Starfield is full of crafting materials that you need if you want to get some powerful mods or expand your outpost, and Vanadium is just another metal on the list. In this guide, I’ll go over one of the best spots I found for the metal and how you can extract the material for yourself.
Where to Find Vanadium in Starfield
You can find Vanadium to the northwest of the Science Outpost on planet Kapteyn I. This planet is part of the Kapteyn system, and there are only two planets to explore, making the locations easy to spot. To make searching for the rare metal even easier, the Science Outpost is one of the major POIs on the surface, so you don’t have to guess.

I landed at the Science Outpost, and then I headed northwest after picking up a mission to take out the Spacers in the area. Multiple small rocks on the path had some Vanadium ore veins that I could take advantage of with my Cutter. As always, the Cutter is entirely necessary for collecting any metal on your own in Starfield.
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When you start to get more resources stacked up, and you have enough materials in your ship, you can start using extractors as well. These are part of the Outpost system in the game, and they allow you to pull metals like Vanadium from larger areas in the ground. These are expensive but work passively.

The most important part of finding materials like Vanadium, though, is surveying the surface of a planet when you arrive. These scans will tell you what metals can appear, and I scanned the same way on the Kapteyn I planet. Because Vanadium is rarer in Starfield, you have to do more guessing work on the scans themselves.
Once you have enough material, make sure you store those items in your ship to save some space.