No Man's Sky Starter Tips: 25 Things I Wish I Knew in the First 10 Hours

The first ten hours of No Man’s Sky are famously the worst ten hours — not because anything there is hard, but because the game explains almost nothing and lets you make slow mistakes in a very big sandbox. Veterans all tell the same story: “I quit once, came back, and then it clicked.” This guide is the click, compressed. Twenty-five tips, roughly in the order you will need them, each one a mistake the rest of us made first.

Last updated: August 27, 2026, current through patch 6.50. For the full structured walkthrough, see the beginner guide; for the opening hours in strict order, the first-day walkthrough is the step-by-step companion — this page is the tips-only list.

The First Hour

1. Follow the awakening objectives. The opening quests look like a chore and are actually the tutorial: they hand you the analysis visor, the terrain manipulator, the hyperdrive, and your first warp. Everything else builds on that chain.

2. Scan literally everything. Flora, fauna, minerals — the visor turns your surroundings into money. Fully scanned animals pay far more than their discovery value, and completing a planet’s fauna set pays a bonus on top. This is the single best income in the early game and most new players sprint past it.

3. Learn the two plants that keep you alive. Sodium plants recharge hazard protection; oxygen plants refill life support. Both glow, both are everywhere. A new player who stops to tap every yellow and red plant they pass never dies.

4. Do not fight the Sentinels yet. You will accidentally annoy them — mining too fast, opening a gravitino ball. When drones go red, break line of sight and wait, or just jetpack away. Combat answers come later; in hour one, running is free.

5. Refine your ferrite dust. That pile of red dust from every rock you break refines into pure ferrite — the material half of everything buildable. Keep a portable refiner fed and you will never lack building materials (refining basics).

Inventory and Money

6. Buy exosuit slots before anything else. Every space station sells one inventory upgrade per visit, and drop pods on planets do it for materials. Suit slots are the permanent quality-of-life purchase; ships and tools come and go, your exosuit is forever.

7. Use cargo slots for stacks. Cargo inventory holds double per stack. Put the heavy, stackable basics — carbon, ferrite, oxygen — in cargo and keep the general slots for the interesting stuff.

8. Do not repair crashed ships with units — repair them with materials. Crashed ships are free: fix the launch thrusters and pulse engine with common materials and you have a slot upgrade for nothing. One crash site detour beats saving units for a station ship.

9. Sell to the right vendor. Galactic trade terminals buy everything, but tech merchants pay better for modules, and the scrap dealer buys suspicious packages. Match goods to buyer and the same loot pays noticeably more.

10. The scanner is a money printer — upgrade it. The first upgrade modules worth their nanites are scanner modules: they multiply the units every scan pays. Within hours, each scan funds the next one (module system).

11. Nanites come from missions and modules. The station mission counter and Nexus missions pay nanites, and so does scrapping unwanted upgrade modules. The nanites loop matters earlier than you think — modules are the whole game.

Travel

12. Take the free freighter battle. After a few warps, a freighter under attack event triggers — save the capital ship and its captain hands you the freighter, free. It is the game’s biggest early gift; do not sell or decline it (freighter basics).

13. Build a teleporter at your first base. The moment you can research one, place it. Bases without teleporters are places you will never revisit; with them, every station becomes a door home (base building start).

14. Chart toward wealthy systems. The galaxy map’s economy filter routes you through three-star systems: better stock, better prices, better ships and multitools on the wall. Poor systems are for passing through.

15. Fuel is cheap if you make it. Launch fuel comes from di-hydrogen and ferrite; warp cells from antimatter and oxygen-rich crafting chains. Buy neither — the crafting loop is trivially cheap once set up (refining guide).

16. Do not sell your starter ship broken parts. Strip the tech you want from a ship before trading it in — modules installed on a traded ship are gone with it.

The Middle Game Arrives

17. Three modules per family, no more. The upgrade system caps at three same-family modules; the fourth does nothing. Internalize this early and every tool and ship you ever build is disciplined (the upgrades guide).

18. Group modules next to their core tech. Same-family upgrades perform better adjacent to each other. A tidy grid is not aesthetics — it is free performance.

19. Salvaged data is everywhere — dig it. Buried technology modules fund your entire base parts catalog. Whenever the visor shows one nearby, spend the ninety seconds (parts unlock).

20. Specialists are quest lines, not furniture. Hire the Overseer, Scientist, Armourer, and Farmer when the base quests offer them — their chains unlock base technologies nothing else provides.

21. Find a dissonant system when combat-ready. The corrupted-planet loop hands out one of the best multitools in the game deterministically — no spawn luck (sentinel multitool).

Habits

22. Save before anything rng-shaped. Before buying a multitool, before opening that suspicious cargo, before the freighter captain’s gift decision — a manual save turns every bad roll into a reload.

23. Summon the Anomaly when stuck. Polo and Nada’s space station answers questions, sells upgrades, and hosts Nexus missions with good rewards. It is the game’s help menu in disguise.

24. Play the expeditions. Time-limited expeditions hand out ships, tools, and cosmetics at an absurd rate, and their curated starts are the best tutorial content in the game (expedition guide).

25. Stop optimizing and pick a project. No Man’s Sky does not have a difficulty curve — it has a curiosity curve. The moment you stop following objectives and start chasing something you chose (a dream ship, a megabase, a full creature collection), the game stops being opaque and starts being yours. Most players who bounce off never reach this step. Get there faster.