With Frontiers and the sale, there’s probably a lot of new players coming to the game so I wanted to put together a list of some lesser known tips and tricks. Some of these may already be well known but a lot of them are either things that took me a long time to find out about, or things I see people asking about a lot. Some of these are probably gonna be useful to experienced players too. I’ll add more things to this thread over time.

Reply with your own tips and I’ll add some good ones to this post too!

• The mining laser is faster the more it heats up. When you use the mining laser, the heat bar in the corner goes up and eventually the laser changes colour. For maximum efficiency, try to keep the heat bar almost full without overheating it. It will mine twice as fast this way.

• The melee jetpack boost. This one’s been around since the game first came out so it’s probably more known but it may be worth mentioning for newer players. When you’re on the ground, if you melee and then immediately hold jump/jetpack, you get a significant forwards boost. This is probably the fastest way to move around without vehicles and it doesn’t require any upgrades.

• You can refine oxygen to get carbon. By around mid to late game, you reach a point where you have so much money that you can bulk buy almost any of the main resources from trade terminals instead of having to mine or farm them. The one exception is carbon, which as far as I can tell never appears in trade terminals. However, you can just bulk buy oxygen and refine it into carbon.

• Use the smallest terrain manipulator size for maximum resources. The number of resources you get from mining things with a terrain manipulator seems to be more based on time spent mining rather than the actual volume you mined. So by changing the size to the smallest, you can get far more resources from each ore deposit. ( This thread about this inspired me to make this post )

• Use medium / large refiners to make resources that you don’t have blueprints for. This one is somewhat relevant to expedition 3 specifically. One of the objectives requires you to make herox but you don’t immediately have the recipe for it. However, some resources like herox can be made in refiners which do not require you to own the blueprint. A lot of these recipes can be found on the wiki.

• The main story will unlock a lot of blueprints quickly. I know personally I mostly ignored the story when I started and just kind of did my own thing for a while but I got annoyed with how long it took to unlock certain base parts or equipment. But if you just follow the main storyline first, it will unlock a lot of important things for you far quicker than if you were to do it manually.

• The first freighter you rescue is free. In the early game, you might come across NPC freighters which are very expensive to buy directly. But after traveling to a couple new star systems, you will eventually warp in to a pirate fight. If you save the freighter from pirates, you can get it for free. If you want an S class, you can just reload a manual save from before you warped into that system and repeat that fight until you get lucky and spawn a free S class freighter.

• Use the space anomaly to escape space fights with pirates or sentinels. If you get in some space trouble, you will be stuck fighting for a while without the ability to pulse away. One simple way to get around this is just summoning the anomaly and entering it.

• You can turn off PVP or multiplayer altogether in the settings. Going into the settings > network > multiplayer will give you options to turn off certain parts of online play. I would recommend at least turning off PVP and others editing your bases to prevent griefing. If you’re having issues with glitches / crashes, turning multiplayer off entirely may help. Nothing in this game actually requires multiplayer, though some aspects are more fun with it on.

• Use the space station teleporter to save the station to your teleporter list. If you ever want to warp back to a certain star system again, simply fly into its space station and find the teleporter there. Just opening the teleporter menu will register the teleporter to your list and you will then be able to warp back to it from any other teleporter.

• Using your jetpack against a vertical wall does not use up jetpack fuel. If you need to get out of a hole, just walk into the wall and boost up.

• To save launch fuel, land on marked landing spots. This is not just landing pads, if you land on any landing spot that has the green circles, it won’t cost any launch fuel to lift off again.

• You can teleport to any of your base computers, even if the base doesn’t have teleporters. If you just want to mark a cool place you want to return to in the future, just putting down a base computer is enough for you to later warp there with a teleporter.

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My guess would be an abandoned dissonant system since it seems like abandoned systems are the rarest (according to Wiki) and I would assume dissonant systems are less common than normal systems.

Edit: I know there’s also a difference in the number of stars and the color of the star, but not sure which number and color are rarest.

After almost 900 hours of play time I decided to start a new game in Survival Mode.

The wiki details are pretty sparse (https://nomanssky.fandom.com/wiki/Game_mode#Survival_mode) , but basically what I’ve seen comes down to a few changes:

1. You die you lose your carried stuff
2. Your inventory stacks are severely limited
3. Planet resources are further apart
4. Enemies have more health
5. (anecdotal) Planets are set up to kill you

One – This is reasonable, especially if you die (like I did) early in the game in space.

Two – This also includes the amount you can place in refiners. This is just annoying and time consuming. Nothing about this is harder or “survival”, just gets in the way. It makes the game much more boring, as you end up feeding the refiners constantly rather than setting them and coming back a little later.

Three – Again, more annoying and time-consuming but not harder. You can still find the resources you need, but takes more hunting to find the resource you need near enough to a power hotspot. More boring.

Four – Good. No objection. They may have increased the number of enemies (for pirate raids or Sentinels), but I don’t think that’s actually happened. Seems about the same. I think more enemies is a much greater risk than greater health, as they have an easier time targeting you while you’re focused on picking them off.

Five – This SEEMS to be the case but I may just have bad luck. Every single planet I’ve been on has had weather or environmental damage at play. However, I’ve only encountered one seriously aggressive predator (a very fast bonecat) in about 30 hours of play though.

Summary: I think Survival could use some work. Adding difficulty doesn’t have to come along with making the game slower or less enjoyable. There’s a few tweaks I’ve hinted at above that could improve playability and fun.

Change my mind 🙂