Surveying Kreet – Starfield

Kreet is the first planet (moon, technically) you visit in Starfield after completing the intro section. And while still a part of the game’s guided tutorial, Kreet is already open enough to let you engage in some exploration and familiarize yourself with the game’s surveying feature. This guide will help you figure out how that feature works and scan everything there is to scan on Kreet.

Biomes

What may not be immediately obvious when you’re just starting your interstellar journey is that planets have distinct biomes. When looking at Kreet in your Starmap, you’ll be able to Scan it. Doing so will add some color to the picture. Mousing over the bright areas of the new Starmap will reveal that Kreet has three distinct biomes:

• Volcanic
• Mountains
• Frozen Volcanic

Clicking on any of these biomes will allow you to set them as your landing target. Landing there will place you in a procedurally generated area of a particular biome with its own layout and points of interest.

Certain resources and scan targets can only be found in specific biomes, and as such you’ll need to visit them all if you want to fully survey Kreet. With all the procedural generation going on, it can be tricky to find everything. Still, there’s a method to the madness. So, if you follow our guide, you should be able to fully survey Kreet in no time.

Surveying Basics

In order to scan things, you’ll be using your handy hand scanner you bring up by pressing F on a keyboard or LB on a controller. The scanner is a generally useful tool as it will highlight all scannable objects and points of interests within your immediate area.

Things you can scan are highlighted by a blue outline. Things you have already scanned, but require more samples of, are colored completely blue. And things that you’ve fully scanned are colored green. As such, the very first thing you need to learn when surveying things in Starfield is to constantly bring up your scanner and look for glowing blue outlines.

The default scan range is 10 meters, with the Surveying skill greatly increasing it and allowing you to zoom with the scanner.

To fully survey a planet, you’ll need to scan its:

• Flora
• Fauna
• Resources
• Traits

You’ll only need to scan a resource once, while the specimens of flora and fauna require a total of 8 scans to be fully surveyed. Planet Traits are all unique, but on Kreet, you’ll need to scan two stone arches.

When dealing with plants and animals, harvesting plants and killing animals counts towards the surveying progress. But just to be on the safe side, don’t neglect your scanner and use it often to check your progress.

Some species are only present in particular biomes. So, when you see Biome Complete on your scanner, you’ll need to move to a different biome to find new types of animal and plant life.

Occasionally you’ll run into invasive species that you won’t need to scan to fully survey a planet. In Kreet’s case, that means you won’t need to scan or kill a Terrormorph to complete the challenge.

Kreet Flora

Kreet has a total of three species of flora, one per biome:

• Dust Root
• Nebula Vine
• Frost Reed

You find Dust Roots in the Volcanic biome, Nebula Vines in the Mountains biome, and Frost Reeds in the Frozen Volcanic biome. You can generally find them all over the place immediately after leaving your ship.

Kreet Fauna

The three species of fauna you’ll need to scan on Kreet are:

• Trilobite
• Kreet Stalker
• Kreet Grazer

From what we can tell, you can find them in every biome. You’ll see some Trilobites immediately after leaving your ship when you first land on Kreet. Keep going forward in the general direction of the Kreet Research Lab and you’ll see your first Kreet Stalker.

Kreet Grazers roam in packs and tend to favor Kreet’s valleys. We were able to find some directly to the east of the Research Lab. Usually, whenever you see Grazers, you’ll also be able to find some Trilobites, and so scanning these two shouldn’t be a problem.

Kreet Stalkers tend to be more elusive. They like to pretend to be rocks and whenever you spook them, they tend to burrow under the ground to emerge after a few seconds somewhere nearby. It took us a while to find 8 of them, but we had the best luck in mountainous areas.

Kreet Resources

Kreet has a total of 8 scannable resources, but every time we landed there immediately after the intro, we had Helium-3 listead as already scanned, and as such, had to find only 7 resource types. The complete resource list for Kreet is as follows:

• Helium-3
• Argon
• Iron
• Lead
• Silver
• Alkanes
• Water
• Neon

With the game’s randomized nature, chances are you’ll find these in slightly different spots than we did, but we’ll still provide you with some general pointers for where to look and what to watch out for.

Argon

Argon in Starfield is presented as a small mound producing a plume of grey smoke. We were able to find several deposits right behind our starting location on Kreet.

Iron

Iron in Starfield looks like a brownish chunk you can find sitting on top of rocks. We were blessed with some iron right after taking our first step on Kreet.

Lead

Lead in Starfield looks a lot like Iron, but more greyish in color. We found some deposits a few steps to the right of our starting position on Kreet.

Silver

Much like Iron and Lead, Silver in Starfield looks like a rock chunk. This time, a silvery one. We found one by simply walking down the path leading to the Research Lab.

Alkanes

Alkanes in Starfield look similar to Argon – a smoke-emitting mound. Only the smoke here is darker. It took us a while to find some, but eventually we discovered a deposit relatively far to the east of the starting location and the Research Lab.

Water

Water in Starfield resembles an elevated pool and as you might expect from space, it’s quite rare. We found some water way far to the east of the starting location and the Research Lab.

Neon

Neon in Starfield looks like a reddish mound. It took us a long while to find some of it on Kreet. In fact, we had to go to the Mountains biome where it was located slightly to the east of our landing area. But since the other biomes are randomized much more than the starting one, your quest for Neon might take you in a completely opposite direction.

Kreet Trait

Planets in Starfield have unique Traits that are essentially special points of interest that have more of a scientific as opposed to monetary value. In Kreet’s case it’s a series of Eroded Reef Outcroppings serving as evidence of long-vanished oceans.

Finding Kreet’s Traits can be a challenge due to Starfield’s procedural generation. The general rule of thumb is to manually land in a particular biome and then start exploring the points of interest found there, with the ones marked as map pins having a great track record for hiding Traits.

In all our tests of Kreet, we were able to discover its Trait in the Mountains biome by exploring the map pin point of interest directly to the south-west of our landing location.

Once we reached it, we saw a glowing smoking pool and the point of interest was renamed into Unexplored Geological Feature. Running around with our scanner out soon led us to a pair of large stone arches that are actually Eroded Reef Outcroppings. Scanning two of them once again renamed the point of interest, this time to Deep Ocean Deposits. Doing so, revealed Kreet’s Trait and completed our planetary survey.