How long is Starfield? Main story length & time to complete

Considering that Starfield has thousands of planets and hundreds of star systems, it isn’t a surprise that you can spend several hours exploring space. The main story is a tiny portion of what Starfield has to offer, and here’s how long it will take you to beat the campaign and the entire game.

Bethesda is popular for making open-world titles with a surprising amount of depth that allows players to spend countless hours in-game. This explains why fans were delighted to know that Starfield is bigger than Skyrim and Fallout 4.

Like any other Bethesda game, completing the Starfield campaign is just the tip of the iceberg as you’ll still have a ton of faction missions, planet surveys, sidequests, and home decor to do. This naturally makes players curious about the total amount of time they can expect to spend in Starfield.

Here’s the length of Starfield’s main story and the time it’ll take to complete everything that the game offers such as planets, star systems, sidequests, ship-building, and more.

How many hours to beat Starfield?

Starfield‘s main story can be completed in around 17 hours, which is significantly less than other Bethesda titles. However, depending on your playstyle, this can easily go up to 30-40 hours if you spend some time exploring and doing side quests.

While Bethesda director Todd Howard said “This one’s ending up a little bit longer [than our previous games] and we may tune that some still,” in an exclusive interview with IGN, it seems that the player base has figured out a legitimate way to beat the main story sooner than expected.

If you were to focus on all of the Main and Side quests in the game, then you’d spend close to 52 hours in a single save file.

A completionist run in Starfield is a different story altogether. As listed on HowLongToBeat, both Fallout 4 and Skyrim completionist runs take more than 150 hours to finish, but Starfield’s comes in at a whopping 189 hours, which means that it could take up to 200 hours to beat completionist runs for Starfield, which includes exploring every inch of the map.

For more on Starfield, check out some other guides on the game:

Starfield plants explained | All Starfield character creation options | All romanceable characters in Starfield | Will Starfield be on Xbox Game Pass for PC & console? | Will Starfield have multiplayer or co-op?