Essentials

Fuel Scooping Guide

Updated 05 Nov 2026 by CMDR LouisFredEx · Reviewed by staff 05 Nov 2026 · 4 min read

FUEL SCOOPING

Fuel scooping lets you refill your tanks from stars, so you can travel as far as you like without a station. While it is a core skill every explorer needs, it is also extremely useful for travel around the bubble to prevent fuel exhaustion.

THE FUEL SCOOP MODULE

A fuel scoop is an optional internal module. You can only fit one per ship, and you need it to scoop fuel and to boost your jump range at neutron stars and white dwarfs. Bigger and higher-rated scoops fill your tank faster. Find all our builds with one on NEWP Builds.

THE BASICS

Fuel is an essential component that powers the ship and without it any Elite Dangerous profession will become fruitless. The indicator of your ship’s fuel is located beside the power distributor HUD. There are three components to the fuel gauge:

  • the top will have a number indicating the rate of consumption, this number is irrelevant
  • the thin line indicates the consumption of one tonne of fuel
  • the thick line indicates the total fuel reservoir stored on your ship

Fuel scooping can only be done in supercruise. By orbiting close to the body of a fuel scoopable star, near its exclusion zone, fuel is collected into the ship’s total fuel reservoir.

Be careful to not overheat your ship either by:

  • fuel scooping too close to the star
  • charging your FSD to jump while being too close to the star
  • staying stationary for too long

THE EXCLUSION ZONE

You can accidently hit the star’s exclusion zone and drop out of supercruise. You’ll take some damage and the process of fuel scooping will stop.

To safely exit the star’s exclusion zone, you’ll need to:

  • line up with the escape vector which can be located by:
    1. target the stellar mass
    2. line up so that the target reticle on the compass is at the center and is hollow
  • line up with the next system target
  • be sure not to boost to cause unnecessary heat damage

How to scoop safely: skim the scoop zone around the star without entering the exclusion zone, watch your heat and fly clear before charging the FSD

FUEL SCOOPABLE STARS

Fuel Scoopable Stars are a subset of all the different types of stars you’ll find in the Elite Dangerous galaxy. Those scoopable stars are the main sequence star types. To easily memorize the Scoopable Stars types, you can use:

  • “KGB FOAM”
  • “Oh Be A Fine Girl / Guy Kiss Me”
  • “Oh Bollocks, A Friendly Ganker Killed Me.”

Scoopable stars: K, G, B, F, O, A and M. Not scoopable: brown dwarfs, T Tauri, white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, Wolf-Rayet, carbon and Herbig Ae/Be stars

JET CONE AND INJECTION BOOSTING

You are able to inject raw materials into your Frame Shift Drive to give your ship’s jump range a marginal boost. Injection of materials into your ship’s Frame Shift Drive can be found in the synthesis tab of the ship’s Inventory. Basic, standard and premium injections will boost the ship’s jump range by 25%, 50% and 100% respectively.

By using a fuel scoop, you can supercharge your Frame Shift Drive from White Dwarves and Neutron Stars to give your ship’s jump range a 50% and 300% jump increase respectivley. Neutron Stars are popularized to allow CMDRS to jump to places faster. Supercharging your FSD will damage it overtime.

white dwarf with a 50% boost White Dwarf

neutron star with a 300% boost Neutron Star

It is generally advised:

  • to avoid white dwarves because of its large exclusion zone and its small 50% increase in jump range
  • to fly in the same direction as the neutron’s jet

You can also run into a White Dwarf or Neutron Star’s Jet Cone in its exclusion zone. This is very dangerous place to be, often resulting in eventual death if you are not prepared to escape from one. Incidents like these are rare but can happen.

Spansh’s Neutron Plotter is a great tool used by many to plot long distances journeys with a collective network of neutron stars along that path.

GALACTIC RESCUE LINE

Stranded at a star you can’t scoop with an empty tank, or down to life support? Don’t panic. Our SOS page walks you through what to do right now and how to call for help:

If the Blue Oxygen Timer is showing in the top right of your screen, LOG OUT to the Main Menu immediately- this stops the timer.

If not, exit SuperCruise and come to a stop. Keep Life Support on while disabling every other module you can (there are some you can’t disable). This reduces fuel consumption and increases the time until fuel is exhausted and the O2 timer begins.

Options for Rescue Include:

  • NEWP Interstellar Rescue: our own rescuers on PC, Xbox and PlayStation, on our Discord.
  • No answer within a few minutes? The page also points you to the Fuel Rats if you are out of fuel, or the Hull Seals if your hull or canopy is failing.
  • SRV stuck in space or on an exobiology life form? The SOS page doesn’t cover this, so call the Hull Seals directly.

Open the SOS page