No Man's Sky: Making Money

Crafting for Profit, Element List, and Tips for Earning Credits

Making money is an important part of No Man's Sky, if you want a better ship or to be able to afford (or stock up on) the rare resources that are needed to craft the best gear and afford inventory upgrades for your exosuit. The latter approach 300,000 credits each as you near the maximum. This guide will focus on giving you some tips to making money in No Man's Sky, and what you can craft that is highly profitable and worth making in bulk. Some items are a loss, others have huge profit margins if you empty your inventory of unneeded items and craft many of them.

Garbage suggestions

• Buy Low Sell High - you'll see this one a lot on guide sides, they don't play the game I don't think - it's just popular so they're writing BS articles. It's hard to do and time consuming, more so than the most basic tip (mine) to make money.
• Scan Plants and Animals - Yeah you can make some money doing it, only do it if you enjoy that. It's not a major money-maker. 300k to finish an entire planet and scan literally every animal. Do this for the milestones, maybe, when you're achievement hunting. DO scan some here and there, mainly animals, and activate save slots, you can end up with 15-20k even with a short stop on a planet. But you're not playing professional wildlife photographer as a money-making profession, you like it as you enjoy it.
• Bash freigthers and your wanted level magically disappers - this is actually a good suggestion, but right now it counts as an exploit and if you want to do that you might as well just get a trainer on nomansskymods.com and save yourself some time. I really list this as when this is patched all those 'how to make money in NMS' articles that are floating around are going to be invalidated assuming HG cares about their product and patches it. Because of how awful the game is at handling wanted levels, you just dip into a planet and you're fine. Or fly into a starbase - fine. Trip and fall into your spaceship and you're fine. Worse, somehow, getting yourself killed while doing as much damage as possible to freighters before you do it is somehow a money-making tactic. You'll have everything you lost and can immediately sell it. It's not great, better if you upgrade your shields and weapons. I'd save being a pirate raider for later in your career when you can FIT these things in your ship along with loot.

Mine

Yep, this is it. This is where the big money's to be had, but it gets better when you can afford to fly to higher-ranked star systems that require at least a Tau Warp Engine. You can look for stars with special characteristics that may mean they host more metals. Fly low over planets, look for large ore deposits, and mine them heavily. Look for anything that isn't heridium or equivalent price. You want a 16-20 slot multi-tool fully upgraded for this to work out well, and you will want to pick up every plutonium you see. Oh, and until they fix the wanted level thing, shooting down any sentinels you see is actually quite profitable. Mine the large deposit, take off and find another.

Look for Sales and Exploit Them

Watch the Galactic Market for any items that have the star, this means they are worth far more than normal. Beware this star also shows up if an item is grossly overpriced (when you're buying, this means that trader will take them for twice as much as well). If you're buying, you want minus galactic average - selling you want + galactic average. You can then go to traders in the port (ship by ship) and buy as many as they have available, so long as they are normal price. Taking them back to the exchange, you can make a ton off this buy-low sell-high routine that many guide sites talk about.

Sometimes you can even head to a nearby planet and return to make more profit - you know they need plutonium and it's marked up, so go gather loads of plutonium! It's a fundamental practice that everyone should know. To better take advantage of this, when you're leaving a star system don't make one last trip to the exchange in that system unless you have a reason to - move on to the next to sell your goods, so you can see what items - if any - are in demand.

Buy Low Sell High iS BS

In the game's current state, playing trader means doing the above - not buying something for 5% less than the galactic average and selling it to a starbase. The profit margins are too slim. While it's handy to buy some gold, or omegon for half off, it's not possible to do this to more than 40-50 units, thus you won't make that much money buying low. The only time this is good is if you can get dynamic resonators or other expensive items for half off, it's worth buying a few. Other methods here help you make millions, which is what is needed for the better ships.

Resources List and Base/Stack Values

Crafting Profits in No Man's Sky

It may not be obvious to some players, but you can certainly make a lot of money by crafting items and selling them - especially when the final product is marked up at the galactic market or with an alien you meet at a space station or trading port. Additionally you may find crafting ingredients on markdown (like cheap antimatter or 50 cheap plutonium for sale that would make Lemmium even more profitable). Doing this means selling the unnecessary items, then filling each empty inventory slot with one of the items you'd like to sell. You'll have to craft them one by one, but thankfully do not have to sell them individually unless they are split between your ship and exosuit inventory.

Make sure to look for when an item that is not normally very profitable but cheap to craft, such as Microdensity Fabric or Suspension Fluid, are marked up on the galactic market. You can take a look when you're about to sell unnecessary items before you mass-craft and may notice something else is more profitable. It's easy to then make a lot of them and sell them all for an increased price.

Many people know about the profitability of making Bypass Chips, though there are some other items that are worth substantially more. Bypass Chips do have a strength in that they are very easy to come by. Use this information alongside that knowledge to make use of your leftover resources and make even more money on your next trip to the galactic exchange.

Save Your Money: Ship and Exosuit Upgrade Values

Don't aim straight for 48 slots, but don't go up 1-2 slots each purchase. This is actually a waste of money, since your ship is essentially valueless in a trade. Buy a 16-18 slot ship, then a 22-24, maybe a 30, then work toward a 40+ slot ship. This will save you lots of money in the long run. I might concede it'd be worth it if you're going to be stuck at 40 slots (with 48 being the max) for a long time and you just like the look of a new ship, since you're going to be seeing it a lot.

Another thing is, it may not be worth buying too many inventory slots until you've got at least a ship worth 3-5 million. The slots for the exosuit can start to cost 200,000-300,000 each, only hold 250 units, and a ship with 24 slots is a better bargain in terms of max number of units held. A 3 million credit 24-slot ship costs an equivalent of 62,500 credits per slot (this being because it is worth 48 exosuit slots in terms of carrying capacity when it comes to 500-stacks of materials).

Other No Man's Sky Guides

• Guide to Ships in No Man's Sky
• Walkthrough Part 1: Leaving first Planet
• Walkthrough Part 2: Warp Drive
• AtlasPass V1 & Anomalies
• Finding AtlasPass V2 and V3
• Discovering Plants an Animals (Scanning)
• Antimatter
• Adding Inventory Slots
• How to Buy Better Ships
• Signal Scanners, Monoliths, Outposts, and Crashed Ships
• Best Elements to Recharge Gear
• Multi-tool and its Functions
• Mining in No Man's Sky
• Sentinels and Wanted Level
• Where to Find Better Warp Reactors