How to Wait in Starfield

Waiting in Starfield can be used to pass time on a planet for a mission, or if you want to change the time of day. There are multiple reasons why you would want to wait in Starfield including for completing missions or resetting the shop stocks. You can use waiting to complete missions quicker. For example, if a mission requires you to wait until night but you’ve unfortunately arrived on a planet during the day time. There are a few ways you can choose to wait in the game; you can use a chair, couch or cot. Using a bed instead of the other options has its perks. Let us look at how to wait in Starfield. 

How to wait in Starfield

First you’ll need to find a chair to sit in or a bed to sleep on. Look for a safe location and when you try to sit on any piece of furniture, the game will give you the option to wait at the bottom of the screen. If you want to wait in real time, you can simply choose to continue sitting till you’re ready to get up. 

If you want to skip ahead, use the ‘Wait’ command that appears on your screen. You’ll be prompted to choose how long you want to wait for with a slider going up to 24 hours. Select your desired time to wait and watch the slider tick down and pass the time.

While sitting is a good option to wait, sleeping in a cot or bed has some benefits. If you choose to sleep in a bed, your health will be restored. If you have a romantic companion in the game, you will “wake up with a newfound sense of emotional security”, provided by your partner which gives you a 15% XP boost. Even if you don’t have a romantic partner, you’ll still get the “well-rested” status effect, found in other Bethesda games like Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim which gives you a 10% XP increase. 

Where you choose to wait is also important, make sure you aren’t surrounded by enemies or in any unsafe locations. The first ship you begin the game with, the Frontier, has a number of chairs and a bed for you to pass the time along. And that’s pretty much it for this rather simple mechanic; that’s all you need to know about how to wait in Starfield.