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I just blew almost all my money on a really cool lookin' ship. How do I regain solvency without spending a lot of time fiddling around in my inventory?
At the moment I've found a sequence of steps that'll turn 50 carbon and 100 Plutonium into ~5000 Units (by creating Suspension Fluid and then turning it into Electron Vapor). Are there better recipes or sequences of recipes I should look for? Or should I just drop the whole thing and go mine a particular mineral?
One method that's not incredibly fast but reliable (around 1.5m every half an hour) is to simply go to a space port, look at that ports trader, and note down everything with a gold star next to it that they'll buy for +90% or more value than galactic average. Then, go down to where the space ships come in and purchase everything in their inventory that will sell to the space ports seller for twice the value. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum.
You can make two-three million units per hour by crafting bypass chips.
Bypass chips sell for 3575 each, and require only 10 iron and 10 plutonium to craft. This means you can use this method on nearly every planet, with no special equipment or recipes, and without any money currently to your name. It's also very space efficient, as each stack of 500 iron or plutonium will net you 90,000 units worth of chips. This is even better than gold!
For those who doubt that it can really give you this much money, this is how I determined the value: I loaded my game, which I happened to last save by a Trading Post, so I ran over there as my starting point. I then timed how long it took to get 500 plutonium from the trading post, which came out to two minutes. This includes looking around to find a likely location, running over there, avoiding some pesky sentinels, and actually mining it. I had to run a fair bit to find some, and I also mined some aluminium while I was at it, so I feel this is a time you could generally achieve. This comes out to 2.4 seconds/chip (120 seconds/50 chips).
I then timed how long it took to get 500 iron with a mining laser, which was 40 seconds. I didn't add any time for finding iron, as it's pretty much always plentiful near plutonium. I just mined the nearest things, which weren't overly rich in resources, so this should also be a reasonable number to consistently achieve. This is 0.8 seconds per chip.
Next I crafted 16 chips (the amount of inventory space I happened to have open), which took another 40 seconds. I didn't rearrange my inventory at all to make it more efficient, and I'm on the PS4, so you can probably meet or beat this time easily. This adds 2.5 seconds per chip.
Lastly I sold all my chips, which took ten seconds. How many seconds this adds per chip depends on how many you sell at a time, but let's be pessimistic and say you only have ten slots available. This adds one second per chip.
If we add that all up, we see that it takes a total of 2.4 + 0.8 + 2.5 + 1 = 6.7 seconds per chip. There's 3600 seconds in an hour, which gives 3600 / 6.7 = 537 chips an hour. The galactic average for the chip is given as 3,575 units, so presumably you will get that on average if you always sell your chips wherever is convenient. So 537 chips/hr * 3575 units/chip = 1.9 million units/hr. Obviously you will eventually have to travel farther away to get the plutonium, but you could fly to a cave with lots of it and load up before returning to a trading terminal. I think you could sustain this rate if you did nothing but craft bypass chips if you did so on a decent planet and were smart about your process for gathering mats.
This is an average case if you aren't trying to be efficient at all. I ran from a random spot to spots that looked likely for plutonium, then only picked up 500 when there was lots more. If you pick up plutonium as you are walking around and/or clean out large stashes as you find them, you can easily halve that number. If you use grenades to get iron instead of the mining beam, the time is practically 0. (I've gotten 1000 iron in under 10 seconds with grenades.) If you have 20 spots free instead of only ten, then selling them only adds 0.5 seconds per chip instead of one second. This all brings the time to 1.2 + 0 + 2.5 + .5 = 4.2 secs/chip, which is 857 chips/hr. You can also wait until you find a trading terminal that gives you an above average price. The one I happened to sell at gave me 3617 units/chip instead of only 3575. If we work out the math with those values, you get 857 * 6317 = 3.1 million units/hr. Granted, you can't achieve that for 100 hours straight, because it relies on the time walking between nodes being spent on other things. If you're planning to explore anyway, though, then you can't beat the efficiency of picking up every bit of plutonium you see.
My current method, and granted this entirely depends on your planets, has a planet near me which has Gravatino Balls on the ground worth around 25k each.
For me, any planet where the sentinels automatically attack you, has these orbs, designated by a yellow ! when using the scanner.
Also a bonus (depending on how you look at it) is every time you pick up an orb some sentinels come after you, which you can get titanium and neutrino modules for, which also sell for good money.
If you can't find a planet with trade commodities like gravitino balls just lying on the ground, a decently fast way to make some units is mining. Find a planet with either Gold or Emeril deposits - these kinds of planets are pretty common, so there should be at least one in any given system - and gather as much of that material as you can, then sell it at a trading post. It can take some time to fill up your ship with minerals, but every 500 stack of Gold/Emeril is worth upwards of 100k units.
A couple tips for using this method - firstly, fly to deposits that aren't right next to your landing site, it's faster to stop and mine some plutonium than to run all the way to a deposit and back, even with the melee-jetpack trick. Secondly, if your environmental protection runs low, you don't have to use oxides or consumables, just tunnel into whatever rock you're mining to allow your protection to regen and mine it out from the inside.
Not the fasted way to make Units, but I can tell you it's the least boring!
Search for crashed space ships! Dismantle the components which per spaceship are worth ~300k Units. This also aligns nicely with upgrading your space ship.
Whenever you find a crashed spaceship there is a 50% chance (at least that's what I have read - I myself think it's lower) it has one more cargo slot than your current ship and 50% chance it has one slot less. If it's better, dismantle the components of your old spaceship and then take the new one. If the new one is worst, still take it, dismantle its components, then claim back your old spaceship.
You need to repair some components to be able to lift off, but don't waste your resources for repairing anything else.
You need some inventory space to be able to take all resources with you and most likely you need to free your inventory at the next trading terminal before you can hunt the next ship down.
If you can find 4 crash sites per hour, that's about 1.2m Units.
With the NEXT update, I have found a few ways to make units quickly or at least in large amounts at a time.
Your multitool's scanner without any kind of upgrade is quite a poor way to make units. However, I've managed to obtain an upgrade that I purchased from the store in a space station that provides the following bonuses:
Yes it is an S class upgrade, and yes, I may have gotten lucky with what this technology does, but as you can see, I get a 6512% unit increase for all fauna that I scan (animals), and a 9321% unit increase for all flora I scan (plants). For all of the plants I scan, I get 23,817 units each. Most planets have an abundance of flora to scan, making it quite easy and quick to make some units. As for fauna, depending on how rare they are, I can make anywhere from 30,000 units to just over 100,000 units per fauna scanned.
This is one of the more fun ways that I've found to make units. You can also go about finding Ancient Ruins in multiple ways. The first time I found an Ancient Ruin, I asked a Gek for directions (which is one of the dialogue options when speaking to most aliens in the game), and the Gek pointed me towards an Ancient Ruin. At this Ancient Ruin, I interacted with the object that was there (I'm not sure of the actual name of the object). It provided me with two options - seek language help, or seek knowledge of the past. Select the seek knowledge of the past option, and it will point you to another ancient ruin, only this time it should be one that is buried under some terrain.
After you reach the next Ancient Ruin, start digging using a terrain manipulator. Dig near the pieces of the ruins that are sticking out of the ground to find these small chests. These chest contain "Ancient Keys." You will need to find at least three of them, though I believe the ruins contains more than three to find. After finding three of the keys, dig near the center of all of the ruins. You will find a large chest that will require three ancient keys to open. Once you open it, you will find a random ancient artifact item, that is usually worth a lot of units. The first time I did this, my artifact fetched me over one million units.
I believe another way to find these ruins is to use your signal scanner and a Navigation Data chip on it, and select the Scan for Artifacts option. This will lead you through the same process.
As a side note, I believe these ruins always have two Gravatino Balls to be found (one is on a ramp of one of the ruins, while the other may be buried). These are a way to make a quick buck, but picking them up will always trigger the sentinels to attack you, so it may not be worth it.
After obtaining a freighter, and going through the short tutorial with it, you can craft some Frigate Fuel. This recipe is quite simple to craft as well. All you need is Di-Hydrogen, and Tritium. Di-Hydrogen I've found on every planet I've been to so far. It looks like blue crystals that stick out of the ground. Tritium is quite commonly obtained by destroying asteroids when flying around a solar system. Frigate fuel can be made in the following quantities:
Each of these are worth around 1000 times their weight in Tonnes (50,000, 100,000, and 200,000 units respectively). Depending on the Market, you can get a little more, or possibly a little less that what the fuel is worth.
I've found some good money-making recipes like:
but @Kat's Bypass Chip recipe is indeed simple and easy to mine. The problem with Bypass Chips is (at least on PS4) the amount of time it takes to construct them, open the merchant terminal, sell them, close the merchant terminal, etc., etc. It's really quite slow on the PS4. Far less insanity-inducing to make 35K in a single construction.
10,000,000 per hour
The best return I've found is combining 20 Temerium with 20 Spadonium to make Albumin Gel which should return ~45K each.
Temerium takes 16 minutes to grow while Spadonium takes 8. Each one produces about 20 units per grow cycle.
Set up a farm with 20 Temerium and 10 Spadonium to make 450K every 8 minutes. That's about 3,500.000 per hour!
Harvesting, converting and selling 10 Spadonium and 10 Temerium takes 2-3 minutes. That leaves 5-6 minutes sitting around waiting for Spadonium to grow so scale up.
Conceivably, you could make 10,000,000 per hour.
By using the power of farming, you can get a lot of money quickly and consistently with a little bit of setup time. I've found this guide to be quite helpful. (Note that the grow times on that page are outdated - actual times are much longer)
Summary:
You will need to farm four specific plants: Fungal Mold, Solanium, Cactus Flesh, and Mordite (the last you can also kill animals for). By growing enough of these resources, you can combine them to make Liquid Explosives and Circuit Boards, both of which sell for over a million a piece. Depending on the size of your farm, you can make anywhere between 500k to several million units per hour. The major downside to this method is that it takes a significant amount of startup time - you'll have to finish most of the farming quests and many of the science terminal quests as well before you have access to the recipes needed.
It'll net you tens of millions without much effort. And, on top of that, you can do it early in game, without needing a ton of space for farming or unlocking and memorizing tons of multi-tiered recipes.
In my experience, 2-3 hours of doing this translates to 20-30 million units. Enough to buy your own freighter. Welcome to the yacht club. ;)
