Hey all. If you like to use a freighter as you primary base, and you don’t want to go through all the trouble of building a planetary base to get your Oxygen, it’s possible to get it entirely from your freighter! Here are the steps for a net gain of 2250 Oxygen, and you can of course scale up for your needs.

1) Collect 250 Nitrogen gas from a Stellar Extractor room. Yes, these things are actually useful! (Okay, and they are also known to be a bit buggy, but i am able to do this rather reliably. I’ll go over the bugs i’ve encountered and how to deal with them below.) To get Nitrogen from these things, park your freighter in a RED star system the day before. It’ll be ready when you start up NMS next time.

2) Harvest 3 Echinocactus plants from your Cultivation Chambers. Echinocactus is the most efficient since it gives you 100 per plant, but any of these will work: Star Bramble, Fungal Cluster, Echinocactus, Solar Vine, Frostwort, or Gamma Weed. You’ll need a total of 250 of whichever crop you have.

3) Grab 25 Chlorine and 50 Condensed Carbon from storage. Have 150 Oxygen on hand.

4) Go to your Refiners and start refining! Note that these are all “net gain” recipes, meaning that you don’t lose any of your starting materials. The extra Chlorine and Condensed Carbon can go back into storage for next time.

Refine 50 Condensed Carbon + 100 Oxygen -> 300 Condensed Carbon.

Refine 25 Chlorine + 50 Oxygen -> 150 Chlorine.

Refine 125 Chlorine -> 250 Salt.

Refine 250 Salt + 250 Nitrogen -> 250 Kelp Sacs.

Refine 250 Kelp Sacs, 250 Condensed Carbon, and 250 crop of choice into 2400 Oxygen. This particular recipe is a bit slow, so i’d recommend splitting it up into 4 or even 8 refiners. Voila!

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Okay, so let’s talk about those Stellar Extractor rooms and their little bugs? Here’s what i have personally encountered and how i’ve been able to work through them. If you know of other bugs and workarounds, please feel free to add them in the comments? Thanks! Anyway…

When you first build a Stellar Extractor room, it seems to be important to wait a few minutes until it produces at least one unit of something and then collect it. Otherwise it might not work right. This only needs to be done once, and that’s when you first build the room.

If you check your Stellar Extractor and it doesn’t have anything in it when it should, try going into the build menu, removing the room, and then replacing it. More often than not, the gathered materials have magically reappeared for me after doing this. I’ve only encountered this a few times ever, though, so your mileage may vary.

Finally, if you’d rather not deal with Stellar Extractor rooms at all, you don’t have to! Travel to any star system with water, hop in a starship, and scour the ocean floors with a Positron Ejector to collect the Kelp Sacs growing there. As a bonus, this will probably also get you a bunch of Cyto-Phosphate, Carbon, Salt, and a few other things.

Anyway, i hope you find this information useful. Good luck and have fun, fellow Travellers!

Day 1 – Unknown distance from the center of the galaxy

Awoke on a toxic planet.

Ship’s crashed, but I don’t remember how. I don’t remember much of anything before that last jump. Everything’s gone.

Well, not everything…

Previous Log Entries:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 6
• Days 9 & 10
• Day 16
• Day 27
• Day 38
• Day 47
• Day 59
• Day 67
• Day 75

(I thought for sure I’d get bored and abandon this. But I got into it. The early part was especially fun strategizing how I’d maximize the hyperdrive with limited tech slots. That first freighter battle nearly did me in since I pulled all the shield and weapon upgrades for more hyperdrive upgrades.

Eventually, I started to feel some my my character’s obsession. I’d take a break to eat, intending to pick it up again the next day. But I’d feel the pull to log back in and start jumping again. I actually finished the journey a couple days ago. I’ve just been waiting a bit between posts.

I got really lucky on the ship. Fairly early on, I found an S class explorer at a space station. It had a large number of tech slots already unlocked. It had three super-charged slots in a row together and the fourth was two rows beneath. I was able to load up on S and X class hyperdrive upgrades fairly quick and got it up to 2500 light years and +350% efficiency. I wish I’d saved the system glyphs as it made the journey so much faster.

Some “interesting” stats about the journey:

• Total jumps: 341
• Total systems discovered: 339 (only the last two were not “First Contact”)
• Total warp cells used: 105
• On-Foot Exploration: 14,014 – This surprised me, I thought it would be lower. I reckon most of this was running around space stations.
• Total freighter battles: 2 – And not one dreadnought battle. Another surprise. With all those jumps, I expected there to be more. I guess my play time on this save was too low for more. Most of the downed pirates were from a couple missions I did for flavor/variety and getting attacked flying to space stations.

Thank you to those that offered advice on how to make the journey faster. That wasn’t my goal with this journey, but this community has always been great about sharing tips and game info for new players (which I’m not, but I appreciate ya’ll anyway).

Anyway, I hope at least some of you enjoyed this. Thanks for riding along.)

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.