Waiting in Bethesda RPGs is a time-honored tradition, whether it’s standing motionless outside a vendor’s shop all night until they open for business in Oblivion, or crafting a chair in Fallout 4’s survival mode so you can park your butt and avoid taking hunger damage.
The tradition continues when you wait in Starfield. You can have a seat to fast-forward the clock or sleep in a bed to get an XP boost—and sleep with a Starfield companion for an even bigger one. But if you really want to maximize your waiting in Starfield, there’s one planet you should do all your waiting on: Venus.
Venus is a highly unusual planet—and I mean in real life, not just in Starfield. It’s the hottest planet in our solar system, even though Mercury is closer to the sun. Every other planet in our solar system spins counterclockwise, but Venus spins clockwise. And a single day on Venus lasts longer than an entire year does.
Weird but true! It’s because Venus’ rotation is so slow that the planet travels all the way around the sun (which takes about 225 Earth-days) before it makes a single full rotation (which takes 243 Earth-days). So before a single day can pass on Venus, an entire year has gone by.
And it’s incredibly cool that this unique facet of Venus made its way into Starfield.
Give this a shot. Fly to Venus, get out of your cockpit seat, and take a seat somewhere else in your ship. (Yes, it is irritating that you can’t wait while sitting in the pilot’s seat.) Press B and choose to wait for one hour. You’ll see that one hour in local Venus time translates to 100 hours in Universal Time. Sleep for 24 hours on Venus, and 2400 hours will pass for the rest of the galaxy. That’s 100 days! Quite a long nap.
It’s a really fun detail that shows Starfield’s developers wanted to celebrate just how unusual Venus really is. I do think the strange time properties are mainly included as a joke: Venus isn’t like that one planet in Interstellar where an hour spent on it is equal to seven years on Earth—that was because that planet was orbiting a supermassive black hole. Passing time on Venus is a clever reference to the oddball planet, not real science.
That doesn’t mean it’s not useful. I was selling stuff to the vending kiosk on Jemison, and quickly exhausted the 5,000 credit limit on the machine. Typically I’d have to run to another vendor or wait sit in a chair for 24 to 48 hours for the credits to resupply so I could sell more junk. Instead, I fast-traveled to Venus and sat down in a chair in my ship for an hour. That single hour on Venus translates to 100 hours of Universal time. I fast-traveled back to Jemison, and the kiosk’s credits were refreshed. Thanks, Venus!
clivingston@pcgamer.com (Christopher Livingston)
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