No Man’s Sky: making units

Trade Routes

Install economy scanner in ship.

Trade routes:

These tips will help set up an effective trade route using the Locally Produced trade commodities for a given set of systems. Depending on economy type, the system will have a set of Locally Produced items (see infographic for list) that can be bought at a steep discount (as low as -79% of base value) and sold at a neighboring system for a high mark up (can be +100% of base value). Most of the info on the items is in the infographic.

Key Points

• Every system has an economy type (noted by symbol and color) and wealth level (star rating)
• Install the Economy Scanner to use the Economy color filter in the galaxy map and scan for Trade Outposts (in the ship quick menu, Gear icon) in new systems.
• Buy/Sell prices are best at planetary locations (Trade Outposts, etc), avoid Space Stations
• Always Sell an item in one transaction by keeping it in a single inventory (ie, all Star Silk in ship, and all Decrypt User Data in exosuit). This avoids crashing a market before selling the rest of your inventory.
• Use a ship with good hyperdrive range (shuttles/large explorers are affordable + lot of slots) to expand your network.
• Focus on “value per slot” by purchasing the most valuable items you can afford. While these offer less profit margin, your profits increase dramatically due to the value of the items. For example, making 40% profit off of 10m worth of goods is better than making 90% profit off of 100k worth of goods. In the respective cases, your profit would be 4mil vs 90k units.

An easy way to earn units is setting up a profitable trade route.

Setting up the trade route :

1. Buy the economy scanner at Anomaly and install in ship.
2. Filter the galaxy map by economy type and spend some time finding high buy/sell numbered 3 star systems. The closer they are to the maximum of 80% / -30%, the more profitable your trade route will be.
3. Scan to find a Trading Post on any planet in your chosen system. Build a base beside it with a teleport module.
4. Create a trade route from the best systems you have found following the path laid out in this image.
5. Here’s an old trade route of mine : https://postimg.cc/N28yfHBq. I name the different bases 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 or 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4 depending on the route to make it easier on me.

Once your trade route is set up, takes less than 5 minutes daily to collect those sweet units :

1. buy all the trade goods at 3.1, trade goods being the 5 fancy items at the top of the list, not materials and such.
2. teleport and sell them at 3.2, then buy all at 3.2
3. teleport and sell them at 3.3, then buy all at 3.3
4. teleport and sell them at 3.1
5. profit ~25-30 million
6. same idea for a 4 trade route, profit ~40-50 million

Unless you sell to the visiting traders at the Space Stations or Trading Post, the price on goods crashes. You get the best price for trading goods on a planet, that’s why it’s handy to build your base next to a Trading Post.

Trade Route Styles

Established:

• Build base computers and teleporters at a planetary outpost per system (“Blue Tradestop”)
• Pros: Simply teleport to next base in route, very fast $$, no pirates or refueling.
• Cons: Save often in case of bugs, supply and demand will eventually fall for a while.

Nomadic:

Find new systems to buy/sell as you explore the galaxy

• Immersive, actually fly your ship to transfer goods
• Pros: Unaffected by market crash, effectively unlimited $$, feel like a trader
• Cons: refueling, using the galaxy map, pirates (Cargo Scan Deflector is a good investment)

Alternatively, you could use a freighter with a trade terminal built inside and the Interstellar Scanner tech installed (economy scanner). The pricing might be the same as planetary outposts (I honestly forget).

Sentinel ships

You could try to find a dissonant planet in a rich or pirate sector and start hunting for an S class sentinel ship (be aware that attacks on your ship in space, or on you on ground can happen in pirate sectors and troubled sectors, so only do this if your ship is fit to destroy pirates already, it is usually not that hard on normal difficulty). The low class ships I pick(ed) up on the way provide a lot of income. You can avoid fighting all the waves of corrupted sentinels by going underground if need be.

As you are new, a bit more info.

On dissonant worlds you can find structures called Dissonance Resonators (they look a bit like small ever-moving construction cranes with a crystal boom section), when destroyed they drop either an Inverted Mirror or an Echo Locator.

Using an Echo Locator will lead you to a Harmonic Camp. You will have to do a puzzle but this camp will unlock scanning for crashed sentinel ships.

You will need Inverted Mirrors to repair said ships and some other resources you will be able to find or produce nearby.

If you are lucky the cherry on top will be a nice ship.

Scrapping can be a bit of a nuissance as the game usually summons the first ship you own after scrapping, so scrapping more ships takes a lot of travelling and summoning ships on planets. But, even scrapping a c class sentinel ship yields 20 million+ units.

Edit1: The reason to do this in rich or pirate sectors is that ships that spawn in these areas have a higher chance of being S class, ships in stations, freighters, and apparently also crashed ships.

If you install some other weapon and uninstall the sentinel cannon before scrapping, you can reclaim the inverted mirror Also, in pirate systems, while the chance for s class is higher, ships also spawn with less inventory slots

You can save time on the ship switching by using the Anomaly - loading & switching are both faster, and you can almost always park the Anomaly closer to the station than the nearest planet.

Dissonant planets are a new player’s ultimate financial jumpstart - everything is valuable. The crashed interceptors are worth way more units than other crashed ships and are easier to find. Radiant Shards process into 50 Nanites each; spare Inverted Mirrors at 95 Nanites each; Atlantideum becomes Pugneum at 1:2, and then Pugneum becomes Nanites at 5:1. Fixing broken autophages (at least 1 per crashed ship site, more across the planet) or fighting sentinels can reward Salvaged Glass, which can reward unique upgrades and/or high-end components for craft or trade.

Nanites

• go to pirate system
• buy suspicious packages for arms and tech
• open them
• sell the upgrade modules at space stations

Economy crashing

Carbon, chlorine, gold, platinum.