Technology Guides

Technology optimisation is the deepest system in No Man’s Sky and the one with the least in-game explanation. The game shows you slots and modules and never mentions that where you put them changes their output by a large multiple.

Three rules do most of the work. First, upgrade modules cap at three per technology — a fourth is dead weight, and the game will let you install it anyway. Second, adjacency: modules of the same technology touching each other and touching the base technology gain a bonus, so the shape of your layout matters as much as the modules in it. Third, supercharged slots multiply whatever occupies them, which makes them the most valuable squares in any inventory and the most commonly wasted.

Those three interact, and that is where it gets genuinely difficult. The optimal arrangement is not "put the best modules in the supercharged slots" — it is finding a layout where a supercharged slot sits inside an adjacency cluster, which depends on where your particular ship or tool happens to have its supercharged squares. That is why worked grid diagrams are more useful here than prose. This category covers module classes and sources, the reroll trick, Technology Merchants, and the layouts themselves.