No Man’s Sky lets you upgrade all the equipment you have on you at the beginning of the game – including your ship itself – but you really shouldn’t. It is available on PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows.
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One of No Man’s Sky’s most valuable resources are Atlas Stones, as they are related to reaching the game’s ending, and collecting just a few is created to take several hours.
As far as I’m aware, there are only two ways to obtain Hyperdrive upgrades – either by locating them in a drop pod, or by increasing your friendliness with an alien species. That could mean literally, if you discover enough words via knowledge stones, space station interactions, or otherwise. Along with having the items in the ship’s inventory when dying, the only other requirement is that players have enough free slots to pick up the duplicates from the grave site. You need to salvage as much of these crafting resources as you can because you will need them in order to continue your exploration, combat, and potentially nearly everything in the game. These one-use items require resources to craft, and when crafted, get you access to certain locked doors and chests.
As you progress through No Man’s Sky universe, you will come across plentiful of elements and resources from flora/fauna, rocks, and asteroids in outer space. While you may instinctively not want that to happen, you’ll need to consent to this process in order to be in with a chance of getting a Hyperdrive upgrade.
Story wise, I can’t do much to spoil No Man’s Sky because there’s not a whole lot to spoil yet. The worst part is that I have to do that instead of playing it. But when you go into your inventory or talk to an alien you’re given a mouse cursor-style selection tool that seems more cumbersome than it should be on a gamepad. The death penalty is light, too – there’s a corpse run to gather your stuff from where you were blown out of the sky, but both times when I returned to the site of my defeat my killers were nowhere to be found, so I simply picked up my goods and continued on my journey. Polygon said you need lots of money in the game, and the most efficient way to earn that is by collecting lots of iron and plutonium, using them to craft bypass chips, and selling the bypass chips to vendors. But every time I jump closer to it, I’m feeling like I’m leaving so much behind.
As with any No Man’s Sky guide, your experience will differ heavily to anyone else as the game’s impressive algorithm tailors pre-set events to your tiny, tiny section of the universe.
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I’ve now only visited two worlds, both a star system apart (well, actually multiple worlds in each system, but you know what I mean). To its credit, I feel it pulling me back in to do more exploring and unlocking new technologies. And I mean a lot.
