How do I start base building in No Man's Sky?

Craft a Base Computer (chromatic metal and pure ferrite), place it anywhere on a claimable planet surface, and wait for it to initialize. Once claimed, open the build menu next to the computer and start placing parts. The game's base-building tutorial missions walk you through the rest.

What materials do I need to start a base?

Pure ferrite and chromatic metal cover the Base Computer and your first basic parts — timber and metal walls, floors, doors, and a solar panel with a battery. Almost all of it comes from common rocks and copper, so a starting planet has everything you need within walking distance.

How big can a base be in No Man's Sky?

A base occupies a sphere around its Base Computer with roughly a 300-unit radius, and the game imposes a total object limit per base rather than a strict footprint rule. Most players never reach the object cap; those who do spread their projects across multiple bases or onto a freighter.

Can I build a base anywhere?

Almost. Any planet or moon surface works — including extreme-weather worlds — but not inside space stations, not on other players' claimed sites, and some locations such as certain restricted or mission areas refuse the computer. Underwater and cave bases are fully supported.

Do I lose my base if I build another one?

No. You can own many bases at once across different systems, and a freighter base on top of those. Building a new base never deletes an old one — bases only disappear when you deliberately delete them at their Base Computer.

What should my first base have?

Keep the first one ruthlessly practical: a Base Computer, one enclosed room, a teleporter for fast travel back, a save point, some storage, a solar panel and battery, and the specialist desks you unlock through the base quests. Decorate the dream palace later, once the functional skeleton earns its keep.

No Man's Sky Base Building Guide: How to Start Your First Base

Everything in No Man’s Sky is temporary — ships get traded, tools get replaced, expeditions end — except one thing: your base. It is the only progress in the game that is purely yours, and the building system behind it is deep enough that players have recreated cathedrals, corporate lobbies, and entire starports with it. But the first hour of base building is famously awkward: a build menu with hundreds of parts, a terrain system that fights you, and no signpost saying what a base actually needs. This guide is that signpost.

Last updated: August 22, 2026, current through patch 6.50. This is the foundation guide — claiming a site and raising your first functional base. For picking where to live, see best base planets; for unlocking more parts, base parts unlock.

Step 1: Craft and Place a Base Computer

The Base Computer is the heart of every base: a small pylon crafted from 40 Chromatic Metal and 80 Pure Ferrite. Both ingredients come from the starting experience itself — copper refines into chromatic metal, and every common rock drops ferrite dust that refines into pure ferrite (the refining basics guide covers refiners if you have not built one yet).

Placement rules are simple:

Any planet or moon surface works — lush, frozen, irradiated, even underwater.
You cannot place on top of another player’s claimed site or inside restricted mission areas.
Place it on reasonably flat ground if you can; slopes make your first walls fight the terrain.

Place the computer, interact with it, and let it initialize — a short wait while the claim registers. Name the base something you will recognize, because this name is what you will see in the space station and freighter teleporter lists for the rest of your save.

Step 2: Understand What You Just Claimed

A claimed base gives you a building sphere of roughly 300 units in every direction from the computer. Inside that sphere you can place parts, dig with the Terrain Manipulator, and register the base’s contents. Outside it, nothing builds.

Three things every new builder should know immediately:

Concept	What it means
Build radius	Parts must stay inside the sphere — the build menu greys out when you cross it
Object limit	A total per-base part count caps how much you can place; you get a warning as you approach it
Terrain edits	Digging and filling with the Terrain Manipulator is part of the base and can be reverted at the Base Computer’s restore point

Open the build menu near your computer (the same menu that holds the Terrain Manipulator). It is organized into categories — basic wooden and metal parts, prefab rooms, furniture, technology, and decorative sets — and it is initially mostly locked. That is by design: parts unlock through salvaged data research and specialist quests, so a fresh builder has a small, comprehensible palette.

The essential controls, whatever your platform:

Select a part, place it in the world, and adjust before confirming. Parts snap to sockets on existing pieces — walls snap to floors, roofs to walls, doors into wall frames.
Rotate and nudge before placement; most placement mistakes are fixable before they are committed.
Free camera while building lets you reposition your view around the structure instead of walking around it.
Delete any part from the same menu to refund some materials.

The classic beginner path is timber — cheap, forgiving, and fast to assemble into a cabin — before graduating to prefab rooms.

Step 4: Raise Your First Room

Functional beats pretty for base number one. The smallest useful footprint:

A foundation pad of floor pieces on flattened terrain — flat ground means walls that meet the roof.
Four walls and a roof, with a door on the wall you will actually walk through. Enclosed matters: prefab and timber interiors keep storms off your screen and your power lines out of the rain.
A Teleporter inside, the moment you can research one. This single part converts your base from a building project into infrastructure — teleporters connect every space station and your freighter to your base instantly, free, forever.
A Save Point or bed, so the base is a respawn anchor too.

With just those four elements the base already earns its place in your loop: warp home from anywhere, save, teleport back.

Step 5: Power It

Base parts with function — teleporters, refiners, storage containers, lighting — draw power from your base’s grid. The starter power chain is two parts:

Solar Panel: generates during daylight.
Battery: banks surplus for the night.

A panel and a battery behind a teleporter is a complete, self-sustaining starter grid. Run power lines from source to consumer (lines snap to parts and can be re-anchored), and the build menu shows each part’s live power state. As bases grow, players graduate to biofuel generators and — the endgame answer — electromagnetic generators on power hotspots, all covered in the electrical wiring guide.

Step 6: The Specialist Quests

The Base Computer’s mission line sends you to hire specialist NPCs — an Overseer, a Scientist, an Armourer, a Farmer — from space stations. Each needs a desk in your base and runs a quest chain that rewards blueprints and parts. This is the game’s intended base-building progression, and it hands you the pieces that turn a cabin into a workshop: advanced refiners, cultivation equipment, and the technology that makes a base worth teleporting home to. The unlock system behind all of it is detailed in base parts unlock.

Common First-Base Mistakes

Building on a slope without flattening first. Level a pad with the Terrain Manipulator before the first floor piece.
Skipping the teleporter. A base without one is a place you will never go back to.
Decorating before the skeleton works. Power, storage, and a teleporter first; the aquarium dome can wait a week.
One mega-base for everything. The game expects a network — a farm base, a storage hub, a scenic retreat. Multiple bases are free and encouraged.
Fighting the terrain instead of editing it. The Manipulator digs foundations, levels hills, and buries pillars; it is a building tool, not just a mining one.

Where to Go Next

Once the first base stands, the system opens outward: storage containers for the loot flood, base building tips for the techniques that separate cabins from architecture, best base planets for the hunt of somewhere worth building, and — if the first base taught you anything about placement regret — Base Computer placement, the guide to claiming sites you will not want to move.

Every veteran’s hundred-hour megabase started as a timber box with a teleporter in it. Build the box.