How to Unlock Base Parts in No Man's Sky: Salvaged Data and Quests

Open the build menu in hour one and it is a hardware store with the lights off: a handful of timber pieces, a solar panel, a door. Open it at hour two hundred and it is an architecture catalog — prefab suites, lighting families, farming infrastructure, logic parts, decoration sets from a dozen expeditions. Everything between those two moments was unlocked, deliberately, through systems the game explains only in fragments. This page is the whole picture: where base parts come from, in what order to chase them, and what each channel is actually for.

Last updated: August 22, 2026, current through patch 6.50. For what to build with the parts, the base building guide and tips are the companions.

Channel One: Salvaged Data and Construction Research

The main catalog. Salvaged data is buried currency; construction research is where you spend it.

The dig loop, in full:

1. Land on any planet — nearly every world hosts buried technology modules.
2. Scan on foot with the Analysis Visor; modules show as icons with distance markers.
3. Excavate the glowing buried module with the Terrain Manipulator — dig down to it, open it, collect one to several salvaged data.
4. Spend it in the build menu’s construction research interface, where part families unlock permanently for the entire save.

A single planet-side walk routinely funds several research families. Salvaged data is one of the most generous currencies in the game — veterans dig it in passing, while walking to a crash site or between hotspots, and never grind it on purpose.

The Research Order That Matters

Priority	Family	Why
1	Power — solar panel, battery	Nothing works without it
2	Storage containers	The storage network that fixes inventory forever
3	Teleporter	The part that connects the base to the galaxy
4	Your room system — cuboid or prefab	The bones of every build
5	Refiners and utility	The functional core of a workshop
6	Lighting and decoration	Everything above it was earning this

The order is not strict doctrine — it is the observation that power, storage, and connection outlast every aesthetic choice. A base with a teleporter and full storage in a plain box is a functioning base; a palace with none of it is scenery.

Channel Two: The Specialist Quest Lines

The Base Computer’s own mission line sends you to hire specialists from space stations: an Overseer, a Scientist, an Armourer, a Farmer. Each needs a desk built in your base and then runs a multi-stage quest chain — errands, fetches, and story beats that reach surprisingly far into the game’s lore.

The rewards are the point: blueprints and technologies the research menu does not sell. The specialist chains are where advanced refiners, cultivation equipment, and core base technologies come from. They are also the game’s intended on-ramp — a new player who simply follows the Base Computer missions will emerge with a working, powered, specialist-staffed base without ever reading a wiki.

Two practical notes: the quests progress simultaneously, so hire as you find them; and their tech rewards stack with the research catalog rather than duplicating it.

Channel Three: QuickSilver, Expeditions, and the Cosmetic Archive

The third channel is fashion. The Space Anomaly’s merchants sell decorative part sets — flags, rugs, ancient monuments, exotic furniture — for QuickSilver, and past expeditions have left behind entire themed building sets as rewards. None of it is functional. All of it is the difference between a base that works and a base that is yours.

The catch is tempo: QuickSilver accrues slowly by design, and expedition sets return only when the expedition does. The mature approach is to treat cosmetics as a background harvest — Nexus missions drip the silver, the anomaly visit is already in your loop — and let the archive fill itself while research and quests do the real construction.

What Unlocks Nothing: Buying and Finding

Worth saying plainly, because new players assume otherwise: base parts do not drop from crates, cannot be bought with units at station traders, and are not random. The catalog grows only through the three channels above. Units buy materials and ships; nanites buy modules; salvaged data, quest completion, and QuickSilver buy the base itself. The economy of architecture is deliberately separate from the economy of everything else.

The Full Progression, One Paragraph

Dig salvaged data on the way to other errands; spend it on power, storage, and teleporter first, rooms second, decoration later. Follow the Base Computer’s specialist quests as the backbone — they hand you the tech research cannot. Bank QuickSilver in the background and spend it when a set you love appears. In practice a dedicated weekend takes a builder from timber box to full catalog access, and from there the only remaining limit is the object budget of the base and the size of your ambition.