How to wait and pass time in Starfield

In Starfield, there may be moments when you need to pass some in-game time quickly. Luckily, you can do this easily just about anywhere that has furniture by waiting. Our guide details how to pass time and how to wait in Starfield.

How to pass time in Starfield

All you need to do is sit on a chair or sleep in a bed. When you sit in a chair, you’ll be prompted to wait at the bottom of the screen. Press the corresponding key or button to bring up a screen asking how long you’d like to wait for. When you choose to sleep in a bed, you’ll get the prompt right away:

Image: Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks via Polygon

You can wait or sleep for up to 24 hours of local time. For some quests, like the “Red Tape Blues” quest line on Mars, passing time until it’s night causes NPCs to clear out of areas you need to sneak into. (Hey, NPCs need sleep too!)

If you sleep, you’ll get a “well-rested” buff, as it does in other Bethesda games. This gives you a 10% XP boost, so you should sleep before missions. If you sleep alongside a romanceable companion you’ve married, that bonus increases to 15%.

The Frontier (the ship you start with at the beginning of the game) has both a bed and many chairs inside, so it makes for easy time-skipping if you need it.

If you’re playing on PC, then you can also just bring up the wait prompt using console commands by pressing the ` key and then entering the command “showmenu sleepwaitmenu.”