For better or worse, Starfield‘s main story revolves around the Artifacts, a collection of ability-granting space rocks with mysterious origins. You’ll be spending a lot of time hunting these things down and even more time staring at the fancy display case Constellation keeps them in, but eventually, you’ll be tasked with finding a place to keep them yourself.
If you’re agonizing over the pros and cons of each option, agonize no more—there is a pretty obviously correct one if you want to keep your main story experience as convenient and detour-free as possible.
Where should you store the Artifacts in Starfield?
For the majority of the main story, you’ll be keeping your Artifact collection at the Lodge in New Atlantis. While formulaic, the “collect an Artifact, bring it to the Lodge” loop is nonetheless a formula that works. Grabbing your spooky space rocks, putting them in the display in the Lodge, and immediately heading right back through the door to chase down the next one will quickly become a rhythm you settle into, even if Starfield‘s story might flow a little better without the constant visits to Jemison.
It won’t last forever, though. After the mission High Price to Pay, which sees the safety of the Lodge broken and presents you with a devilishly tough choice that will impact the rest of the game, Constellation rightly assumes that keeping the Artifacts—now revealed to be parts of something called the Armillary—there is only asking for more trouble, especially given that the Starborn can now apparently just teleport into the Lodge and start killing people whenever they want.
As the most competent remaining member of Constellation by a country mile, you’re tasked with finding a new hiding spot for the collection of MacGuffins and presented with three options: keeping them on your ship, on your person or in one of your Outposts.
How do these actually differ, though? Basically, the Artifacts will attract Starborn attacks. Keep them on your ship and you’ll be accosted by them in space, keep them in your inventory and you’ll start getting jumped on planets, and keep them in your Outpost and you can honestly just forget about the whole thing. Starborn will attack your Outpost, but the story prevents them from actually stealing the Artifacts back, so you can more or less ignore them. However, the optimal solution does not lie on some resource-rich planet.
Without going into too many spoilers, the final mission of the game requires you to have the Artifacts on your ship anyway, so it’s best to cut out the extra steps and simply keep them there. You can do this by storing them using the freshly added Armillary screen on your ship, which is located right next to the cargo hold interface, depending on the cockpit model you have. In my experience, the Starborn attacks were infrequent enough that you don’t really have to worry about them—I was only accosted once or twice, and by this late in the game, you should have no trouble whatsoever chewing through them.
