Part of the Tips & Tricks series:

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How to Get Quicksilver: The currency most cosmetics cost.

Quick Answer

The Appearance Modifier is the terminal that changes your traveller. It sits on space stations and on the Space Anomaly.
You can change race and body freely, including playing as a Gek, Korvax, Vy'keen, robot, Autophage or Traveller.
Exosuit parts are modular. Helmet, torso, arms, legs, backpack and colour are all set separately.
Most cosmetic parts come from the Quicksilver Synthesis Companion on the Anomaly, bought with Quicksilver.
Expeditions, Twitch Drops and community events hand out parts, emotes, titles and banners that the shop does not sell.
Changing your appearance costs nothing after the parts are unlocked, and it is reversible at any time.
Ship and multi-tool colour options are far narrower than exosuit options. Corvettes are the exception, because you build them yourself.

Overview

No Man's Sky treats appearance as a free, unlimited toggle rather than a loadout with consequences. Nothing you wear affects stats. A full Autophage body with a scavenged helmet performs identically to the default human silhouette, so every choice here is taste.

What gates the system is unlocks. The menus are always open, but they only show parts you already own, and parts arrive from a handful of specific sources. Knowing which source produces which cosmetic saves you from hunting through a shop for something that was only ever handed out during a Twitch campaign two years ago.

The Appearance Modifier

The Appearance Modifier is a standing terminal with a mannequin next to it. You will find one on space stations and one on the Space Anomaly, which covers almost every situation, since a station is rarely more than one warp away. It can also be unlocked as a base-building part, worth doing if you tinker often and would rather not fly anywhere.

Using it is free. There is no material cost, no cooldown, and no limit on how many times you change your mind. Nothing commits until you confirm.

The deepest option is race. You are not locked to the human-shaped default. The modifier lets you rebuild your traveller as a Gek, a Korvax, a Vy'keen, a robotic body, an Autophage frame or a Traveller, each with its own head shapes, proportions and part sets. Changing race does not alter your standing with any faction, your save, or your questline progress. NPCs still react to you as a Traveller regardless of the body you wear.

Underneath race sit body proportions and the individual gear slots. Race and body are the structural choices; everything else is dressing applied on top.

Exosuit Customisation

The exosuit is built from separate pieces rather than whole outfits, which is where most of the depth lives. Each slot is chosen independently:

Helmet: reads hardest at distance and in screenshots. Visor shapes vary enormously between races.
Torso: sets the overall bulk of the silhouette.
Arms and legs: subtler, but mismatched sets can look deliberately scavenged.
Backpack: the most visible piece in third person, since your camera sits behind it.
Colour: applied through the palette options, and the fastest way to make mismatched parts look like one outfit.

Nothing forces you to wear a matched set. Mixing an Autophage limb with a standard torso is allowed, and the community's most recognisable looks tend to be mixes rather than presets. If a combination looks wrong, the palette usually fixes it before the parts do.

None of this touches your exosuit's inventory slots, hazard protection or life support. Those are upgrades handled elsewhere.

Where Cosmetics Come From

Four sources feed the wardrobe, and they behave differently.

The Quicksilver Synthesis Companion. The robot vendor on the Space Anomaly, and the main cosmetics shop. It trades in Quicksilver, earned from Nexus missions and other repeatable activities, and its stock includes exosuit parts, emotes, decorations and other vanity items. Stock rotates, so a piece you skip may not be there next week. Our Quicksilver guide covers farming the currency efficiently, which matters because this is the only reliably repeatable source on the list.

Expeditions. Each expedition awards its own rewards for hitting milestones, and cosmetics are a common payout: suit parts, titles, banners, posters and companions. Expeditions run for limited windows at launch, though many are later rerun through the expedition redux system. The expedition archive lists what each one gave out, which is the fastest way to trace an item you saw on another player.

Twitch Drops. Hello Games runs periodic Twitch campaigns where watching participating streams unlocks reward tiers, frequently including exclusive suit parts, ships and emotes. These require linking your Twitch account, claiming the drops during the campaign window, then redeeming them in-game. The Twitch Drops guide covers linking and claiming, including the common failure where a drop is claimed on Twitch but never redeemed in the game.

Community events and milestones. Weekend community research events, Nexus mission milestones and long-running progression goals award titles, banners and occasional cosmetic unlocks. These trickle in through normal play.

The practical consequence is that the shop is the only source you can plan around. Everything else is time-limited to some degree, so claiming a Twitch reward or finishing an expedition while it is live costs far less effort than tracking it down later.

What You Can Change, and Where

What you can change	Where you change it	Where the options come from
Traveller race and body	Appearance Modifier	Available from the start, no unlocks needed
Helmet, torso, arms, legs, backpack	Appearance Modifier	Quicksilver shop, expeditions, Twitch Drops
Exosuit colours	Appearance Modifier	Mostly available by default, some palettes unlocked
Title displayed under your name	Appearance and customisation menus	Milestones, expeditions, community events
Banner	Appearance and customisation menus	Expeditions and events
Emotes	Quick menu emote wheel	Quicksilver shop, expeditions, Twitch Drops
Ship colour and trim, where offered	Ship customisation options	Varies by ship class and update
Corvette design	Corvette build mode	Parts unlocked through play and events
Multi-tool appearance	Limited, mostly fixed per tool	Determined by the tool you acquire
Base decorations and posters	Base build menu	Quicksilver shop, expeditions, milestones

Titles and Banners

Titles are the short line displayed under your name to other players, and they are earned rather than bought. Journey milestones, expedition completions and community events all award them, so the pool grows steadily as you play. Selecting one is done through the appearance and customisation menus, and switching is free.

Banners work the same way. They are cosmetic identity markers awarded largely through expeditions and events, and they exist purely to be seen by other travellers.

Neither affects gameplay. Both are worth setting once, because the default state makes you look like a fresh save even after hundreds of hours.

Emotes

Emotes are unlocked from the Quicksilver shop, expeditions and Twitch campaigns, then assigned to the emote wheel and triggered from the quick menu. They are the main non-verbal communication tool in multiplayer, which matters on a platform where voice chat is not universal.

The other use is photography. A posed emote gives your character something to do in a frame, and since emotes hold their animation when the world pauses, they double as poses.

Photo-Friendly Setups

If your goal is screenshots rather than day-to-day play, a few appearance choices do more work than the rest.

Silhouette beats detail. At the distances most landscape shots are taken, fine texture disappears and outline is all that survives. Distinctive helmets, large backpacks and the angular Autophage and robot bodies read clearly against a sky. Slim, rounded default parts vanish into terrain.

Pick a colour that fights the biome. Travellers in muted greys disappear on ash worlds and lush worlds alike. One high-contrast colour turns your character into an anchor point the eye finds immediately.

Match your suit to your ship, or deliberately clash. Either reads as intentional. A near-match with a slightly different hue reads as an accident.

Set the title and banner before shooting multiplayer. They appear over your character in shared sessions.

Combine that with the mechanics in the photo mode guide, particularly hiding the HUD and pulling focus onto your character, and the appearance work actually shows up in the final image instead of being lost to depth-of-field blur.

Ships and Multi-Tools

Ship and multi-tool appearance is far more constrained than exosuit appearance. Most ships you find or buy come with their colours and hull parts fixed at the moment they spawned, which is why players hunt specific systems for specific looks rather than repainting what they own. Colour options that do exist are limited compared to the suit.

The genuine exception is the Corvette class, which is not painted at all. Corvettes are built piece by piece to your own design, so hull shape, layout and colours are yours from the start rather than something you negotiate with a random spawn. If ship appearance is what you actually care about, that is the system to invest in, and the Corvette and ship customisation guide covers building one.

Multi-tools are the most fixed of the three. The model, colour and silhouette come with the tool you acquire, so getting the look you want means finding the right tool rather than editing one you own.

FAQ

Can I change my character's race?

Yes, at any time and at no cost. The Appearance Modifier lets you switch between human-style, Gek, Korvax, Vy'keen, robotic, Autophage and Traveller bodies. It has no effect on faction standing, quests or save progress, and you can switch back immediately if you dislike it.

Where is the Appearance Modifier?

On space stations and on the Space Anomaly. Look for the terminal with a mannequin beside it. You can also unlock it as a base-building part and install one at your own base if you change your look often.

How do I get more outfits?

Buy exosuit parts from the Quicksilver Synthesis Companion on the Anomaly using Quicksilver, complete expeditions for their milestone rewards, and claim Twitch Drops during active campaigns. Community events add occasional pieces on top of that.

Can I repaint my ship?

Only within the limits the game offers for that ship. Most ships keep the colours they spawned with, and customisation options are narrow. Corvettes are the exception, since you design and build them yourself rather than modifying a found hull.

Do cosmetics affect my stats?

No. Every item covered here is purely visual. Exosuit appearance parts have no bearing on inventory slots, hazard protection, life support or damage, and titles, banners and emotes have no mechanical effect at all.

Key Takeaways

Appearance in No Man's Sky is a free, reversible system with a hard gate in front of it. The menus never cost you anything, so the entire challenge is acquisition, and acquisition splits neatly into one repeatable source and three time-limited ones. Quicksilver farming is the source you control. Expeditions, Twitch campaigns and community events are the sources you have to catch while they are running.

That asymmetry should shape how you treat them. A shop item you skip today will come around again. A Twitch reward left unclaimed or an expedition left unfinished may not, and the effort to obtain it later is far higher than grabbing it now. Claim first, decide whether you like it afterwards.

For everything else, mix rather than match. The exosuit's slot-by-slot structure exists so that no two travellers on the Anomaly need to look alike, and the palette will tie together combinations that seem incoherent in the preview. Set a title, pick a banner, choose a colour that stands out against terrain, and your character becomes recognisable in every screenshot and every multiplayer session from then on.

No Man's Sky Appearance Guide: Customise Your Traveller, Ship & Gear