Nanites in No Man's Sky, explained: what they're for and how to actually get them

Nanites are the currency behind almost every upgrade in No Man's Sky — technology modules, multi-tool and ship class upgrades, freighter fittings, base parts and blueprints all cost them, separately from the Units you earn trading. The steadiest way to stock up is mining Curious Deposits for Runaway Mould and refining that into Nanites; buying and scrapping ships pays more per session but needs Units up front and has gotten less generous over the years.

What nanites are actually for

Nanites aren't a resource you carry raw — they're a wallet. Technology Merchants at space station Starship Outfitting Terminals sell upgrade modules for nanites, and the same terminals buy modules you don't want back for nanites too, which is why scrapping revolves around them. Beyond upgrades, nanites also cover freighter customization, exocraft parts, and — once you're building bigger ships — the Corvette, a mid-size hull introduced with the Voyagers update that sits between a standard starship and a frigate; its structural modules and fittings are bought the same way as any other upgrade, with nanites.

The reliable methods, in order of how much setup they need

Curious Deposits are the workhorse. They're the gold icons your Analysis Visor flags on almost any planet. Mine one and it drops Runaway Mould, which a Refiner converts straight into Nanites — no intermediate steps, no combat. Because Curious Deposits respawn after you leave the area and come back, a base built near a dense cluster turns into a small, repeatable farm; an Optical Drill speeds up the mining part further. This is the method both Game Rant and Gamer Guides still call the simplest reliable option, and it doesn't need any Units invested first.

Scrapping ships pays more, but costs more. Buy a ship at a space station — ideally B-class or better — dismantle it at the Starship Outfitting Terminal, and sell the resulting upgrade modules to the Technology Merchant. Done at a wealthy system with good stock, this is the highest nanite-per-session method around. It's also the one that's been quietly worsened: players on the Steam forums have tracked ship prices rising faster than their scrap payout since the inventory-slot changes, and some report scrapped S-class ships now handing back a mix that includes C-class modules instead of the S-class upgrades the trick used to guarantee. It still works as of the 2026 Xeno Arena update, just with a thinner margin than it used to have — budget real Units to start, and expect to eat a loss on a bad roll.

Damaged machinery is free money, but only opportunistic. Fixing a piece of damaged machinery you stumble across while exploring — hand over the material it asks for — is one of the most common ways it pays out in nanites, on the order of a hundred or so per fix. You can't farm it on demand; it's a bonus for exploring, not a route to plan around.

Missions and the Nexus fill in the gaps. Space station missions (courier, combat, wildlife, photography) and the multiplayer Nexus missions at the Space Anomaly both hand out nanites alongside Units and Quicksilver, and the Nexus board refreshes roughly every ten minutes. Neither is fast, but both run passively while you're doing something else anyway.

Derelict freighters are loot, not a farm. Boarding and clearing an abandoned freighter tends to include nanites among the rewards, but between the combat, sealed doors and puzzle rooms it's a multi-hour trip for what a Curious Deposit run gets you in minutes — worth doing for everything else it drops, not specifically for nanites.

Uploading discovery data (scanning fauna, flora and minerals) also nets a trickle of nanites and is worth doing anyway in your first hours, but nobody treats it as a farming method past the early game.

How many you actually need

Don't expect a clean number here — the two things you'd want it for, a fully-kitted ship and a maxed exosuit, scale with how many slots you're chasing and what class you're upgrading from, and the outlets covering this don't agree closely enough on totals to print one. As a rule of thumb: a single upgrade module runs from the low hundreds into four figures depending on its class, and freighter or Corvette customization options (paint jobs, fittings) sit in the thousands. If you're just trying to afford the next module in front of you, an evening of Curious Deposit farming or one good ship-scrapping run at a wealthy station will usually cover it; chasing S-class everything across a full loadout is the kind of goal that benefits from combining several of the methods above rather than leaning on one.