Starfield: How to do the Akila City Puddle Exploit

Making money, getting the best weapons, and keeping your healing items stocked are a lot easier to achieve when you can obtain a whole store’s inventory in Starfield. Thanks to a puddle in Akila City, you can access all of Shephard’s General Store without having to steal or pay. Here’s how to do the Akila City puddle exploit in Starfield.

How to Do the Akila City Puddle Exploit

Akila City in the Cheyenne system gets plenty of rain, leaving it filled with puddles. The puddle you’re looking for, however, allows you access to a storage chest used to populate Shephard’s General Store inventory. Typically, these chests are buried and locked behind walls of code deep beneath the areas accessible by players.

Thanks to a glitch, the chest can be looted through a puddle in the city. Head to Shephard’s from the direction of the staryard. The puddle in question is the smaller one on the left side of the walkway, in front of the store.

You need to be sneaking over the puddle to see the chest indicator. Stand up and you’ll walk right over it without knowing it’s there. The actual indicator may appear just a bit away from the puddle, like it did for me, but I was able to get a plethora of weapons, food items, apparel, and other miscellaneous goods. Some of the weapons were even uncommon or rare. You want to make sure you’ve got ample room in your inventory, your companion’s inventory, and haven’t sold items to any of the merchants in town. The cache can have over 800 pounds of goods.

After a few days travel, I returned to Akila City. It seems like 24 hours may not be enough for the stash to replenish itself, but a substantial amount of time is enough. When I first accessed the items, my gun randomly drew and would fire. I was unable to put it away, as every action I did caused it to fire. If that happens keep it low to the ground, then get to a merchant and speak to them quickly. That seemed to reset my inventory and weapon. There may be other glitches caused by using the exploit, so just be aware that they can occur.

That’s all there is to know about the Akila City puddle exploit in Starfield. I made quite a large sum of money from my initial looting of the chest, and wish I knew about it when I was at the beginning of my playthrough. For other ways to make money, how to sell contraband, or what houses you can buy, check out our full Starfield guide library.