Discover the best methods to quickly earn Nanites in No Man's Sky, including uploading discoveries, examining buildings, refining larval cores, and hunting Sentinels.
We’ll cover eight main ways that you can make Nanites in No Man’s Sky: uploading discoveries, examining buildings, refining larval cores, killing Sentinels, salvaging unwanted starships, farming curious deposits, speaking with specific NPC on the Space Anomaly, and completing local and Nexus missions.
Upload Discoveries for Nanites
This is probably the method that you’ll use to earn your first nanites in No Man’s Sky. All you need to do is explore a planet, examining specific locations and all the flora and fauna that you come across with the Analysis Visor. You won’t necessarily earn a lot of nanites in a short amount of time doing this, but the small amounts that you do earn certainly stack up. You should make a habit of checking the Discoveries tab from the main menu, where you can view the different types of discoveries that you’ve made. You can upload the discovery of specific planets within a system, but you can also select the planet to upload any discoveries related to the flora and fauna, or specific structures.
Examine Buildings for Nanite Clusters
As you explore a planet you’ll come across different types of buildings such as Abandoned Buildings, Manufacturing Facilities, Observatories, and Shelters. Most of these will offer some form of nanite acquisition, but some will be easier to loot than others. Abandoned Buildings, Shelters, and Observatories are perhaps the easiest to obtain nanites from, since all you need to do is walk through the structure and interact with any interface available to you. There are usually a few different points in each structure which provide nanites after interacting with them. Manufacturing Facilities are slightly more complicated, since they will often be patrolled by Sentinels who will become hostile if you try to break into the facility. However, killing the Sentinels in this scenario is part of the nanite farm, since you’ll gain nanites for each sentinel that you kill, although only a small amount.
In addition to the types of buildings listed above, you can also find nanites from damaged machines which are scattered across the landscape of most planets. Most of the time, all you need to do is remove the various types of gunk which have clogged these machines to effectively repair them, and you’ll receive a small number of nanites in return. However, sometimes you’ll find machines which require specific materials to repair, and you’ll receive more nanites from these as a result if you provide the materials.
Refine Larval Cores From Whispering Eggs
This is essentially the same method noted in our guide on how to make units quickly. However, the difference is that you’ll be refining the Larval Cores rather than selling them. If you haven’t read that page, an overview of how to find the Whispering Eggs which contain the Larval Cores is noted below.
The creatures you’ll be stealing the eggs from are only found at specific sites known as Abandoned Buildings. These are found on almost every planet, especially those you start on, so you shouldn’t have much trouble locating one. When you first arrive at an abandoned building you’ll notice that it’s surrounded by nests, but with no creatures visible. The nests contain Whispering Eggs which can be destroyed using the Mining Beam or a type of ammunition, revealing the Larval Core within. You can farm as many cores as you want before taking them back to a refiner, where you can process each core in exchange for 50 nanites.
The only trouble with this method is that as soon as you destroy a Whispering Egg, numerous hostile creatures known as Biological Horrors (aka Fiends or Burrowing Monstrosities) will emerge from beneath the ground and begin chasing you. These can inflict a lot of damage in a short amount of time, especially if you’re overwhelmed by a lot of them, so you’ll need to keep moving or find a safe place on the rooftops of the building as you take them out. You can kite the horrors fairly easily around the area as you kill them one by one, but all of this can take quite a long time, making other methods potentially more desirable if they’re available to you.
Hunt and Kill Sentinels for Combat Supplies
This is one of the best ways to acquire nanites, but it’s something you’ll be doing once you’re a bit more experienced, since you’ll need to kill multiple Sentinels. However, it won’t take long before you can do this fairly comfortably. The main thing you’ll need to ammunition for your multi-tool, effectively turning it into something more like a weapon and allowing you to kill Sentinels much more quickly than you would by using the Mining Beam. Once you know that you can take on multiple sentinel waves and survive, you can begin to hunt them for their valuable drops.
You’ll gain a lot of Salvaged Glass as you kill Sentinels.
Almost every Sentinel that you kill will drop Combat Supplies. These will appear on the battlefield where the Sentinel falls, and you can immediately loot them by walking up to them or by shooting them. You’ll earn a small number of nanites for each combat supply that you loot, but there’s also a chance that more valuable items will drop with them. This can include things like Salvaged Data, but the most valuable item in terms of farming nanites that you should be looking for is Salvaged Glass. This item may seem unimportant at first, but if you interact with it to extract the components, you will receive different types of valuable items that you can sell for units or nanites.
The most valuable items that you can sell for nanites are upgrade modules, which will generally sell for anything between 300 to 1,100 nanites, depending on the tier. Keep in mind that you won’t be able to sell th
100% Human-Written. AI Fact-Checked. Community Verified. Learn how AntMag verifies content