As we've noted above, there are plenty of alternatives to making money in No Man's Sky, which we explain below.
- Mining and farming - The most obvious means of making money is simply mining rare resources - Gold, Heridium, and Emeril are generally easy to spot on planets, and come in decent amounts at each deposit - before taking them back up to a space station or planetside terminal to be sold. If you're lucky enough to find a star system, planet, and/or terminal combo which has abundant gold, and a high demand for it at a terminal nearby - plus you have a large amount of inventory space - then you're in luck. Mining the life out of a planet and reselling it that way will likely be even faster than our Dynamic Resonator method above. That situation is, however, quite time-consuming to find and verify, which is why we don't recommend it as the number one option. Farming works as well as mining - you'll occasionally find a planet which has huge numbers of Vortex Cubes scattered through its caves, for instance - however there's often significant sentinel attention when you grab these, so save often and be prepared to run. You can also find some semi-valuable items from the random containers dotted around save Beacons and outposts, so keep an eye out. Piracy - Another means of earning large sums is piracy or, in other words, shooting open freighters for all the sweet sweet bounty inside. There are two problems with this however: a freighter's loot is fairly random, so you could get stuck with less-than-valuable resources, and face a lottery with whether or not the Galactic Network (or parked-up NPCs) buys them at a good price; plus, there's the matter of the huge amount of sentinel attention you'll draw for attacking them. If you're going to do it, make sure you give the freighter a scout first, take out it's turrets, and focus on just grabbing the loot and booking it back to the space station, where you'll lose the sentinel aggro. We found that our upgraded mining beam blew freighter storage apart very quickly, as opposed to the standard plasma weapon attacks. Scrapping - An interesting method pointed out on the No Man's Sky subreddit is the process of scrapping old ships. The process is explained in full in the above post, but in brief you can utilise old ships which you've purchased or moved on from to make money by dismantling the various upgrades and selling the awarded resources for a decent amount of money. Again though, the actual amount you'll get from these depends on the pot luck of which Galactic Terminal you're near, and it's not really worth the time investment of shopping around systems for the right one.
