Update 8/25/2016: Added pages on Finding Trade Posts, Sentinels and Wanted Level, in addition to Shielding, Power, and Unstable Plasma Items. Also see my guide to Making Money in No Man's Sky for some tips on the best methods for earning cash, what crafting items are most profitable, and a list of all resources in the game.

No Man's Sky: Item Crafting

Shielding Shards, Power Gel, and Unstable Plasma Uses

No Man's Sky features three classes of consumable items that are used to recharge gear. Some are better than others, and one can make you rich.

No Man's Sky has a few strange items that are not obviously useful, but a few are actually great items that all fall under the consumables category in the crafting menu. I went a bit too long without using these, so decided to spread the word to others who may have missed their purpose. You typically get these blueprints from manufacturing facilities. No Man's Sky's consumable items include:

Shielding Items: Shielding Shard, Shielding Sheet, and Shielding Plate - situationally very useful.
Power Items: Power Gel, Power Canister, and Power Reservoir - not nearly as useful, need buffed.
Unstable Plasma: I only put this on the list because it's in this category and people would think I missed it. It charges a few things (the laser on the ship, mining beams, and plasma grenade) but is ridiculously expensive to produce given the amount of power it provides. It is a bugged item, but it's also a really expensive one (see below).

Shielding Shards, Plates, and Sheets

Shielding Sheets recharge hazard protection on the exosuit.

Your exosuit features both life support and hazard protection. The latter needs recharged (or a rest outside the extreme conditions) to recover.

These are the ones I really want to recommend for normal play. It takes 25/50/75 iron to craft them, and iron is available on every planet - if it's a destructible rock, it contains iron. The thing with the environmental hazard life support system is, it takes titanium and zinc to fuel. Those are readily available as well, but worth a lot more than iron. When on a hazardous planet, you'll be using them regularly.

The best time to make use of these is when on a really, really nasty planet that happens to have great resources. You can use shielding shards to power both the hazard protection system itself, as well as any special modules you've built to withstand the extreme conditions. Using shielding plates for 50 iron can take you straight to 93%, sheets are overkill by quite a lot.

That said, I highly recommend you build even a sigma module related to the type of planet you're on if it's qualified as 'extreme'. You can always scrap it, they typically take carbon and plutonium or something and won't hurt to scrap. What this does, is gives you two hazard bars. The first bar to go down will be the special shield you've constructed, the second will be your normal environmental hazard protection on the exosuit. When you have the special shield, such as radiation or thermal protection active, the normal hazard protection will recharge as it's not under strain. So recharge only the extra shield layer.

Surviving extreme planets in No Man's Sky

Extreme Planets can sometimes have valuable resources. This place was hell but had a lot of aluminum and calium. Using a toxic shield and shielding sheets made things much easier to manage.

So, find yourself the basic resources you need to make a module for the type of planet you're visiting, so long as you have the blueprint available, craft it temporarily and snag some iron for shielding sheets to power it. Make 4-5 shielding plates for 250 iron. It takes up 5 slots, but they'll be gradually freed. Use this to mine those large ore veins in peace. The special shields don't recharge without you repairing them, so you will have to do that, but it beats always using zinc or titanium and you'll only have to do this half as often when visiting an extreme planet.

Power Gel, Canister, and Power Reservoir

These are not as useful as the above, so I will not recommend them. It takes 25/50/75 carbon to make them, and it's kind of annoying to craft a bunch of these to fuel the mining beam when you could use the resources directly and at a similar level of efficiency. They don't provide nearly enough power (5/7/10% for the ship laser), and there isn't a piece of technology that takes a more valuable resource, as with the environmental hazard life support requiring titanium and zinc. That's what makes the three shielding items useful, no redeeming qualities here.

Unstable Plasma

As noted above, unstable plasma is bugged to all hell and doesn't make much sense as an item. You can somehow charge the grenade launcher with just a few plasma, yet this indicates that's its purpose. What it IS good for, is making money. Unstable Plasma is worth 27,500. Take the 400 Thamium9 and 200 Plutonium it costs to craft, and you get a total of 16,500. That means it's worth 11,000 credits more than the items used to create it. It's up there with Grantine and Magmox yet is a very simple recipe to make.

Other No Man's Sky Guides