No Man's Sky: How to Get Units Fast

Units are the standard currency in No Man's Sky, and nearly every ship, freighter, multi-tool, and base part you want is priced in them. The good news is that the economy is deep enough that you can go from scraping by to comfortably wealthy without any exploits. The better news is that the methods scale: the same systems you learn early keep paying out later.

The methods below were checked in October 2026 against community resources including the official No Man's Sky wiki, Reddit's r/NoMansSkyTheGame, and written guides from IGN and GameRant. Because the game updates often, I have kept exact sell values qualitative where they shift between patches, and focused on mechanics that have stayed reliable across many updates.

How the unit economy actually works

Three things drive unit income: buying low and selling high, selling materials you gather, and selling goods you craft. Each star system has an economy type and a trade level, and galactic trade terminals on space stations show live supply and demand. When a commodity is in surplus it sells cheaply; when it is in demand it sells for a premium. Smart players exploit the gap by buying a commodity where it is cheap and carrying it to a system where it is wanted.

Selling raw and refined materials is the steadier, lower-effort path early on. Salvaged data, gravitino balls, and storm crystals all sell well for the effort, and anything you refine into a higher tier (for example turning common metals into chromatic metal) is worth more than the inputs.

It helps to think of your income in three stages. In the first stage you are gathering and selling whatever you find to cover fuel and repairs. In the second you are trading and running missions for a reliable flow of units. In the third you have built farms and factories that earn while you are doing something else entirely. Most players drift through all three naturally, and the jump in income between each stage is dramatic, so it is worth knowing where you are headed rather than grinding the same low-tier method forever.

Early-game income you can start today

In your first few hours, focus on momentum rather than optimization. A handful of dependable early earners:

• Scan everything. With upgraded scanner modules, cataloguing new plants and animals pays a bounty per discovery, and a fully surveyed planet's fauna adds up quickly.
• Collect and sell salvaged data from buried technology modules, then spend some of it on blueprints you will need anyway.
• Grab gravitino balls and other surface curiosities, accepting that some trigger sentinel attention.
• Run derelict freighters, which drop valuable salvage and the occasional high-value item along the way.

If you are brand new, pair this with the broader fundamentals in our starter guide so you are not spending everything you earn on launch fuel and repairs.

Trade routes and the economy loop

Once you have a hyperdrive and a little capital, trading becomes the most active way to multiply units. The loop is simple: find a system with a commodity in surplus, buy it out, warp to a system that wants it, and sell. Trading posts and large space stations are the hubs. A scanner that reveals economy strength and a freighter with cargo bulk storage make the runs far more profitable because you can carry more per trip.

Suspicious packets bought from shady vendors can also be gambled into valuable items, though that is streaky and better treated as a side bet than a plan.

A detail that trips up new traders is the trade level of a system. Systems are rated from low to high economy strength, and the wealthier a system, the better its buy and sell prices and the larger its stock. If you upgrade your ship's economy scanner, the galaxy map and in-system scans start showing economy strength, letting you plan a route through rich systems rather than wandering blindly. Pairing high-economy destinations with a commodity those systems actually demand is the whole art of trading, and it rewards a little planning far more than raw grinding.

Mid-game earners between farming and trading

Before you commit to a full factory, several mid-game activities bridge the gap and pay well for the time:

• Derelict freighters, reached with emergency broadcast receivers bought at a station's scrap dealer. Each run is a short horror-tinged exploration full of salvage and curiosities to sell, and the first derelict you clear each week pays an extra bonus.
• Dig up buried technology modules with the terrain manipulator to collect salvaged data, which both sells and buys the base blueprints you will want anyway.
• Visit outlaw and pirate systems, where black markets buy and sell contraband at prices you will not find in lawful space.
• Scan everything with a fully upgraded, grouped set of scanner modules on your multi-tool; the per-creature bounty climbs high enough that a well-populated planet is a tidy payday on its own.

None of these needs a huge setup, so they are ideal while you are still building toward the factory stage described below.

Crafted goods: the real money

The largest, most consistent unit income in the game comes from manufacturing. The classic chain runs through fusion ignitors and stasis devices, high-tier crafted products that sell for enormous sums each. Building them requires setting up farms and extractors that feed the recipes, so this is a mid-to-late-game project rather than a quick fix.

Activated indium is the other pillar. It is a stellar metal mined in red (and some other) star systems, and a base built on a rich activated indium deposit with mineral extractors and power will quietly stockpile a fortune while you play. Many veteran players run both an activated indium farm and a stasis device operation, selling the output across several station terminals so you do not crash a single market. Learning where to put those extractors ties directly into our base-building guide.

The crafting chains are deliberately layered. You refine raw materials into intermediate components, combine those into manufactured products, and finally assemble the top-tier goods that sell for the real money. Each step adds value, so the more of the chain you own, the higher your margins. The trade-off is setup time and inventory management, which is why crafted goods sit at the top of the income ladder rather than the bottom. Once a chain is running, though, it turns cheap raw inputs into fortunes with almost no ongoing effort beyond collecting and selling.

If you are weighing where to put your first real investment of time, activated indium is usually the gentler on-ramp and stasis devices the bigger long-term payoff. Indium needs only a deposit, extractors, and power, so you can have it running in a single session once you reach a red star system. A full stasis device operation asks you to set up and manage a chain of farms and refiners feeding one another, which is more work but scales to income the indium farm cannot touch. A common progression is to start with indium for a steady base of units, then graduate to stasis devices once you want to be truly wealthy, keeping the indium farm running the whole time as a reliable floor.

Spread your sales so prices recover

Every trade terminal has limited demand. Dump a thousand units of the same product into one station and the price collapses as you sell. The fix is to split large sales across multiple space stations, or to wait for a terminal's price to recover over time. Having a network of teleporters linking your bases and stations makes this painless, and it is a big reason wealthy players keep several outposts.

There is also a simple rhythm that avoids the problem entirely: sell in moderate batches, move to the next station through your teleporter, and come back around later once prices have climbed back up. If you are producing a lot of a single high-value good, keep a few station economies in rotation so you are never forcing a sale into a market you already flooded. This habit alone can meaningfully raise what you take home from the same stockpile, and it costs nothing but a little organization.

A note on patience and consistency

It is easy to chase whatever the current community-favorite money method is, but the most reliable wealth in No Man's Sky comes from consistency rather than the perfect trick. A modest activated indium farm you actually visit beats a theoretical mega-factory you never finish. Build one income source until it runs itself, then add the next, and within a few sessions you will find that units stop being something you worry about and start being something you spend freely on ships, freighters, and bases. The economy is generous once you stop fighting it and let your investments compound.

If you would rather skip the grind

There is no shame in earning the hard way, and genuinely, setting up an activated indium or stasis device farm is one of the most satisfying projects in the game. But if your time is tight and you simply want to explore with a full wallet from the start, our No Man's Sky modded starter save delivers a save with maxed resources and modded ships so you can skip straight to the parts you enjoy, on PS4 and PS5.

It is a save file, not a cheat you run in the background, and you need to own the game. If you want to browse everything we offer for the game, the full No Man's Sky page lists it all in one place.

Frequently Asked Questions