Combat Guides

Combat in No Man’s Sky is optional for long stretches and then suddenly is not. Sentinels escalate in waves and will keep escalating until you leave the planet or destroy the wave that spawned. Pirates scale with the value of what you are carrying. Dreadnoughts turn up when you are least equipped for them.

On foot, the fight is really an inventory question. Sentinel waves are survivable at any stage if your multi-tool has a properly built weapon and your exosuit has shield upgrades grouped for adjacency; they are unwinnable if you are carrying a default Boltcaster and hoping. The same is true in space: dogfighting is much less about aim than about whether your shields recharge faster than an interceptor squadron can strip them.

The Swarm update reworked space combat permanently, and those changes outlived the campaign that introduced them — better enemy flight patterns, an auto-follow boost for staying on an agile target, and critical hit zones that reward aimed fire rather than sustained spray. This category covers Sentinels on the ground and in space, dogfighting, pirate dreadnoughts and capital ships, dissonant and corrupted planets, the Swarm campaign, and PvP, which remains a niche activity the game does very little to support.