What to sell and what to keep?

[AvB!$]

My inventory is full and I'm not sure what I need to keep and what I should sell. Anyone have any ideas or know of a guide that will help me?

[ΔΙΑΚΟΣΙΑ]

Look at the item description.
If the item says "trading" only, sell it.
Other than that, depends on what you have.

[Mr. Bufferlow]

Unless you have immediate need, anything that is available on every planet can be sold or dropped. Ferrite, Carbon are always available. As noted, if it says for trading only, it is good to go away.

As soon as you get the chance, find uranium (it is the most compact fuel source) and either Tritium or Pyrite for your boosters. Tritium is nice because you can use it in a number of ways.

I try to keep a stack of 2000+ on my ship at all the time of two of those three. Metal fingers are the easiest way to get tons of uranium without standing around in radiation while gathering it.

Try to use up any artifacts as soon as practical. They are helpful to raise your rep with the various groups, but they use up a slot you need for other things. If it comes down to it, I will sell them early game.

The real key is to start adding slots as quick as possible. Even a single slot can make things so much easier when you are just starting out.

As you may know, you can pick up two slots in each new system. One at the station and one in the upgrades area of the Nexus.

Invest in the drop pod locators and carry the supplies needed to repair them. Ionised cobalt (you can make it from cobalt), Antimatter (carry the stuff that makes it), sodium nitrate (you can make that from sodium if needed), and oxy.

You can usually pick up two slots using the locators on most planets. I have the talent to just find them by flying over the planet and looking. 2000+ hours may help. They can be tough to find when you are new to the game.

Don't worry about it too much. There are almost no unique items in the game so you can recover if you sell something and later find out it might have been good to keep it.

[jonnin]

If you have sodium, oxygen, and carbon (or the extra strength versions) you have all you need. Everything else is for building/crafting/repairs/money. If this is the early game, thin it down to those 3 + ferrite dust.

[knighttemplar1960]

Refine your ferrite dust into pure ferrite. Refine your pure ferrite into magnetized ferrite. Refine your sodium into sodium nitrite. Refine your carbon into compressed carbon. Refine your cobalt into ionized cobalt. If you don't have any immediate use for star bramble, frost crystals, cactus flesh and the other special plants refine then into carbon and then compress it. If you have no immediate need for nitrogen, radon and the other special gasses sell them. If you have no immediate need for mordite, faeceum, and gravitino balls sell them. Go to a space station and turn navigation data into maps and then use them up. Spend buried data modules at your blue print analyzer. If you have all the blue prints the analyzer gives then refine the buried data modules into nanites. If you have a good amount of uranium then turn your dihydrogen into jellies. If you have no uranium turn your dihydrogen into launch fuel until there is a full stack in your ship's storage.

Rinse and repeat until you have a use for specialized items.

[Guh~hey~hey~♫]

Buy a stack of ion batteries (for your environnemental protection), a stack of life support gel (for your life support), they are both extremely cheap at space stations, a stack of carbon (for the mining laser) and a stack of pure ferrite (for the terrain mannipulator), then save all the oxygen you can gather (for expension recipes once you unlock the medium refiner) and a small sample of either salt or chlorine (just a sample is enough, dont bother farming it).

Any other things you might consider "valuable" are a waste of inventory slot.

[phadin]

I find the life support gel unnecessary, just gather any oxygen from plants you scan, and make sure to kill any hostile flora. that typically gets more then enough oxygen to supply life support that the gel becomes unnecessary.

Ion batteries I bought early on, but I soon learned that the envrionment it protected against usually let me mine the element that I needed to recharge the protection. You only need 16 for a complete recharge, so just a few rocks that contain the element is enough. Still, you'll want to make a point once you have more space in your exosuit to grab the environmental minerals in decent quantity. Not just for protection but other effects (Uranium is great for charging your thrusters before you get the autocharger)

[stvlepore]

Dump the stuff that's readily available on every planet except life support items. Hording eg carbon only saves you the time of harvesting it when you need it.

[knighttemplar1960]

Originally posted by Guh~heh~heh~♫:

Buy a stack of ion batteries (for your environnemental protection), a stack of life support gel (for your life support), they are both extremely cheap at space stations, a stack of carbon (for the mining laser) and a stack of pure ferrite (for the terrain mannipulator), then save all the oxygen you can gather (for expension recipes once you unlock the medium refiner) and a small sample of either salt or chlorine (just a sample is enough, dont bother farming it).

Any other things you might consider "valuable" are a waste of inventory slot.

You can't buy carbon at the space stations. You can buy phosphorus at some space stations. Phosphorus powers your heat hazard protection and is much more effective per item used at recharging your mining laser than carbon is.

[Johnny in the Clouds]

For NORMAL mode the following is useful but applicable to survival and permadeath too.

Max out your suit slots especially all your large cargo slots. Use the large cargo slots to hold resources or every type including life support modules, warp cells, plasma batteries etc in stacks.

Top them up as you go buying or finding stuff or when you visit a base. Everywhere you go for a mission you collect something, so don't constantly wrestle to keep slots free but dedicate one slot per resource in your large cargo suit. Any extra resource delete or throw into a spare ship, freighter storage.

Think of NPCs as YOUR storage containers. They can always be found close by with vast resources to top up everything you carry. Also often forgotten are the massive resources floating in freighter cargo pods that can be simply raided and collected like ionised cobalt, gold etc. No Man's Sky is about space after all :D

The universe is vast and planets can be overwhelming in scale. But stop and interrupt your search and always ask the question where else can I find or gather a resource more easily. Raiding freighters or buying a resource often helps. And you can now scrap ships too for valuables.

Space station missions remember have ranked missions that will reward all the high value items so you have 'resources' ready made to complete other items. So it is worth pursuing them to reach the top ranks as they are effectively an active storage resource.

Your suit's general slots you can keep free but dedicate eight slots to the farmed plant types. All the rest will be for suit tech or simply keep empty, ready for your next mission. Collect all the recipes so you can easily craft high value items to sell and use any extra resources up that spill over into a second slot.

Use your freighter for less frequently used items like, freighter fuel, frigate resources etc.
Freighter based storage crates use for storing intermediate or final crafted high value items, salvage, antimatter, guild relics, storm crystals heart of the suns, cooking items etc.
If you have the matter beam transfer tech you can access them on a planet surface.

Your exocars and space ships have huge storage too use them as well. Keep the colossus for special cooking plants, crystals etc things you might collect as you drive in safety.

You can make anything or refine anything you need from all the basic resources including the gas types. If you have something of everything with you, you never are without when you need something.

Refining is useful if stuck for something, like converting oxygen to carbon, sulphur to radon etc But if you carry and top up as you play and explore, refining is secondary.

The game wants you to explore and find stuff and not really spend time hoarding. It can be difficult to break that cycle of collecting too much.

[Guh~hey~hey~♫]

Originally posted by phadin:

I find the life support gel unnecessary, just gather any oxygen from plants you scan, and make sure to kill any hostile flora. that typically gets more then enough oxygen to supply life support that the gel becomes unnecessary.

Ion batteries I bought early on, but I soon learned that the envrionment it protected against usually let me mine the element that I needed to recharge the protection. You only need 16 for a complete recharge, so just a few rocks that contain the element is enough. Still, you'll want to make a point once you have more space in your exosuit to grab the environmental minerals in decent quantity. Not just for protection but other effects (Uranium is great for charging your thrusters before you get the autocharger)

that's the point.... not using oxygen...
...because it's one of the most valuable material in the game since it allow you to use expension recipes on many other usefull/expensive materials in a medium refiner, with a ratio of 1 for 6 on some of them (condensed carbon, cobalt and chlorine...).
Any oxygen you use for something else is a waste of credits.
Actually it's not so much that oxygen is valuable, it's that it's way easier and faster to gather than the other materials it expense, so you're basically turning oxygen into those material with that crazy 1 for 6 ratio, effectively producing wealth out of thin air... and it's automated since it's the refiner that does the job....

You dont carry uranium on yourself, unless you maxed, or close to max, your exosuit cargo slots, you just keep a small stack on your starship (and make sure to get the auto recharging launcher and efficient trusters upgrades asap to no longer need to recharge it anymore), especially if it's for the sole purpose of fuelling your launcher... you wont need that uranium when away from your ship, so keep it on your ship.

[AvB!$]

Thank you everyone for the advice. I greatly appreciated it.

[Shadowfox]

place resources on your freighter base/storage units. Keep exosuit storage open for upgrades. Keep refining nanites in your personal refiner. Use one ship as a construction vessel for base building.....no need to hoard in this game