Credits aren’t hard to come by in Starfield, but every little bit helps. One way to make a lot of money fast is by smuggling and selling contraband items, which you’ll find scattered throughout the galaxy. Good luck unloading it, though: if you try to take it to a settlement like New Atlantis on Jemison or Akila City in the Cheyenne system, you’ll probably get busted as soon as you grav jump into orbit. Whenever you visit a settled planet, some officious yahoo who should be minding their own business will scan your ship, and if contraband is found, you’ll wind up in jail or in an outer space shootout with local law enforcement. There are ways around that, though, and we’re here to explain how.
There are a few ways to lessen the odds of those scans. First off, you can put points into Deception on your skill tree; scanners will be 10% less likely to find contraband when at level one, and if you max it out up to level four a scan will have a 50-50 shot of detecting whatever you’re trying to hide.
It also helps if your ship has a shielded cargo hold. If you have one of those installed on your ship, it’ll also lessen the chance of a scan picking up your illegal items. I’m not sure if this matters, but stay on the safe side and actually put your contraband inside your ship’s official hold through the screen in your cockpit if you’re going to count on the shield. Also, these holds can be expensive, and not always easy to buy; if you want to get one relatively early in the game and without shelling out too many credits, you can tackle The Mantis quest, which will get you the Razorleaf, a ship with a shielded cargo hold.