resources into your cargo hold. In order to increase your ship’s cargo capacity, you’re going to have to delve into some ship customization.

You can find a Ship Services Technician near the landing pad of virtually all of the big cities in Starfield. Talk to them and you can either outright purchase a bigger, better ship with more storage, you can modify the ship you currently own and upgrade your cargo hold, or you can build an all new ship from scratch.

In order to increase your ship’s cargo capacity, you’re going to have to delve into some ship customization

All of these options cost either a lot or an obscene amount of credits. The cheapest option is to just upgrade your existing ship, but be aware that it’s not as simple as just slapping on a larger cargo hold and then calling it a day. When you open up the ship builder and start editing your ship, the first thing you’ll find is that there’s nowhere to actually put a larger cargo hold. So the first thing you’ll have to do is make some space for it. I’d recommend deleting the currently existing cargo hold, adding a structural mount in its place, and then placing however many side mounting cargo holds you want on the sides.

This will make your ship too heavy to properly maneuver, so you’ll need to upgrade or add new engines. Upgrading your engines is the cheaper and easier route, but if you’d prefer to go big: grab your two engines and pull them out, place large engine bracers in their place, reattach the engines you already had, and then add two more rear facing engines, and you should be good to go.

If you do this though, you will likely make your ship too heavy to grav jump, so you’ll need to either upgrade the one you have, or delete it and add on a better one. This is all of course, just an example of something I did, and you’re free to customize your ship however you’d like. If you’d like to learn more about it, we’ve already got a ship building guide that goes into far more detail than this, including where and how to find special cargo holds that shield your contraband from scans.

You can also get more out of the storage you currently have on your ship by investing in the skill “Payloads,” which is in the second tier of the Tech skill tree. One point will increase your cargo holds’ capacity by 10%, while maxing it out will increase it by 50%.

Other Storage Tips

If you still don’t have enough storage, you little space hoarder you, or maybe you’re just looking for a way to save on some credits, you can also use the captains locker on your ship, which is located just to the right of the cockpit and can store 40 kilograms of cargo. If you find Freestar Collective Magazines, you can increase your storage space by five for each magazine you find.

And finally, if you want to be truly chaotic, you can also just… drop stuff on the ground and they will stay there right where you left them. In your ship, in your home, or on an outpost. Like a dang child. I hope your mother doesn’t see this.

Check out these additional Starfield guides from the experts:

Best Starting Traits and What Effects TheyStarfield Walkthrough: Main Quests, Side Quests, Faction Quests and MoreStarfield Cheats and How to Use Console CodesHow to LockpickEvery Starfield Companion and Crew MemberAll Romance Partners in Starfield

Mitchell Saltzman is an editorial producer at IGN. You can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit