I’m a 36 year old man, and tonight this game made me yelp in genuine terror. So first a little backstory. I’ve only been playing for about a month now, and tonight I discovered my first planet with water on it. Now, since none of you know me, I have a very real, and very extreme fear of being submerged in water, and ashamedly, this carries over into video games as well. Despite my fear of water I decided to jump into this deep lake I discovered on said planet to see what was in it because up until this point I’ve yet to come across any hostile animals besides the ones that show up when you steal a whispering egg.

So as I’m swimming around scanning all the plants and animals, I see an icon that says “Alluring Specimen” so naturally I had to go and investigate. This, was a bad idea. I swim over to where the waypoint is and I see an option to collect an item, so without thinking, I grab it. If swimming over here was a bad idea, taking that object was a far worse idea, because suddenly I see “biological horror detected”. From out of this giant plant looking thing emerges what I can only describe as a very pissed off anglerfish looking thing swimming right for me. I fucking freaked out! I yelped out of sheer terror, my heart started racing, and let me tell you, my jetpack could not get me the fuck out of that water fast enough. I got back in my ship, and I left that planet behind, because FUCK THAT! I did come out though with something called a Hadal Core, whatever that is.

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!