Starships Guides

Starships in No Man’s Sky are graded on two axes that new players routinely conflate: class and type. Class is the S/A/B/C rating that sets the bonus percentages and the maximum slot count. Type is the archetype — Fighter, Hauler, Explorer, Shuttle, Solar, Exotic, Living, Interceptor and now the buildable Corvette — and it decides what the ship is naturally good at. An S-class Shuttle is still a Shuttle. A C-class Explorer can be upgraded into something better than a B-class Hauler for the job you actually do.

Which means the ship you should chase depends on what you spend your time doing. Explorers carry the strongest hyperdrive bonuses and are the right answer if warping range matters to you. Haulers exist for inventory and take the most punishment. Fighters and Interceptors are for combat, and the Sentinel Interceptors in particular come with a permanently supercharged slot arrangement that changes how you build them. Exotics are the prestige pick and are genuinely rare rather than merely expensive.

The guides here cover finding and identifying each type, the free and cheap routes to a good ship — crashed salvage, scrapping for units, expedition rewards — and the technology that goes in them once you have one. Exocraft live in this category too, split by vehicle, because the Minotaur, Nautilon, Colossus and the three light vehicles solve genuinely different problems and the choice between them is not a matter of taste.