No Man's Sky Units Farming Guide: Fastest Ways To Get Rich

Units make the galaxy run. Ships, freighters, exosuit slots, storage augments, all of it costs money, and the price tags climb fast once you start shopping for the big stuff. The nice thing about No Man's Sky is that the money methods stack. You can run trade routes while your frigates haul loot home, grow plants that pay out on a timer, and dig up fossils worth more than a starter freighter. These are the five methods that pay best, with the real numbers attached.

Running Profitable Trade Routes Between Economies

Trading is the oldest moneymaker in the game and still one of the strongest. Every star system has an economy type, and each type manufactures trade goods that the next type in the chain wants to buy. Buy where it's cheap, warp one hop, sell where it's dear. That's the entire trick.

The two loops worth knowing

There are two fixed chains, and both loop back on themselves:

• Trading → Advanced Materials → Scientific → back to Trading
• Mining → Manufacturing → Technology → Power Generation → back to Mining

Direction matters. Follow the arrows in that order, because the system at the end of each hop pays a premium for whatever the previous system sold you. You can join a loop at any point though. If you're parked in a Mining system, buy its goods and carry them to a Manufacturing system.

Some players memorize these with the mnemonics ITEM and CAR (Industrial, Technological, Energy, Mine and Commercial, Alchemy, Research). Honestly the arrow lists are easier to keep straight.

Picking systems that actually pay

Economy strength shows up when you highlight a system on the galaxy map. Aim for the wealthy tier, the three-star economies like Affluent or Prosperous. Rich systems stock the expensive trade goods in big stacks. Poor systems sell small amounts of junk, so you burn a warp for pocket change.

The other thing to check is the buy and sell percentages, which appear next to the economy once you have an Economy Scanner installed. The dream targets are about -30% on buys and +80% on sells compared to the galactic average. You won't hit those exact numbers every day. Anything in the neighborhood works fine.

Cargo space is the real ceiling on income here. Players running a 48-slot A-class hauler through a loop of three or four wealthy systems report somewhere around 12 to 15 million units per three-system circuit, and closer to 17 to 20 million on a four-system loop. Your early runs in a small ship will pay a lot less. The method scales with your hold, so every slot you buy feeds the next lap.

Outposts beat stations

Two details most new traders miss.

Planetary trade outposts give better prices than the space station in the same system, on both the buying and selling side. Land on a planet, ping it with the Economy Scanner from your exocraft or ship, and hit the outpost terminal instead of the station.

Also, all the planetary outposts in a system share one market. Buy every Non-Stick Pistons stack at the outpost on planet A, and the outposts on planets B and C in that system go dry too. The space station keeps its own separate stock and prices, so you can drain both before you warp out. Sell the surplus planetside first, since those terminals pay more.

Farming Duplicatable Frigate Culinary Recipes

This one starts slow and turns into a machine. Frigate expeditions drag loot back while you're off doing something else, and buried in the reward tables are culinary curiosities: NipNip Buds and GekNip. Both are food chain items. Both can be copied into more of themselves, one directly and one through a replant loop. One of them better than doubles in value the moment you cook it.

What your frigates bring home

Once you own a freighter you can hire up to 30 frigates and send them out from the fleet bridge. The navigator offers five new expeditions per day at the 0:00 UTC reset, missions run anywhere from one to 28 hours of real time, and they keep ticking while the game is closed.

The reward tables differ by mission type. Combat expeditions can bring back NipNip Buds among the curiosities, and exploration expeditions can bring back GekNip. Neither is guaranteed on any single run, but a fleet cycling five missions a day accumulates both pretty quickly.

Keep your fleet rating at least one star above the mission difficulty. At equal ratings frigates start taking damage, and a damaged frigate that takes a second hit is destroyed for good. That gets expensive fast.

One flat income source worth grabbing early: trade specialist frigates generate 1,000 units every 30 seconds while they sit at home, up to a cap of 125,000 per frigate. Board the frigate to collect. Even three or four of them idling between runs is several hundred thousand units for nothing.

The NipNip replant loop

NipNip Buds sell for 47,284 units each, which is already decent money. Planting them is smarter.

Once you hire a Farmer for your base and finish enough of their mission chain, you learn the NipNip recipe. One NipNip Bud plus 20 Faecium builds one NipNip plant. That plant then produces one bud roughly every four hours, and it keeps doing that forever. So every bud your frigates bring home is a choice: 47,284 units once, or 47,284 units every four hours for as long as you keep the base standing.

A couple of catches. NipNip can't go in an outdoor planting spot no matter what the item text claims, so you need hydroponics trays or biodomes. Bring Haz-Mat Gauntlets for the harvest too.

Scale it out and the numbers get silly. At 47,284 each, 250 harvested buds is more than 11 million units, and a decent biodome setup kicks out a fresh batch every four hours without you touching anything. Buds don't refine into anything better, so raw sales are the exit.

Cooking GekNip into Herbal Crunchies

GekNip sells for 20,625. Fine, but there's a better way out.

Cook it. One Sugar Dough plus one GekNip in a Nutrient Processor makes one Herbal Crunchie, which sells for 60,000 units. Sugar Dough is cheap to make from refined flour and processed sugar, and the dough alone only sells for about 5,000.

So the math on a single crunchie: roughly 25,600 units of ingredients going in, 60,000 units coming out. You more than double your money on every piece. Ten GekNip from an exploration run becomes 600,000 units as crunchies instead of 206,250 sold loose.

Nutrient Processors need no power and no fuel, and all the processors at a base share one 25-slot ingredient store, so a wall of them in your base kitchen churns through a stack in a few minutes.

One caution. Don't cook the buds. Sugar Dough plus a NipNip Bud also makes an Herbal Crunchie, but a raw bud is worth 47,284 on its own. You'd be turning about 52,000 of ingredients into 60,000, which barely pays for the button press. Sell buds raw, cook GekNip.

Cactus Flesh And Star Bulb Cultivation Loops

Plants are the closest thing this game has to a paycheck. Set them up once, harvest on a schedule, sell forever. Cactus Flesh and Star Bulb are the pair to start with, because together they craft into Poly Fibre, one of the most valuable farm products you can reach early.

Setting up the grow

• Echinocactus: costs 50 Cactus Flesh plus 25 Pyrite to plant, gives 100 Cactus Flesh per harvest every 16 hours
• Star Bramble: costs 50 Star Bulb plus 25 Paraffinium to plant, gives 25 Star Bulbs per harvest about every four hours

Both grow fine in hydroponics trays or biodomes on any planet, so the whole farm can live in one base regardless of biome. That's the reason this beats picking wild plants. Wild Echinocactus and Star Bramble are rare spawns, and wild Star Bramble needs Haz-Mat Gauntlets to harvest.

The recipe is what sets the ratio: one Poly Fibre takes 100 Cactus Flesh plus 200 Star Bulb. One Echinocactus covers the cactus side in a single 16-hour harvest, and two Star Brambles cover the bulb side with 50 bulbs each per four-hour cycle. So one cactus plus two brambles is the exact match. Every 16 hours you get precisely one Poly Fibre's worth of materials from three plants, which is 130,000 units per day and a half for almost no effort. Add plants in that 1:2 ratio to scale it up.

The refiner doubling trick

You can shortcut the grow timers with a refiner. Both plants have an Organic Expansion recipe:

• Cactus Flesh x1 plus Pyrite x1 makes Cactus Flesh x2
• Star Bulb x1 plus Paraffinium x1 makes Star Bulb x2

Feed in a flesh and a Pyrite, get two flesh back. The copy is basically free, since Pyrite is a common desert mineral you can buy in bulk at most terminals or pull from a mineral hotspot. Each pass runs at about 0.36 seconds per unit of output, so a full stack doubles in a couple of minutes. Doubling costs one Pyrite per Cactus Flesh, so it eats minerals rather than time. Your call whether that beats waiting out the timer.

From Poly Fibre to Circuit Boards

Poly Fibre sells for 130,000 each, and the blueprint is easy to get. Building the Science Terminal and playing through the Scientific Research quest line awards it, or you can buy it from the Synthesis Laboratory on the Space Anomaly for 250 nanites.

Once the farm is humming there's a second rung. One Heat Capacitor plus one Poly Fibre crafts a Circuit Board, and Circuit Boards sell for 916,250 each. Heat Capacitors come from the same kind of loop, 100 Frost Crystal plus 200 Solanium per unit, and sell for 180,000 on their own. Run the two farms side by side and every matched harvest turns about 310,000 units of materials into 916,250. That's the whole reason to grow plants instead of just selling raw crops.

Selling Runaway Mold And Ancient Bones

These two share a section because they suit the same trip style: land, scan, dig, leave. One pays units, the other pays nanites, and both sites respawn so you can build a loop around them.

Digging Ancient Bones

From space, scan a planet and check the info panel for the Ancient Bones icon. On the ground, the Analysis Visor marks the burial sites. Bones sit under the surface, usually less than 100 units down, and you dig them out with the Terrain Manipulator. Each one opens into a random Excavated Bone with a generated name and a price tag.

Value depends on rarity, and the ranges are wide:

| Rarity | Total value per bone (units) | Rough odds per dig | | --- | --- | --- | | Common | 57,500 - 126,500 | about 20 in 26 | | Uncommon | 230,000 - 747,500 | about 5 in 26 | | Rare | 805,000 - 1,955,000 | about 1 in 26 |

The odds column comes from the game-file weights listed on the wiki. Rares carry adjectives like Magnificent, Intact, Bizarre, or Exceptional, so watch the name before you get excited.

Run the math with the middle of each range and the average dig lands a bit over 200,000 units. Clear the whole site before you leave, because commons add up and every dig is free money once you're standing there. Bones don't refine into anything and don't feed any crafting chain, so selling them is the whole play. Any terminal takes them.

The mould side of the trip

Runaway Mould comes from Curious Deposits, those rolling metal spheres that scatter when you mine them. Planets that have them usually have clusters scattered across the surface, and mining a cluster fills stacks fast. Drop a base computer and a teleporter next to a good cluster, since deposits come back over time and the teleporter turns it into a two-minute loop whenever you need a top-up.

Here's the honest part. Selling mould raw is a bad trade, since its base value sits around 20 units. Nobody gets rich selling goo by the unit.

The real play is the refiner. Five Runaway Mould refines into one Nanite Cluster at 0.6 seconds per unit of output. A full 9,999 stack becomes about 2,000 nanites in roughly 20 minutes of refiner time, and nothing stops you from running four or five refiners in parallel to chew through multiple stacks at once.

Nanites aren't units, but they're the currency that buys S-class upgrade modules for your ships, tools, and exosuit. The usual reason players burn units on new gear is that they're short on nanites to upgrade what they already own. A mould loop means you never make that trade again.

There's a cheaper feedstock too. Residual Goop refines into Viscous Fluids, then Living Slime, then Runaway Mould, then nanites, all with simple 1:1 steps before the final 5:1 conversion. Residual Goop is near-worthless junk that stacks up in station shop inventories, so buying it in bulk and refining it up is a genuinely cheap nanite pipeline.

Using The Galactic Trade Terminal To Time Sales

Every method above ends at the same place, a trade terminal. How you sell matters almost as much as what you sell, because terminals punish careless selling.

Sell the whole stack at once

Selling an item to a terminal drops the price for that item in that market immediately after the sale. The drop doesn't touch the items already in your batch. So if you sell 40 Circuit Boards one at a time, most of them sell at the fallen price. Sell all 40 in a single transaction and every one pays the listed price.

The market boundaries matter here. All planetary outposts in a system count as one market, but the space station is its own separate market with its own prices. So if you have more stock than the planet market can absorb at a good price, the station in the same system gives you a second clean market to dump into.

NPC pilots don't crash prices

Selling to the NPC pilots who land at stations and outposts doesn't move the market at all. If you plan to re-run a trade route in the same session, sell your goods to incoming ships instead of the terminal, and the prices will still be waiting on your next lap.

Prices vary between individual pilots, sometimes a lot, so check two or three before you commit a big stack. One limit: pilots never sell the marked trade goods, so terminals stay your only source when you're loading up.

Reading the percentages and hunting surges

With an Economy Scanner fitted, the galaxy map shows each system's economy type, wealth tier, and two percentages for how its buys and sells compare to the galactic average. Best case is around -30% buy and +80% sell. The gap between those numbers is your margin, so chase the widest gap you can find rather than just the richest-looking system.

The scanner also unlocks Trade Surges. Ping for trade opportunities from the ship quick menu and you'll occasionally get pointed at a system paying a spike on a specific commodity. Players who've timed expensive crafted goods like Stasis Devices and Fusion Ignitors into a matching surge report roughly double the normal margin. If you're sitting on a pile of high-value crafts, it pays to hold them until a surge lines up with what you're carrying.

Small terminal habits that add up

Prices only refresh per item after a UI change, like flipping between exosuit and ship inventory inside the terminal screen. Keep each item type in one stack in one inventory so the listed price stays honest while you sell.

Build your own Galactic Trade Terminal at your base and another on your freighter. That lets you cash out a harvest the second you pick it, and it means your kitchen, your biodomes, and your sales counter all sit in one spot. A freighter terminal plus three plants in the right ratio is 130,000 units every 16 hours without a single warp.