Starfield: Freestar Collective explained

Bethesda’s Starfield has proven that it’s a true-to-form Bethesda Game Studios RPG, which means it’s a remarkably free-form yet janky experience that’s positively loaded with content. As this is an all-new IP, however, the Elder Scrolls and Fallout tropes players know and love from those respective franchises don’t necessarily apply to Starfield‘s lore. This is shown in how the game handles its two main factions, the United Colonies and the Freestar Collective.

Freestar Collective is, true to its name, the less structured and overbearing of the two. Whereas the United Colonies is a centralized republic with a single president, the Freestar Collective is a looser confederation of worlds governed by a council. Virtually everything else that’s important about these two factions is drawn from this one key difference.

Explaining Starfield’s Freestar Collective

Freestar Collective is, in the simplest terms possible, a loose alliance of libertarian and libertarian-adjacent human colonies. Whereas the United Colonies aims to establish a centralized democracy, the Collective is ruled by a Council of Governors drawn from all the pertinent worlds and/or colonies. The members of Freestar Collective are:

• Cheyenne, Akila City
• Narion
• Volii, Neon City

The acting capital of Freestar Collective, Akila City, has been the beating heart of Freestar Collective from the very start. The founder of Akila, Solomon Coe, formed an alliance with the Volii system hundreds of years before Starfield takes place, in 2189, which kicked off the idea of a more loosely connected system of colonies than what the government of United Colonies allowed.

Freestar Collective is particularly interesting to many Starfield players because of its Wild West in space aesthetic. With duster coats, sci-fi revolvers, and high-powered rifles clad in wooden furniture, Freestar Collective’s Akila City is the place to be for any players looking to immerse themselves in this new frontier. It certainly helps that the Freestar Collective Rangers are a joinable faction, too.

Freestar Collective’s conflict with United Colonies

Freestar Collective and UC have butted heads numerous times before. The two governments have got two full-fledged wars with one another under their belts, in fact. The Narion War took place from 2196 to 2216, leading to the creation of the Treaty of Narion, and the recognition of the planet itself as a member of Freestar Collective. While Freestar’s expansion into Narion territory was successful in the end, the same cannot be said about its expansion to the planet of Vesta.

Notably, Freestar Collective was looking to establish an all-new farming colony on Vesta, only for UC to formally object to this as it violated the Treaty of Narion. Diplomacy broke down soon enough, however, and United Colonies ended up razing the Vesta colony in the end. This, in turn, kicked off the infamous Colony War, which took place from 2308 to 2311. Freestar eventually delivered a decisive blow to the UC Navy during the Battle of Cheyenne thanks to its leveraging of guerilla tactics, and a new peace treaty was subsequently signed. In 2330, this peace treaty is still in place, albeit dangling by a thread.