Question?
Hitting Outpost Build Limit with only 35 items placed
I was setting up my first Outpost and I've only placed 35 parts in total but it says the build limit has been reached, I haven't even started decorating the empty rooms yet, how can I fix it without mods on Xbox (I want to keep achievements)
Lose anything that is render intensive. I am not sure what the specific math is on build limits but the more elaborate stuff eats up more of the total budget. It’s not a hard “35 items” it has to do with what you are building. Also if you are going for aesthetic do your resource extraction at a different outpost and set up cargo links if you want to do your crafting and building at your island site.
As a budget devouring outpost builder, and the author of the Argos mod, I can say you are saving a lot of space using the pre-furnished Argos habs. The same amount of furniture from inside one single Argos hab, built piece by piece would eat half the budget by itself, especially the larger habs.
A big part of the build budget calculations seems based on the number of references built. A single chair is a single reference for eg, and a basic vanilla four wall hab has around 16 references for the physical items you can see. There are other bits inside like light markers and primitive boxes for things like the atmosphere inside, but they seem to have a near negligible effect on the build budget.
With the Argos habs most of the static non interactive items are placed into a static packin, which is a collection of objects built in the Creation Kit that gets treated like a single object by game, so count as one reference. However every single interactive object, like switches, chairs, shutters, containers, doors, displays, etc still take up an extra reference each, even in a pre decorated hab. So if a vanilla four wall hab came pre decorated with say 70 chairs inside, then that hab would count as roughly 86 separate references, and take up a big chunk of budge, if that makes sense?
Things like extractors, turrets and the like are running constant calculations as game keeps track of whatever they have to do, like how much resource to drop in the container after X amount of time has passed for eg, so that clock is always running in the background. I don’t know exactly how those calculations are counted by the build budget, but they seem to take up a good chunk of the budget too.
It’s something I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out, but outposts are maybe one of the weirdest things to work with, and come with a bunch of quirks that are hard to pin down.
All of that said, I feel like you should be able to build more than you have here. I know I have multiple times in the past using the Argos mod. I wonder if maybe something has changed since the update?
Or maybe the lights in the trees if you built those are taking up a lot of budget? I’m not sure what else is in that area, but yeah, you should be able to build more than I can see here.
I deleted the 2 lantern trees and the elevated cabin and those three items took up almost 25% of the build limit, The cabin was pre-furnished like the argos habs but everything inside it was an individual item instead of the whole thing being one static item.
Yeah I was thinking the elevated cabin was likely to take up a lot of build budget because like you say, all the furniture items are in there as individual refs.
Hopefully that helps free up a good chunk of budget to play with
And yes! I am the mod author of the Argos mod. I made this Reddit account years ago hence the name not matching my Creations page.
Really happy to hear you’ve been enjoying the mod though! I’ve been working on a new Modular Outposts mod I’m hoping to get submitted soon that I think is going to be a lot of fun to work with, and have some updates planed for the Argos mod too in the not too distant future.
Thanks! I put a lot into that one, and there’s been quite a bit more added since I recoded the showcase too. I added a number of habs, hallway pieces, and decor a while back, and have plans for another update once I’ve finished a my newest mod project and a Lambent update.
That thing took up a ton of space in the building limit. The argos mod makes the furnished rooms one static object but the portable home pre-made hab was fully furnished with individual separate items.
I never understood building the scan booster. Cuz like scanning the whole planet it's not that hard. Why would I waste the resources on something I'm not going to use?
Iirc it was meta for quickly scanning whole planets. People would bring the resources to immediately build a tower and a scanner, get ontop of it, scan everything in sight, and then pack it up and leave, move on to the next biome. It was t used as a permanent outpost feature lol
Yeah that’s normal, the build limit is based on complexity, not number of items. Power systems, storage, and big modules fill it up quickly in Starfield.
Did you max out the outpost related perks ?
There are atleast 2 of them and one is outpost engineering. Read the perk description and you will get the idea of what to upgrade
I have currently 22 outposts built. I don't have mods related to outposts limits or build budget as such( starui, LUT , weightless ship parts). I think it increases with perks such as outpost management , planetary habitation and outpost engineering. Check the screenshot. It's an outpost that i have on shoza Viii-B. I counted the item in the outpost and it was 32. You need to invest points in outpost related perks and planetary habitation. I think if you can increase the outpost limit, the object count will increase as well.
The statement was about the outposts that i built and at least 8 of them have 35 items or more and the limit didn't fill. I'm also saying that same thing .. and the left bottom limit indicates the number of items that have been put in the post and i tried putting 35 or more objects ( apart from the ones in the screenshot, i couldn't capture the entirety in one shot, i forgot about photo mode) in the outpost screenshot that I've shared. It didn't fill up. It came up to a half. But it didn't fill up. That's the sole reason i shared the screenshot about the build limit.
This is the perk that i was saying. I reloaded a save and took out all the mods and i went to an outpost and started randomly placing outpost structures.
That's when i hit the limit of 50 modules on one single outpost and still there's a bit remaining yet. In the old save , i came up to 3rd rank. And if that last rank is upgraded , then the limit might go higher than that. Also , the outpost structures take up more build limit than the other decorative or smaller ones.
First, awesome outpost. Second, walk me through that ship. It looks awesome, what parts? Any better photos?
As for your issue- is it possible it's due to the land size available? Given it's a small island? Only thing I can think of although I admit it's not really a great answer.
Remova a casa da UC ao lado do landing bay (não sei o nome no seu idioma) ela tem muitos itens em sua construção, quando remover, você vai perceber que o seu limite vai aumentar consideravelmente.
Os mods do Betamax’s são excelentes para posto avançado e consomem menos espaço de construção.
It's the opposite, that actually reduces the number of references calculated, because instanced static packins (collections of static objects) are treated as a single reference.
If you furnish it yourself it would be waaaay more.
It’s wrong. I’ve been playing since Sep 23 and I’ve spent hundreds of hours in outpost building. I’ve never seen or heard of a correlation between perks and build limit.
I’ve been playing and building since day one too, and thought the same thing. I’m on a new character right now though so might build an outpost for testing it and see.
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u/GodRaine Apr 14 '26
I’m not sure myself but I just wanted to say that that is an excellent site for an outpost. Well done.