No Man's Sky: How to Farm Billions of Units in New Update 4

Since the Oct 2022 No Man’s sky version 4 update (Oct 2022), rare metal mining is nerfed, so miners need other sources of income. Advanced crafting is a great alternative, but it’s usually done using large plant farms, and the complex tech trees can be hard to use.

This is a guide to advanced crafting without large plant farms. In fact, you only need a single plant of each type. Instead it uses mines to drive the process. This method is aimed at people who have (or intend to have) mines for most resources, or who want to step up from farming to a more scalable process. With medium sized mines you can produce billions of units in a fairly short time without waiting for plants to grow.

The guide takes you through setting up an easy to use system you can use over and over again, which produces 600 million units each run and smooths out many of the complexities of advanced crafting. It does this by assigning an ‘advanced crafting’ ship and permanently laying it out with a special inventory that makes the whole advanced crafting process easier – you won’t need to remember any tech trees, it’s easy to add resources any time, and you can easily stop and start the process any time you want.

This method takes a bit of time to set up, but after that it runs smooth as butter, especially if you never let any of the stacks get to zero.

Crafting fed by mines: Why?

In the NMS v4 update (Oct 2022), miners will need new sources of income. Advanced crafting is a great alternative to Active Indium – a stack of Active Indium is worth under 2 million, while 10 stasis devices is worth 156 million units.

This is normally done using plant farms but using mines is a better method.

Benefits of mine-based crafting compared to huge plant farms

Picking the plants takes a lot of time and is boring and repetitive. Refining takes about the same time as picking, but refining is passive, so you can do other things. If you want to refine more actively, by running between big banks of refiners, this method is quicker than picking plants.
Mines use a lot less building parts than plant farms and mines are useful for lots of other things in the game, big plant farms are not.
You don’t have to wait for the plants to grow, you could actually make billions of units in a single sitting if you really wanted to – with even medium sized mines.
Mines scale better than plant farms – huge mines take no more effort to collect than small mines.

Benefits of assigning a ship to crafting

This method also assigns a ship to make the process easier.
Advantages:

It’s ready to craft at any time and you can start and stop when you want.
It’s easy to remember what to do so you dont have to remember the crafting tree.
Once set up, it’s quick and easy to use, you just hover over an item and press ‘E’
If you keep a small amount in each stack, you can send topup resources to the ship any time and they automatically go into the right slots.

Before you start

Before you start, you need:

Mines for: Pyrite, Parafinnium, Phosphorous, Dioxite, Uranium, Oxygen (large-ish), Ammonia, Magnetised Ferrite and any one of the 3 rare gases*.
Unlocked blueprints (at the anomaly) for stasis devices and Fusion Igniters and everything up to them in the advanced crafting tree.
A decent refiner setup with several medium or large refiners you can run in parallel. Can be planetside or freighter.
A small amount (1 or more) of Cactus, Star bulb, Solanium, Frost Crystal, Gamma root, Faecium, Chlorine, Ionised Cobalt and Fungal mould.
A spare ship you can assign permanently to be your ‘advanced crafting’ area. The ship I used i this guide was fully upgraded before the update, i.e. 96 slots. If you have more slots, you can use them for extra stasis devices and Fusion Igniters, just leave one of each of those in so theyre not empty. If you have less slots it could still work down to about 76, just leave out row 2 and maybe also row 3.

(* Note: You can get away with less mines by refining from other materials – e.g. Uranium from Phosphorous and Pure Ferrite – there are thousands of possibilities, see other guides for how to do this. Anyway, mines are quicker.).

1: Prepare your storage area

Start with a starship that’s been upgraded fully (or close to fully) and empty it.
Your aim by the end of this guide is to create the inventory in this picture, worth over 600 million units.Gather resources from your mines and plants and put them in the correct slots like in the picture. There will be lots of gaps, especially towards the bottom.

Notice I’ve added boxes around some areas:
Yellow = Input plants and their multipliers
Orange = Input gases
Purple = Crafting direct from plants
Red = Crafting direct from gases
Green = Ores and their multipliers
Light blue = Advanced Crafting
The following phases cover each of these.

2: Input PLANTS & multipliers (yellow box on the picture)

Use the mined elements from rows 1 and 2 to expand the plants in rows 3 and 4. (For example, add pyrite to cactus to make more cactus).
Each column can be refined together – each element can be used to multiply the plant below it.
*Note: Faecium and Mordite are slightly different. Faecium refines directly to Mordite. Faecium and oxygen refine to a lot more Faecium.
Refine each plant and element to make more of the plant until the stacks are full.

3: Input GASES (orange box on the picture)

Fill up all the gas slots by adding oxygen. Any gas of the three + oxygen = another gas.

4: Craft directly from plants (Purple box on the picture)

Click the first slot (under solarium) and craft the heat capacitor, like in the picture.
Press ‘E’ over any item to craft more, and keep going until you have 10 of each item in the first row of the purple box (as shown).
As you craft items, they will use up plants or other crafted items. Try not to let any item run out (refilling using ‘E’), because it’s easier to use that way.
Keep going and fill the bottom row of the purple box too, with 10 of each all the way across.

5: Simple gas crafting (Red box on the picture)

Create condensed carbon by refining oxygen into carbon then carbon into condensed carbon.
Add more oxygen to the condensed carbon to expand it very efficiently.
Craft the three elements into 2 stacks of each

6: ORES (Green box on the picture)

Gather the 3 input elements – Ionised Cobalt and Chlorine can each be expanded using Oxygen, and Pure Ferrite refines from mined Magnetised Ferrite.
Craft each ore in the green box, working from left to right, and refilling stacks as they empty.

7: ADVANCED CRAFTING (Light blue box in the picture)

Now for the part you’ve been waiting for – crafting the big money items.

The items in the light blue box are crafted using materials from the other boxes.
Start from the top left (the conductor – a cream coloured circle) and work from left to right, row by row.
As you craft items, keep an eye on the other boxes as they are used up, and keep replenishing them so they don’t run out.
Keep crafting items and refilling stacks all the way to the bottom until you have 2 stacks of stasis devices and 2 stacks of fusion igniters.
These 4 stacks of 10 are worth :nmsunits: 156 million each, so 4×156 = :nmsunits: 624 million units. Now go sell them!
If you want to make more, just refill everything and start again.
With big enough mines, you can easily make billions in a day, just with resources from the mines.

Running the process

Now you can leave this ship in place and craft those high value items any time you need another half billion units. Some tips:

Once you finish the process, remove 9/10 stasis devices and fusion igniters from each stack and start again from the top (fill up the inputs).
Keep every slot in your ship occupied, even with just a small amount of resource – this way you can top up any resource by sending it to your ship and it will go into the correct slot for the next time you want to make some more units.
You can refill the stacks directly from mines. Just ‘send to star ship’ straight from the silo. (just dont forget you’ll need ship fuels and sodium in your suit because they’re not in your ship).
I recommend refilling everything at the end of the process. Up to you but it seems easier.
Add silos to your mines to beef up parts of your production process which arent producing enough. (In particular, you might find that Ammonia and Oxygen need higher volumes).
There is a 10x refiner speed mod (on nexusmods) which I highly recommend .. life’s too short to sit waiting 15mins for a game to refine virtual stuff 🙂 The mod also works with v4 (currently anyway).

By NZ.Zer0

No Man’s Sky: How to Farm Billions of Units in New Update 4