While Starfield’s outposts do offer several secondary functions (trade hubs, bases, homes away from home, etc.), the majority of your outposts exist to generate resources. At the very least, your first few outposts will exist to generate the resources needed to build additional outposts and craft early items/upgrades.
As such, the best outpost planets will feature not just a variety of resources but a variety of the most valuable resources in the game. What are the most valuable resources in Starfield? Well, that kind of depends on your situation and needs. For instance, it’s fairly easy to acquire an abundance of resources like Aluminum, Iron, Nickel, and Helium-3. However, you will constantly use such resources for most of the projects in the game, so you will want to make sure that you have a steady supply of all of them available at all times.
Comparatively, Tungsten, Titanium, and Dysprosium are used in far fewer projects but are also significantly more difficult to find. As such, you will likely want to build at least a basic outpost on any planet where you can find these resources. At the very least, you can sell your excess rare resources for a nice chunk of Credits.
Regardless of which resources you are trying to acquire via outposts, you’ll want to make sure that you prioritize building outposts on planets that allow you to easily extract multiple resources from a small location. You can find such spots by scanning a planet and looking for places where different resources (indicated by colors and patterns) intersect or run parallel to each other. The idea is to start your outpost in a position where you can easily place two, three, or more resource extractors in your small starting area. Though you can eventually expand your outpost to reach multipole resource hotspots, your starting point (and initial outpost locations) should allow you to farm as many resources as possible as soon as possible.
On that note, outposts offer the only truly reliable (and glitch-free) ways to farm both XP and Credits in Starfield. By harvesting resources and crafting items using those resources, you will acquire XP far more efficiently than you would by completing missions, raiding outposts, or doing pretty much any other combination of activities. You can then sell those crafted items (or the resources themselves) for extra Credits. Again, Outposts aren’t your only option for earning extra XP and Credits, but they’re kind of hard to beat for both.
Finally, the best outpost planets in Starfield will be…well, livable. At the beginning of the game, you will want to ensure that your largest outposts are built on habitable planets that naturally support life and do not require external life-supporting devices. While you can eventually unlock Skills that allow you to build outposts on planets with hostile environmental conditions, most of your outposts on those planets will exist to mine the rare resources they typically contain.
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