Summary
- Smuggling contraband in Starfield can lead to a massive amount of illegal goods worth over 350,000 credits, but selling them is not as easy as it seems.
- Joining the Crimson Fleet faction and taking advantage of their vendors is the most efficient way to gradually sell off the contraband in small increments.
- Selling contraband is not as lucrative as expected, with vendors offering low prices for illegal goods, but players can use mods to increase the value or store the goods until the right opportunity arises.
One Starfield player with an apparent propensity for role-playing as a smuggler managed to amass an absolutely massive amount of contraband, worth over 350,000 credits. They later took online to share their achievement, all the while seeking help with a peculiar problem resulting from their illegal escapades in Starfield.
While Starfield has a jail system similar to that of Skyrim, Bethesda's latest title also presents players with plenty of new ways and opportunities to break the law. One of them is smuggling contraband, a special category of goods that aren't necessarily stolen, but are nevertheless illegal to carry. And while pilfered loot is easy enough to launder through the Trade Authority, there's no way to make contraband legitimate, with most such items existing for the sole purpose of selling them to a fence.
But not even accumulating a large collection of illicit goods translates to easy money, as one player recently discovered. Taking to Reddit, user heyuhitsyaboi asked other fans for suggestions on how to move contraband worth 350,600 credits, presumably after realizing that even the rare fence found in Starfield's vast universe doesn't usually carry enough currency to buy even a fraction of their spoils. The most efficient idea proposed by the responding players was to join Starfield's Crimson Fleet faction, then take advantage of its four vendors carrying 20,000 credits each to gradually sell off the loot, keeping in mind that sleeping or waiting for 48 in-game hours after depleting their cash reserves will refresh them.
The whole process would likely require two vendor resets at most, depending on the player's exact Commerce skill level. Namely, selling contraband in Starfield—or anything else, for that matter—isn't as lucrative as the game's inventory valuations might suggest. While illegal goods are certainly among the most valuable items in Bethesda's space-faring RPG, all vendors in the Settled Systems and beyond insist on some ludicrous margins. In this particular instance, 350,600 credits worth of loot would, at most, barely sell for a six-digit sum.
PC players dissatisfied with this state of affairs have the option of upping the value of contraband items via Starfield mods. The currently most popular such solution was developed by Nexus Mods user Moonling, surpassing 8,000 unique downloads since its September 6 release thanks to its promise of treating the sale prices of illicit goods to a tenfold increase.
Mods or not, selling contraband is far from the most difficult way to make a living in Bethesda's latest RPG. Doing so also becomes straightforward once the player realizes they can use Starfield's outpost system to store their illegal goods with no penalties until the opportunity to move them presents itself.
Starfield is available now for PC and Xbox Series X/S.