Starfield May update finally lets players fast travel within cities

Navigating among the stars in Bethesda's Starfield may be a cosmically smooth experience, but the same hasn't been said so much for the game's on-planet travel mechanics. However, thanks to the long-awaited May update, things are finally moving in the right direction with a new feature that lets players fast travel within the game's big cities.

How to fast travel in the Starfield May update

Thanks to May's big update, Starfield players can now fast travel on-planet in two new ways: via the Scanner or the Surface Map.

To do it with your Scanner, pull it up while in a city location and multiple 'point of interest' markers will pop up, denoting places such as vendors, bars, quest-related buildings, and district areas. With your cursor placed on one of those markers, there will be an option to 'Fast Travel' to it at the bottom of the HUD.

With the Surface Map, pull it up via the Starmap in your Character Menu as you normally would. The Surface Map itself has actually been completely revamped as well, showing a detailed geographic view of everything in the perimeter where you've landed. It will also show the same 'point of interest' icons as on your Scanner, and you can use those to fast travel to any desired location.

However, there is a small caveat to this new feature: in order to make full use of this new on-planet fast travel system, you'll need to rediscover all the points of interest in a given location. Upon pulling up the Scanner or Surface Map, all the markers are initially greyed out, and the game will indicate that they haven't been discovered yet. We don't know yet if this is intentional or perhaps a fresh bug (it is Bethesda) that's affecting it. We'll update this article ASAP as soon as we know more.

Nonetheless, this is definitely a big step in the right direction for Starfield's navigation mechanics, considering how spotty they used to be. Only having the tram to travel between general districts in New Atlantis felt cumbersome, while Akila had nothing of the sort nor did Neon City, of all places.

Be sure to check out all of our guides and news for Starfield at Pro Game Guides, such as How to fly faster in Starfield.