No Man's Sky guide: How to get units quickly with valuable trade commodities

It won't take long for No Man's Sky players to tire of their very first star ship, and look for something a little more spacious. Each comes with 15 inventory slots players will fill up in no time at all, and so the urge to find a larger craft settles in early.

The easiest way to find get a new ship is to land on a space station, wait for other traders and explorers to turn up with a vessel that takes you fancy, then make them an offer. It'll surprise nobody to learn that these ships cost a lot of units (the in-game currency) so players will need a quick way to make a lot of moolah.

So, we've put together a guide to getting rich quickly in No Man's Sky. In a game such as this, however, with individual player experiences differing hugely thanks to the procedurally generated nature of the game's enormous galactic setting, guides can be tricky.

We can however, tell you what to keep an eye out for.

Basic trading

Trading occurs at any galactic trading post, which can be found on space stations, in or on planetary outposts and sometimes just floating on their own. They will offer a selection of items to buy and allow you to sell items found.

Each post will offer prices that fluctuate above and below a galactic standard, and accounts for multiples of certain items as well. Of the items players are able to find and sell, Trade Commodities are the most valuable.

Trade Commodities

Trade Commodities can be naturally occurring, but are largely found in randomly occurring cargo boxes littered through No Man's Sky – sometimes scattered in the environments, but also regularly found near beacons and save points.

The naturally occurring ones are where big profits can be found. These are found either lying about like Gravitino Balls, which glow as you approach, or in plants like Albumen Pearls. These are often found in clusters and reap big rewards at the expense of great risk.

Given players will find these items in different locations from each other, to find them they will need to look out for defining traits for the planets where they can be found. Generally, if a planet is inhabited by dangerous, violent and easily-provoked sentinels (robots that patrol the galaxy) then that'll be the case because they're protecting valuable items on its surface.

Sentinels can be dangerous and tough to take down (especially the dog-like sentinels and walking ones) so if you find a cluster of valuable resources, be sure to have an escape route close by – your ship or preferably a trade post where you can sell the items on and free space in your inventory.

Values

Below is a list of the Trade Commodities we know and their values. A couple we know for sure, others have been estimated based on fluctuating galactic prices, and the rest we don't yet have a value for. When we're next playing the game and can check these figures, we'll update the post.

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