Units & Nanites Guides

Money in No Man’s Sky stops being a constraint faster than most games, and the transition is abrupt. For the first few hours units are genuinely scarce. Somewhere around the first serious trading run or the first Activated Indium base, income outruns anything you can spend it on, and the bottleneck becomes nanites and then quicksilver instead.

That progression is why the honest answer to "what is the best money method" is "which stage are you at". Scanning fauna with an upgraded Analysis Visor is excellent early and irrelevant later. Chlorine refining scales with effort. Trading buy-low-sell-high works at any stage but demands attention. Activated Indium mining and Stasis Device or Fusion Ignitor production are endgame answers that require a base and a supply chain first, and both produce more money per hour than anything else in the game by a wide margin.

Nanites and quicksilver run on separate economies with separate sources, and neither converts cleanly from units. Nanites come from salvaged data, damaged machinery, refining Runaway Mould, and selling dishes to Cronus. Quicksilver comes almost entirely from Nexus missions on the Space Anomaly, on a weekly cadence. The guides here cover each of these, ranked by game stage rather than by raw numbers per hour.