Starfield How to Mine Larger Resources Without the Cutter

If you want to know how to mine larger resources without the Cutter in Starfield, you’ve come to the right place. Often times, you’ll come to a large deposit of a material like Neon, Mercury, Benzene, H20, HnCn and so on, and the Cutter can’t extract anything from it. Naturally, this can be a pretty big problem, especially if you’re trying to survey a planet 100%. Fortunately for you, the solution is way simpler than you might think. Let’s get into it.

How to Collect Larger Resources Without Using the Cutter in Starfield

To mine and collect larger resources without using the Cutter in Starfield, just exit the Scanner and pick it up. I’m serious, that’s all you need to do. Mind you, we’re talking about scanning the planet for resources here. We’ll get to actually extracting and harvesting materials in a bit. Let’s back up for a second. As you scan the planet, you’ll run into huge deposits of stuff like H20, HnCn, Benzene, Mercury and gasses like Neon. Your Cutter won’t work on them; that’s only for the reasonably-sized rocks. Instead, exit out of the Scanner menu, approach the resource and hit E on the keyboard or A on the controller. Your character will pick up a chunk of the material. Keep in mind that some of them are hazardous, though, and might inflict a status effect on you.

And there you have it, that’s how you collect larger resources without using the Cutter in Starfield, but how do you actually mine them? As in, what do you need to do in order to harvest the materials? Well, you have to build an outpost and place a resource extractor. That is the only way to get at the whole deposit. Otherwise, you can only grab about two or three units of each material by hand. This will probably be enough in most cases, but if you need larger amounts of something like Benzene or Mercury or Neon or whatever, you’ll have to break out the resource extractor. The Cutter is just not going to cut it, pun fully intended. It’s annoying, but it is what you have to do to harvest the materials.