Starfield High Price to Pay choice: Defend the Lodge or the Eye - and can you save everyone?

There are more than a few missions in Starfield that force the player to make a choice. It's a vital piece of the role-playing puzzle, after all. Though in the main story, there's no choice that has quite as many repercussions as the choice you'll make during the main story mission High Price to Pay. What should you do, and why? The Lodge, or the Eye? This guide will help you to answer that question and make the right call - but this page will also include spoilers to do so.

High Price to Pay: Should you defend the Lodge or go to the Eye?

Last chance - this section will contain spoilers for High Price to Pay. So, why does this mission matter? Well, it's because your choices impact the fates of some characters. One of the friends you've made during your Starfield adventures will die.

You dabble with death all the time in other side quests like Operation Starseed, but this one is different because it impacts major story characters.

Put simply; during High Price to Pay, the members of Constellation are split roughly in half across two locations. Half of the group is at the Lodge at Jemison, and the other half is at the Eye, in orbit up above. When you enter the Lodge, you'll end up on the receiving end of an urgent call - and this is where it begins. 

The Hunter has attacked The Eye, and your allies there - injured - warn you to prepare for their arrival, as they're now on the way to the Lodge. Notably, you'll be told that one Constellation member has been seriously injured; this is your first clue as to what might happen depending on whether you choose to stay or go.

No matter what choice you make, someone from Constellation will die - whoever you had the highest affinity with from whichever location you don't choose to go with. Whichever character is at risk of dying on The Eye will be mentioned; so you'll be able to weigh whether you want to fly over or stick where you are.

How this works is pretty simple. Starfield has been keeping track of your 'affinity' with the characters you've met from Constellation across the course of the game, and the two characters you have the highest 'affinity' with will be at risk. The most likely person for most players is Sarah, since the game pairs you with her early and often, but it can be any two people. For me, it was Sarah and Barret.

Whichever of these characters it is, one will be on The Eye, and will be the person who gets seriously injured by The Hunter. The emergency call from The Eye will note they are badly hurt by name. The other character will be with you at The Lodge, and will stay behind if you rush to The Eye.

The consequences of the High Price to Pay choice are thus:

• If you go to The Eye, you will rescue the injured companion there, but the one left behind at The Lodge will die.
• If you remain to defend The Lodge, the companion injured at The Eye will bleed out and die. 

Naturally, unless you're opening up the console and checking your relationships with each member of Constellation, it might be hard to tell which character at The Lodge you might be leaving to die if you head to The Eye - so you'll have to weigh things carefully when deciding what to do. You might want to base it on friendship, or which character you most prefer - or on something more cold and dispassionate like each character's available crew skills. 

Take too long, and the choice will be made for you as well - so it might be worth pausing to go into the menu to get your bearing while coming to a decision.

Can you Save Everyone in High Price to Pay?

As mentioned above, the answer to this is basically no... but also, actually, the answer is yes: you can, in a round-about way, save everyone in High Price to Pay. There is a catch, however.

Due to the nature of how New Game Plus works in Starfield, you can basically choose to skip the main story for reasons that'll become clear once you actually opt to start NG+. By doing this, you actively skip the High Price to Play mission and therefore skip over the Companion Death. 

However, this means you can only do this on your second play-through. At the first run through, you will be obligated to choose somebody to lose their life - giving the mission its grim title. There's a price to pay. But who has to pay it is your choice.