Part of the series:
- No Man's Sky Freighters Guide Hub: Start here for the full freighter roadmap.
- Freighter Guide: Upgrades & S-Class: How to find and upgrade the best freighter.
- Frigate Fleet & Expeditions Guide: Put your fleet to work sending frigates on missions.
Quick Answer
- Your freighter is a fully mobile base. Build rooms inside it and take your entire operation with you when you warp.
- Freighter bases use pre-built room modules (not free-placed cuboid rooms) organized into four categories: Construction, Technology, Industrial, and Agricultural.
- No power infrastructure is needed: unlike planet-side bases, everything on a freighter runs without wiring or generators.
- You can build up to 16 floors worth of rooms within the available build grid (approximately 21 × 21 per floor).
- Key facilities include: Fleet Command Room, Cultivation Chambers, Industrial Refiner Room, Teleport Room, Galactic Trade Terminal Room, and up to 10 Storage Rooms.
- Up to 3,000 individual parts can be placed in a single freighter base (shared with a game-wide limit of 16,000 across all bases).
- Rooms from the same category snap together and merge visually, creating large, open interior spaces.
Overview
The Endurance update transformed freighter base building from a rudimentary system into one of the deepest construction experiences in No Man's Sky. Instead of laying down generic cuboid rooms, you now place purpose-built modular rooms (each designed around a specific role) and connect them with corridors, stairs, catwalks, and glass walkways.
The result is a fully functional starship interior: part factory, part greenhouse, part expedition command center. Because you're building inside your freighter, this base travels with you everywhere. Warp to a new system and your refiner, your crops, your trade terminal, and your storage are all right there. For players who enjoy automated mining or crafting high-value items like Stasis Devices, the freighter base eliminates the need to constantly warp back to a home planet.
How to Access Freighter Base Building
Once you own a freighter (see how to get a free freighter if you haven't claimed one yet), board it and walk through the glowing green Bulkhead Door on the main deck. The build menu opens automatically inside the freighter interior. The same menu used for planet-side bases but populated with freighter-specific parts.
The build area is a predetermined grid roughly 21 units wide by 21 units deep, extending upward for up to 16 floors. You cannot build outside this invisible boundary. The first floor's height is fixed, so start placing rooms from the existing floor and work outward or upward from there.
One practical tip: stand a few steps back from the spot where you want to place a room. Being too close to the target location causes placement to fail.
The Four Module Categories
Construction Modules
These are the connective tissue of your freighter base: plain corridors, glass corridors, stairs (both standard and glass-sided variants), catwalks, external viewing platforms, airlocks, and doors. Glass corridors are a fan favorite. They open dramatic views of space as you move between rooms.
Rooms from the same category merge visually when placed adjacent to each other. This is most noticeable with the three larger functional categories below, where multiple modules combine into a single open space.
Technology Modules
Technology modules house the general-purpose facilities your crew and visitors need:
| Room | Function |
|---|---|
| Teleport Room | Links to the broader teleporter network; auto-powered on freighters |
| Galactic Trade Terminal Room | Buy and sell goods without leaving the ship |
| Appearance Modifier Room | Change your character's appearance |
| Overseer's Room | Houses the Construction Terminal for base-building quests and the Overseer NPC |
| Science Specialist's Room | Houses the Scientist NPC for research and blueprint work |
| Scanner Room | Pings nearby planets and auto-discovers them on entry to a system |
Industrial Modules
Industrial modules cover processing, manufacturing, and storage. The economic engine of your freighter:
| Room | Function |
|---|---|
| Industrial Refiner Room | Large-scale refining operations |
| Storage Room (×10 max) | Up to ten numbered containers (0–9), each with 50 stacks |
| Exocraft Specialist's Room | Houses the Technician NPC for exocraft and upgrade research |
| Weapons Specialist's Room | Houses the Armourer NPC for combat upgrades |
| Stellar Extractor | Passively extracts a variety of resources from the interstellar medium while you warp |
Storage Rooms are especially valuable. Each numbered room (0 through 9) corresponds directly to a slot in your freighter's inventory UI, so anything stored there is accessible from the bridge storage tab. You can build a maximum of ten Storage Rooms, giving you substantial overflow space for bulk materials.
Agricultural Modules
Agricultural modules turn your freighter into a traveling farm:
| Room | Function |
|---|---|
| Cultivation Chamber | Plant crops directly in the room; supports mass-harvest of entire room at once |
| Agricultural Specialist's Room | Houses the Farmer NPC terminal |
| Nutrition Room | Cooking facilities for preparing food items |
Cultivation Chambers are the standout here. Unlike planet-side grow beds, the entire chamber can be harvested at once. Building several of these and keeping them stocked is among the most hands-off ways to accumulate raw ingredients for Stasis Devices or Fusion Igniters, which remain among the most profitable crafted items in the game.
No Power Required
This is the single biggest quality-of-life advantage freighter bases have over planetary ones. Every machine, terminal, and room module runs without any power source. There are no solar panels to place, no batteries to balance, no wiring to route. If you've ever wrestled with the power and wiring system on a planet-side base, you'll appreciate how liberating this is.
Fleet Command Room
The Fleet Command Room deserves special mention. This is where you manage your frigate fleet. Sending frigates on expeditions and collecting their returns. Each Fleet Command Room you build allows one frigate expedition to run simultaneously, so building several multiplies your fleet's output. You can send a fleet out, refine some materials, harvest crops, and check the trade terminal all without leaving the ship. See the Frigate Fleet & Expeditions Guide for how to staff and optimize your fleet.
Layout Strategies
The Spine Layout: Build a long central corridor from the entry bulkhead toward the rear of the freighter, then branch rooms off to port and starboard. This is the most space-efficient approach and keeps navigation intuitive.
The Vertical Tower: Stack floors using stairs, placing utility rooms on lower floors (storage, refiners) and living or aesthetic rooms higher up. Glass corridors between floors create striking interior views.
Dedicated Floor Zoning: Assign entire floors by function: one floor for agriculture, one for industrial processing, one for crew/NPC terminals. This makes large freighter bases easier to navigate.
Aesthetic Builds: The system supports creative builds that go well beyond pure function: players have constructed cinemas, dining halls, biodomes, and viewing decks. Because freighter base parts have a consistent industrial/sci-fi aesthetic, themed interiors tend to look cohesive without much effort.
A freighter interior is also the best place in the game to learn glitch building techniques. Flat floors, no weather, no terrain and no power grid to disturb means you can spend an hour purely on timing your inputs, and the builds that look impossible in screenshots are almost all made this way.
Building Limit Awareness
The freighter base shares a game-wide part limit of 16,000 across all bases, with a per-base cap of 3,000 parts. If you maintain many large planet-side bases, keep an eye on your total count. Freighter bases built around room modules (rather than hundreds of individual decorations) tend to stay well within limits.
Practical Priorities: What to Build First
If you're setting up a freighter base for the first time, build in roughly this order:
- Fleet Command Room: start sending frigates on expeditions immediately.
- Storage Rooms: build all ten; they integrate directly with your freighter inventory.
- Galactic Trade Terminal Room: trade without leaving the ship.
- Industrial Refiner Room: refine materials while warping between systems.
- Teleport Room: connect your freighter to your teleporter network for fast travel.
- Cultivation Chambers + Agricultural Specialist's Room: set up a traveling farm.
- Scanner Room: useful for exploration-focused playthroughs; auto-discovers planets on warp-in.
FAQ
Do I need to power anything on a freighter base?
No. All rooms, terminals, and machines on a freighter base run without any power source. This is one of the key advantages over planet-side construction. You never need to place solar panels, generators, or wiring.
Can I build a teleporter on my freighter and use it to travel to planet bases?
Yes. The Teleport Room links to the standard teleporter network. You can warp to any previously visited space station or base teleporter from it. It is auto-powered on freighters. For more on how the teleporter network works, see the Teleporters & Base Networking Guide.
How many storage rooms can I build on a freighter?
You can build a maximum of ten Storage Rooms, numbered 0 through 9. Each one provides 50 inventory stacks and maps directly to the corresponding tab in your freighter's storage UI, so they're accessible from the bridge as well as from the room itself.
Do Cultivation Chambers work the same as planet-side grow beds?
They're better in one key way: you can mass-harvest the entire Cultivation Chamber at once rather than interacting with individual plants. Growth timers still apply, but the harvest action covers everything in the room simultaneously.
What is the Stellar Extractor and is it worth building?
The Stellar Extractor is a freighter-specific manufacturing unit that passively collects a variety of resources from space as you warp between systems. It doesn't require any action on your part. Materials accumulate over time. It's worth building once you have your core rooms set up, as it provides a small but genuinely passive resource income.
Can I share or import freighter base designs?
Yes, with third-party tools. Freighter base layouts can be exported via save editors and shared as JSON files. The game itself has no in-game sharing system for freighter bases, so anything you see traded between players has been through an editor rather than an export button.
Key Takeaways
- Freighter base building uses pre-built room modules in four categories: Construction, Technology, Industrial, and Agricultural. Rooms from the same category merge when placed adjacent.
- No power infrastructure is ever needed inside a freighter base.
- Prioritize the Fleet Command Room, all ten Storage Rooms, the Galactic Trade Terminal Room, and an Industrial Refiner Room as your foundation.
- Each Fleet Command Room supports one simultaneous frigate expedition. Build multiple to maximize fleet throughput.
- Cultivation Chambers enable mass-harvest farming aboard your freighter, making high-value crafting loops much more convenient.
- The build grid supports up to 16 floors; a per-base limit of 3,000 parts applies.
- Glass corridors and catwalks let you build visually striking interiors with dramatic space views. Freighter bases reward creative layouts as much as functional ones.