No Man’s Sky – Tips for Survival and Permadeath

Survival and Permadeath Tips

Prioritize:

1. Your health (install SHIELD upgrades in your Exosuit).
2. Your hazard protection (install those “B” refillable upgrades).
3. Use the appropriate mats to recharge both life support and hazard protection (Dioxite works for both life and cold protection. Phosphorus recharges mining beam and heat protection. Uranium refills Launch thrusters and Rad protection)
4. Never, ever use any sort of cannon weapon.

If you’re just looking to earn achievements, go for PermaDeath mode as that will also earn survival.

If you set your game to CUSTOM and turn off the Tutorial, you will have 28 minutes for hazard protection OR until your fix your scanner (at the start of a new save).

Save rusted metal, it converts into Ferrite Dust at 2:1 ratio.

Save a handful of cadmium back when converting it to chromatic metal; you can combine it with the chromatic metal to make more cadmium than you started with. This requires a refiner with at least 2 inputs, but that just means you need access to the anomaly or a freighter… and with 3 slots, you can make large amounts of chromatic metal from tiny amounts of stellar metal, by adding gold and silver.

General tips

Eat plants; Impulse beans, heptaloid wheat, and other growing things that you can consume to recharge your hazard protection and life support. Similarly, “meat” products will heal you; stop throwing away those critter chunks after defending yourself. A Nutrient Processor is a phenomenal device; there’s a 50-slot bag of holding inside it called “Ingredient Storage” that holds anything you can cook… which, oddly enough, includes things like carbon and chromatic metal. It’s well worth the inventory slot it takes up to carry one around. In addition, prepared foods have even better boosts to your life support, hazard protection, and… (avoiding spoilers) other stuff.

Keep an eye out for caves, and/or install a terrain manipulator as soon as possible; during a storm you can get “inside” to let your hazard protection recharge.

You don’t actually need thousands of any material. Learning to cope with the smaller inventory sizes and gather things “on the fly” will help you get better at the game in general. Curb your habitual “pick up absolutely everything” urges; you probably don’t need more than a stack of anything unless you’re working on a specific project.

Discard residual goop, viscous fluids, and living slime immediately. Consider discarding runaway mould, too… the stack sizes make it much less favorable to allow that stuff to clog your inventory, and the 5:1 ratio of the finished product and increased refiner times make it effectively worthless. Don’t spend 15+ minutes making 30 nanites when you can do it much more effectively with other materials. On the flip side of that coin, 1 stack of rusted metal is 2 stacks of ferrite dust, so it is often worth keeping some around.

Don’t keep more than one kind of ferrite unless you’re saving it for a specific purpose. You can turn ferrite dust into whatever other ferrite you need to build whatever it is. Do the math, and only make as much pure or magnetic ferrite as you need to accomplish your objective.

Upgrade your inventory as quickly as you can; until your inventory space is maxed out, visit the space station and the anomaly in every system you visit. Trade in navigation data to cartography vendors for drop pod locations, then go nuts repairing them and adding inventory slots to your exosuit.