I have trouble farming nanites, the runaway mold option is just boring to me and I haven’t found a ton of great options in my 300+ hours of play, but I can reliably build 100+ fusion igniters per day so units are not a challenge for me.

So how to convert units to nanites? I found advice online to buy platinum or mold to refine it into nanites, but I find the refining tedious and there’s never enough platinum or runaway mold at trade terminals to make it worth my while. So what to do?

Well, I spent some time at a pirate controlled trading station on a planet waiting around for a known squid ship in that system, and while I waited I went to the trade terminal and bought all the suspicious packages they had, just out of curiosity. I opened them and got a total of 8 X upgrade modules.

“Okay cool” I thought, that was expensive but I can convert these to nanites.

As I waited at the terminal I discovered an interesting game mechanic. The suspicious packages reloaded at the trade terminal after only 2-3 in-game minutes. I bought all the suspicious packages again, got 8 more modules.

After messing around with it I have discovered they reloaded every 5-10 minutes of actual playtime. As a bonus the station sold hadal cores and larval cores that could be refined into 50 nanites each, and these items also replenished relatively quickly.

So…if you have a lot of units to spare, you can hang out at a pirate trade terminal and every 5 minutes or so buy all the suspicious packages and items that can be refined into nanites. I spent millions but earned 60,000 nanites in the process, for probably 1-2 hours of game time.

This method seems faster than mold farming, although it’s not a passive method either. But combining an activity like ship hunting with it and you’ll actually accomplish 2 goals at once.

It’s really expensive, but less so than buying massive quantities of platinum, and more readily available.