Below are a few popular questions that we’ve received from our past FAQ thread. As always we ask that everyone be respectful and we welcome everyone’s contribution so have fun!

Q- I’m keen to start a new passive money making pursuit. What are some good ideas or guides post-Waypoint?

A#1-Gold farm, then take that stack and sell it at a terminal (not traders) in systems that sell gold. Sell all your gold to the terminal and crash the economy. Then buy it all back at 80% off discount. You just got free money and keep all the gold. All this takes is an initial investment on a gold farm, then you carry all that gold with you and just sell/buy back when you get to another system that sells gold. With 50 stacks in my ship’s cargo hold, I can make somewhere around 150 million units in each system I do this in.

A#2-Start a Farm, Fusion Igniters or Statis Devices Farm which will increase your profits to 100- 200 mil fairly quickly and you can even send out multiple freighter missions which will help you get aronium, magno-gold, Enriched carbon and more which will increase the profits even more.

A#3-Quickest way I’ve found to make a TON of units: Harvesting Storm Crystals. Find a VERY hot planet that has frequent fire storms. DURING STORMS ONLY – you can see the bright white light from Storm Crystals if you fly around low enough. Fly to them, land, quickly harvest them, get back in your ship and fly to the next before you burn up.

Q-How do I get the Advanced Mining Laser? I don’t have the option to craft one, and the multi-tool upgrade vendor at the space station doesn’t have the blueprint for sale.

A-In order to get it, you have to look for the blueprints in crashed ships or abandoned facilities. You get it from the main story (awakenings) or you can buy it on the anomaly.

Q-What do I actually do in the game? I finished the tutorial, is there anything else beside gathering stuff, building a base and repeat?

A#1-It’s really whatever you want, there’s a base story, (assuming you haven’t completed it already), follow the quest log and you’ll figure it out, but things You’d want to do for end game? You can collect multiple multitools, ships, built a fleet for your freighter, etc.

Q-Is there a planet that is populated by many players, and they built their base close to each others like a city?

A- Yeah its the Galactic Hub Project, Its a place where many people have bases and each day the numbers grow. Please help yourself. There are many factions in NMS that do this, even NMS Pirates Hub.

Q-I’m still pretty early into the game, just making my way to the center of the galaxy, what should I be spending my credits on?

A-Go hang around a outlaw/pirate trading post. Cheapest S-class start at around 8-8.5 million without a trade-in. I recommend Vikeen pirate, as then you have two good and 1 remote chances at high-maneuverability S-class: fighter, solar, exotic.

I just love how your frigate expeditions are having adventures worthy of Star Trek while you do mundane stuff like base-building and resource-gathering.

And when they hand in their report, you just skim it quickly and move on to the next report.

​

Frigate captain, pulling up his mission report: “While on a pirate-hunting patrol, we resolved a hostage situation and turned in the criminals to the local authorities, netting us 350,000 units. But then a system-wide civil war broke out, so we helped one side win and they rewarded us with some Vy’keen effigies. We then invested in the system’s recovering industry and turned a profit of 407%. Afterwards, we warped to the next system just in time to witness a supernova up close, allowing us to gather valuable data about–“

Me, a billionaire, busy building my luxurious base on a nice tropical planet: “Yeah, yeah, whatever, dump it all over there.”

These are some of the things I’ve discovered while playing, as well as information I’ve gathered from browsing and lurking this sub, among other places. Hopefully they’ll be useful to others.

General

• To cover more ground faster, do a forward melee attack before jumping: it’ll keep your momentum as long as you keep moving forward.
• Your own plasma grenade CAN one shot kill you.
• Extreme weather goes away after a number of real-time minutes. If you pause the game and come back after ~5 minutes, the storm will clear;
• Your hazard protection won’t drop while you are in Build Mode -> Free Camera. Sentinels can still see and hurt you.
• Whenever the game counts you as “inside a building” (no longer losing life support, restoring hazard protection), sentinels drones will completely stop attacking you and lose sight of you. Bigger sentinels, such as Quads, might still attack.
• If you are within your base, you can build several “open rooms” of 4 archways + one roof (or floor as roof) which can act as a shelter from sentinels and weather and still have ample line of sight for everything around you.
• Atlas Cylinders (the red ones often found around settlements) often have Antimatter and Antimatter housing.
• The rooms that an Atlas V3 pass opens inside space stations often has just a bunch of plants for carbon and some ammo boxes. Not worth the effort
• Keeping a stack of Uranium is usually better than carrying Starship Launch Fuel around
• Activated version of star metals (Copper, Cadmium, Emeril and Indium) are never used for any recipes. They’re only useful for selling or refining into Chromatic Metal.
• A ship’s Economy Scanner can also be used to look for planetary Trading Posts.
• If you sell stuff to pilots that arrive in Space Stations, it won’t affect the star system’s prices. This is very useful for Hardcore and Permadeath modes, where you’re more likely to take Active Indium all over your exosuit, ship and freighter.
• These pilots that stop by Space Stations can offer any of the specific weather elements (Pyrite, Phosphorus, Dioxite, Parafinum), Pugneum, Chromatic Metal, as well as Alloy Metals (dirty bronze, magno-gold, etc). How much they have depends on the system’s economy level.
• Although selling to these pilots won’t affect the prices of the star system, their inventories are affected by the prices shown at the Space Station. You can, for instance, crash Metal Plate prices down to -80% at the trade terminal and buy full stocks off the pilots for the same -80% discount
• On that note, waiting around a 3-star economy space station is the fastest way to fill up your inventory with Metal Plates, if you ever need more for your mining farms.
• Pilots that land on planets often have one or two of the 6 plants used for crafting super expensive things.
• Do NOT attempt to crash the prices of Wiring Looms, Microprocessors or pretty much anything else that’s expensive and ready to buy out of a Space Station’s trade terminal. Wiring Looms’ base prices are 50k/25k buy/sell. For Microprocessors, it’s 19k/2k. Launch Fuel is 40k/450
• Markets are usually fully restocked after 2 hours of real time.
• Crashed markets take over 24 real time hours to recover.
• You can transform Units into Nanites via Outlaw Space Stations. The illegal goods sellers there always have a number of Suspicious Packets (Technology) and (Weaponry). While it’s not a 100% chance they’ll drop X mods, the chance is very high.
• These Outlaw sellers often stock Larval Eggs and Hadal Cores, which you can refine into 50 nanites each. Having a number of these outlaw stations ready to visit can be very good for your nanite account.

Mission stacking

• If you are too far away from where a mission is supposed to happen, you can reset it and it’ll most likely point to a planet within your current star system. This is best done in systems with 2 planets.
• The Scan (Minerals/Fauna/Flora) and Take a Photo of X missions can stack. If you reset them while in a small system, you’re more likely to get all of them for a single planet.
• All the “Kill” missions (sentinels, fauna, monstrosities, pirates), as well as the “feed animals” missions can stack and will count for completion simultaneously, no matter which system or planet you kill/feed the things. If you have 3 “Kill 1 predator” missions active at the same time, as soon as you kill 1, all 3 will complete.

Money money money

• Starting out fresh, mining for Cobalt might be the first bit of easy money you can get. Find a cave and mine away. Once you can build your first Medium Refiner, you just need to buy Oxygen and put both on the refiner.
• Oxygen is a “universal multiplicator”. Stick it + any of the following elements in a refiner to get more of said element: Condensed Carbon, Ionized Cobalt, Chlorine.
• If you have access to plenty of Trituim and Dihydrogen, you can use them to craft Frigate Fuel. The return of investment is usually around 100x, as both elements are extremely cheap and 50tonnes has a base sale price of 20k
• Planetary trading posts might have Drop Pod Coordinate Data for sale. You’ll notice that these are always sold at ~33% discount. You can immediately sell them at any space station for a hefty profit. With enough inventory space and Teleport-saved trading posts, you can even crash the drop pod markets of several systems before selling it all to a space station. Combine this with the time it takes for economies to recover and you can spend a good day hopping back and forth for immense profits.
• A Cactus plantation on a desert planet is one of the easiest, lowest maintenance and time consuming ways to get lots of money. Each cactus yields 150-180 Cactus Flesh. With 200, you can craft one Unstable Gel, which has a base selling price of 50k. This makes each planted cactus worth roughly 35-40k
• You can always visit other players’ activated indium or whatever else farms. If they’ve uploaded their base, they want other players to drop by and get the stuff, because they no longer need it themselves. They want to help you and others.
• Mining machines work on a diminishing returns math. The overall yield drops among all miners the more you put around the spot.
• Minor Settlements NPC sellers usually have 1 or more advanced materials that you have to otherwise craft yourself, such as Semiconductors or Nitrogen Salts.

Making upgrades better

• If you put similar upgrades next to each other, they gain a small bonus (10%) to their efficacy. A +5% damage for your Infra-Knife besides another said upgrade will make both give you +5.5%, for a total of +11% damage.
• You can only have 3 nanite bought upgrades of the same thing (shield, specific weapon) per tab. You can, for instance, install 3 shield upgrades on your General exosuit tab, plus another 3 on the Technology tab.
• Crafted upgrades do not count for the above maximum. They still count for giving the proximity bonus.
• Any upgrades that are in the General tab of your ship can be damaged by Black Hole jumping. Any upgrades in the Tech tab of your ship and exosuit are always safe from being damaged.