Eight Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Playing No Man’s Sky

As far as tutorials go, No Man’s Sky has a very minimalist one. It teaches you to survive, but when it comes to thriving, you generally have to figure it out on your own. Here are just a few things that I wish I had known when I started this game.

Our tips for getting started will teach you how to play the basic game, but some things you can only learn from experience (or from the little exploits discovered by other players).

Read Also: Tips For Getting Started In No Man’s Sky


Boost Jump

Boost jump! Everyone needs to know about boost jump. If you don’t, I am here to save your virtual life. Boost jump is a funny little thing that happens when you melee combat while running, then immediately hold the jetpack button down. It’s probably not something that’s meant to happen, but it sure is useful.

To do one, start running, then press the melee button, then the jetpack. It takes a bit to figure out the timing, but if it works properly the jetpack should speed you off in the direction you were facing instead of sending you upwards. The speed holds for the whole time you’re in the air, so you can cycle the jetpack on and off a few times to prolong your flight.

It’s really useful if you need to get somewhere on foot, fast — you can run until your stamina runs out, then boost jump until your jetpack runs out, by which time your stamina will have filled up again. Cycle through like this and you’ll get to your destination in no time.


Easily Collect Resources On High Security Planets

It’s great to come across a planet that’s just littered with precious resources — except when those pesky sentinels start shooting you when you so much as look at a Gravitino Ball or Vortex Cube. It can be a pain to fight them off for every single item you collect (plus it fills your inventory with more common elements) but it turns out you don’t have to. In fact, using the aforementioned boost jump, you can actually outpace the sentinel forces pretty quickly — often without having to take damage at all.

Read Also: What Is The Deal With Vortex Cubes In No Man’s Sky?

The best way to do this is to run far enough away from the first item that they lose sight of you, but keep picking up items while the sentinels are hunting you. This means that no new sentinels get deployed, and as long as you keep moving you get to collect these items in relative peace. If you stop to wait for them to catch sight of you occasionally, you can draw out this ‘search’ period indefinitely, and continue filling up your inventory with rare items.


Add Extra Inventory Space

Speaking of inventory, you’re going to need more space in your inventory if you want to get rich. There’s only one way to add extra space to your inventory — drop pods. These are little pods scattered around on every world, with each giving you one extra slot in your inventory for a price. The first upgrade is free, the second costs 10,000 units, and the price goes up by another 10k with every slot you gain. I’m at the point where they’re around 300,000-400,000 units each at the moment.

So how do you find drop pods? First, find a signal scanner, which are a bit easier to locate. These are the little conical pods with orange beams shooting upwards from them. Craft a couple of Bypass Chips (10 iron and 10 plutonium, both very common elements) and then use them on the signal scanner. Get it to search for Shelter, and hopefully it’ll locate a Drop Pod. Do this a couple of times to give yourself a few options and then go find yourself some upgrades. You can also spot drop pods fairly easily when you’re just flying over terrain, especially once you know what you’re looking for.


Exploit The No Man’s Sky Economy

While you can rack up the units just by collecting endless resources, it’s always easier to make good money when you have a strategy. Lucking upon rare resources aside, here are a couple of ways you can do that.


Trade With Everyone

All space stations have trade terminals, and most of these have an item or a number of items that is extremely valuable, marked by a gold star. These will usually be items that can be sold at a vastly inflated price, often 95%+ of its regular price. Even if you don’t have any of these at all, you can go back into the main hangar and start buying some off the various ships that dock there. You can literally get into the trading game, buying at a low price and selling (just upstairs) at a much higher one. This can be a little labour intensive, so make sure the markup is significant enough to be worth it.


Craft Bypass Chips

Remember those things from above? They can usually be sold for around 3000 units each, but they only take 10 iron and 10 plutonium to make — elements that are easy to find and harvest. Making all the little chips are a bit of a grind, but in lieu of finding valuable materials, this is the best way to make money just foraging the resources from a challenge (especially if you need a lot of units and you don’t want to leave that planet.


Upload Discoveries On Empty Planets

Have you ever discovered all the animal species on one planet? Not many people have. It’s fairly tedious, unless there are only a few species to discover. It’s pretty easy, however, if there are no species to discover. If you’re on a planet where there is zero wildlife, you can actually select the bar where it says “100% Complete” and upload the discovery. The reward is, fittingly, zero units, but if it works it will at least count towards the tally in your journey achievements.

Now, this doesn’t always seem to work, but it has usually worked for me only when I’m on the planet in question. As far as I can tell, it will only work if the bar on the discovery screen is cycling between “100% Complete” and “Upload for 0 Units”.


Keep Your Ship’s Fuel In Your Inventory

Now, I know inventory space is precious, but so are warp cells. At least, they’re a pain to make. It can be tempting to fill up your ship’s hyperdrive so you can jump around the galaxy as much as you want, but there’s one problem with this. If you happen to buy a new ship, all that fuel can’t be transferred, so you lose it. Keep your fuel in a form that you can carry, so new ships are always ready to go.


Find Trading Posts

Planetary trading posts are one of the most useful waymarks to find. They look like a kind of building with a couple of different landing platforms coming off the sides. When you’re flying around a planet, they’re pretty easy to spot.

Ships are constantly landing and taking off from here, and it’ll have a regular trade terminal as well. It’s a great place to sell all the products of your scavenging — but even better, once you find one it will be marked on your radar as a waypoint, at least until you exit the game or go off-planet.


Grenades Are Your Friend

If your multi-tool doesn’t have grenades equipped to it yet, get on that. Grenades are one of the most useful upgrades to your multitool for a couple of reasons (and you can further upgrade grenades with a number of features of their own.)

Firstly, you can dispatch sentinels, and most types of hostile creatures with a single grenade. You barely need to use the boltcaster at all if you have some ammo in your grenade slot, and surprisingly it doesn’t take too much either.

Secondly, you can use the grenades not only to quickly mine elements like Iron that take ages to mine with the beam, but it also destroys regular terrain. This means you can blast a hole in the ground to take shelter from a storm, or even blast your way upwards out of a cave if you find yourself stuck in one.


These are all the tips that I regularly use, what have you found useful to know in navigating No Man’s Sky? Let us know in the comments!


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