No Man’s Sky Tips and Tricks: Make the most of the No Man’s Sky Next update with these handy hints

No Man’s Sky was easily one of 2016’s biggest, and most controversial, releases. It’s utterly humongous, boasting a planet count of 18 quintillion unique and discoverable worlds and near-infinite ways to experience and play through the game. Simply put, no two people were set to have the same experience with No Man’s Sky.

Over the past five years, the gameplay and your ability to interact with others have changed tremendously bringing a lot of users back to the game.

So, if you’re jumping back into No Man’s Sky following No Man’s Sky Next, here are the tips and tricks to set you on the right path during your spacefaring adventure.

No Man’s Sky tips & tricks: The secret mechanics you need to know

Here is our list of the best tips and tricks to make you successful as you travel No Man’s Sky.

1. Upload All of Your Discoveries

This may sound like a no-brainer but, aside from a 200-credit bonus when you scan a new creature, No Man’s Sky doesn’t automatically reward you for new discoveries. To claim money for your finds, you’ll have to go into the game’s pause menu and individually upload each discovery.

Uploading a new system bags you 5,000 credits, with a new planet or animal granting you 2,000 credits too (and yes, that’s on top of the 200 an animal find already gives you). A new base pays out 1,000 credits and new flora discoveries give you an extra 500 credits to play with. Also, if you find 100% of all animal species on a planet, you can upload your discovery and bag a huge bonus in the hundreds of thousands of credits. Not bad.

2. Scan Everything You Can

As well as uploading all of your discoveries, make sure you do scan everything you see. Not only is it a great way to earn extra cash, but it can also help identify how a species behaves towards you (so you’re not unexpectedly attacked).

If you have an upgraded proximity scanner for rare resources and points of interest, your analysis visor can also identify what some of the ? markers in the distance are.

3. Make Friends with the Fauna

Making friends is a crucial life skill, and in No Man’s Sky, that’s no different. Befriending wild animals is essential if you want to find rare elements, blueprints, or multitools, as friendly animals will either dig up and bring you the goods or lead you to secret locations.

You can become buddies with any non-hostile animal by offering the preferred bait of that particular creature.

4. Become Multilingual

Dotted around every planet you visit you’ll find Knowledge Stones, Ruins, Monoliths, Plaques, and intelligent lifeforms. It’s through these that you’ll learn the major languages used in the systems of No Man’s Sky’s galaxy.

Split into the Vy’keen, Korvax, Gek, and Atlas languages, making sure you know a wide variety of words in each language is essential for solving some of No Man’s Sky’s puzzles. As many of you will know, traders and alien inhabitants regularly have issues you need to solve, and knowing exactly what their problem is will be far better than just having a stab at the correct response. Go forth and learn!

5. Save Fuel on Ship Launches

Spending Plutonium on your launch thruster when taking off from an alien planet can get expensive and time-consuming. Don’t worry, there’s a really easy way to save yourself fuel – lookout for landing pads.

You can find landing pads at trading posts and shelters that contain trading units inside. Shelters such as Observatories and some maintenance facilities also have ship-landing areas denoted by a beacon-like structure. These stops may not have landing pads, but you can still take off from these locations without having to worry about the cost of fuel.

6. Manage Your Exosuit and Ship Inventory

Keeping on top of your inventories is unbelievably important in No Man’s Sky. The draw of Hello Games’ title is really the art of exploration, but resource management plays almost as large a role.

Your Exosuit can hold 250 units of any resource, but your ship inventory is capable of holding up to twice that amount. As you’ve probably guessed, the best way to manage the materials you don’t need is to send them to your ship for storage.

Opt for a freighter when given the chance for even more storage. Because so many valuable resources are found on different planets from the one you’re probably on, it’s a good idea to get a freighter with ample slots available (you can upgrade your freighter now too).

7. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

A crucial element to keeping your inventory count low is to ditch the items you really don’t need to carry around with you.

Elements such as Carbon and Iron are incredibly common, and thus shouldn’t really be carried around with you unless you really think you’ll need it. You can also ditch some rarer elements such as Plutonium, Thamium9, Platinum, and Zinc: many planets have these in abundance as either crystals in caves and around launch pads or as wildflowers.

8. Easily Upgrade Your Exosuit with More Slots

No matter how hard you try to limit your inventory, there comes a point where you just can’t carry on carrying your life around in 13 slots. This is when it’s time to upgrade your Exosuit through the various drop pods that litter the planets of No Man’s Sky’s galaxy. Finding those pods is another matter, however.

Thankfully, there’s one little trick you can use to help you stumble across a few drop pods more often. If you seek out your nearest outpost beacon (the ones with the orange lasers, not the large antennas) and craft yourself a Bypass Chip out of Iron and Carbon, you can request that it finds your nearest “Shelter” point. There’s no particular science to this, but roughly 80% of the time you’ll end up with a new drop-pod location. Stack up a few of these on your map and go for a walk – you’re bound to come across a fair few Exosuit upgrades on your travels.

Be warned, though: each upgrade will cost you 10,000 credits more than the last, so things can become expensive rather quickly.

9. Stop Sentinels from Attacking You

Sentinels are the police force of No Man’s Sky’s galaxy. Nobody knows exactly how they came to be or what their purpose really is, but one thing’s for certain: sentinels are annoying.

You can avoid their scorn if you’re smart, though. Destroying plants, resources, or killing animals gains their attention, at which point they’ll scan the spot where your target once lay and then seek you out to scan you. At this point, if you stand completely still, they’ll leave you alone. Of course, this requires the sentinels on your planet to not be crazed killers, to begin with.

However, if you end up rousing their hatred and walkers start to chase you, place your faith in plasma grenades, as they seem to completely immobilize the enemy. It may be a deliberate feature, or it may be a glitch – whatever the case is, it works.

10. Never Worry About an Overheating Multitool

Nothing’s worse than having to wait for your multitool to cool down when you’re mining a big, juicy rock of rare elements. That’s why this trick to avoid overheating is essential for those looking to gather resources at speed.

Use your mining laser as usual and once the bar begins to flash red due to overheating, stop for half a second or so and then carry on. The bar should drop right back to zero and you can keep going.

11. Learn to Fly Like an Ace

No Man’s Sky doesn’t really ever tell you how to fly, beyond takeoff, landing, boosting, and initiating your Pulse Drive. If you want to best your foes in space dogfights or navigate planets like a pro, you need to know how to make the most of your ship’s controls.

You can find a rundown of the controls in the pause menu but knowing when to make use of your craft’s ability to roll is key along with kicking in reverse thrust to avoid an asteroid. You can also cut flight times by using a planet’s gravitational pull to launch you out into space before falling back to Earth – or whatever planet you’re on – right by your desired waypoint.

12. Befriend the “Pin” Option

Gathering resources for an upgrade or item you need to craft can be a bit of a pain. Sometimes you forget what it is you’re supposed to be looking for – was it Chrysonite you were after, or did you need more Copper? Well, worry no more: you can pin yourself a reminder for what you need, and it will appear periodically in the bottom-right corner of your HUD.

You can pin an item by simply hovering over it in your inventory crafting menu and pressing the Pin button. Voila.

13. Never Get Stuck in a Crater or at the Bottom of a High Cliff

Thanks to a mixture of odd texture layering and strange design, you can get yourself out of any crater or up any cliff with your jetpack. By walking up so you’re walking into the cliff or crater wall, boost whilst holding forward to fly up alongside it without expending any of your jetpack thrusters. Easy.

14. Learn How to Run Even Faster

Even with all the sprint stamina upgrades, sometimes you just can’t run fast enough or for long enough to make it to where you want to be within a reasonable time. That’s why the hidden boost thrust will completely change your life.

Hitting the Melee button, followed directly by the Boost button, will launch you forward at a far greater speed than if you were sprinting. Keep tapping the Boost button and you’ll jettison forward, cutting those arduous waypoint ETA times in half.

15. Know Where to Look to Find a Planet’s Animals

Tracking down the last of any animal on a planet is an utter pain. You’ve seemingly looked everywhere but haven’t a clue where to find the last few of the species you need. Well, one handy hint is to check for caves, because some smaller creatures love to hang out in those dark and dank underground systems.

If the cave systems prove fruitless, look out for bodies of water – if there’s water on a planet, at least one species is bound to be living in it. Also, as a rule of thumb, if there are water and creatures living in it, you’ll also find flying animals around the place. You should be able to scan the bigger flying creatures easily, but you may have to shoot down some of the smaller ones before you can scan them – before you say anything, I know, it goes against the idea of conservation.

16. Build Atlas Passes with Ease

You may have seen many locked doors and containers on your journey across the galaxy, all of them requiring something known as an “Atlas Pass.” Don’t worry, you can craft these as part of the main storyline provided you follow it. If you decided to ignore the Atlas at the start of the game, you can still come across a blueprint and required materials for one later on, so don’t panic.

You should probably keep hold of your Atlas Stones – no matter how tempting it is to sell them at over 70,000 credits a pop. Rumors are you’ll need them when you reach the center of the galaxy.

17. Finding Your Resources

Naturally, you’d assume that a barren moon has less to offer you than the rich and verdant planet it orbits, but you may be surprised to know moons are an excellent place to land in No Man’s Sky. Because moons are far smaller than planets, Hello Games’ world-building algorithm packs them with things to do and see.

If you want to find Exosuit upgrades, learn a lot of alien worlds, or find some sweet, crashed ships, a moon is the place to do it.

When you’re approaching a planet or a moon, hit the scan button for a list of available resources. If the items you’re looking for show up in that list, look for a good landing site.

18. Don’t Be Afraid of Black Holes

Science suggests that you should stay well away from a black hole if you ever were to end up near one. In No Man’s Sky, however, they’re a means to jettison ever closer to the center of the galaxy. Working something like wormholes, black holes will swallow you up and spit you out in an entirely new system.

These interstellar occurrences aren’t all that common, but you should find at least a few on your journey.

19. Never Miss Out on an Alien Conversation

There’s nothing more frustrating than entering into a conversation with an alien at an outpost only to discover you don’t have the item or resource it’s looking for. What’s worse, leaving this conversation completely closes it off and you’ve lost your chance to help a pal out and reap the rewards you could have had.

However, there’s one little exploit you can use to your advantage. Once you’ve started a conversation with the alien lifeform, you have a few seconds to back out and still be able to initiate it again. The window of opportunity is long enough for you to see if you’re missing anything from your list of options and, if you are, you can leave and gather them before coming back.

20. Become an Interstellar Billionaire

Everybody likes getting rich quick and being rich in No Man’s Sky can really help you out. With money, you can buy the biggest ship in the galaxy, all the Exosuit upgrades you stumble upon, and any rare materials you may need. You can be part of the galactic 1%.

Getting rich in No Man’s Sky is also incredibly simple, requiring little more than a couple of hours and some basic trading knowledge.

Head to a space station trading terminal and check the Sell list for any highly desired items, which will be indicated by a star in a circle next to the item’s name. These prized goods can be sold for an exceptionally high price and, conveniently, many of the traders who frequent the space-station port will be selling them at astoundingly low prices.

It’s simple economics, but buy as much as you can at a low price and then sell it off at a high one. Within an hour or so, you’ll have amassed a ton of money and can live like nobility, lauding it over the peons you come across on your travels.

Get a Companion

In recent updates, No Man’s Sky decided to something a little more useful with the creatures you often encounter. Using pellets, you can gain the trust of native creatures resulting in the perfect companionship. Fortunately, it is much simpler to train these creatures using the Pellet recipe in your inventory. Use 60 Carbon to craft 20 pellets. When you’re near a creature, you can select the option to feed it.

Once you’ve gained their trust, you can register the companion. Do keep in mind; different creatures have different capabilities.

Is No Mans’ Sky Worth It?

After reading all the tips and tricks, you may think this is a lot to keep up with in one game. You’d be right, it is. But, No Mans’ Sky has something for everyone. It isn’t just deep-space exploration. You can build, interact with other players, battle space pirates, and complete all sorts of missions.

It’s for those reasons we’d definitely say that No Mans’ Sky is worth it. Even if you finish the storyline, you have a lot more to look forward to. If you enjoy creative freedom, you’ll love building. If you prefer combat, you can do that too. For everything it has to offer gamers, it’s no wonder the game is so popular.