Inventory Management 101 - A guide about not hoarding

I often hear people say that they have problems with the limited inventory space available in No Man's Sky. I personally haven't really struggled with it much myself. Because of that, I thought I would write a short guide to introduce some ideas and methods to help people manage their inventory better in this game in order to have a better experience with it.

Intro to inventory

Hello and welcome to my short and sweet guide on how to better manage inventory space in No Man's Sky! I am, of course, writing this guide assuming that you have already been able to repair your ship and get it off the ground. I won't really be going over basic gameplay concepts here, and there are other guides for that anyway. What I want to talk about it how to make inventory management less of a difficulty.

But first, let's talk about how exactly the system works in No Man's Sky. You have your exosuit inventory, which is the player inventory, and then you have a separate storage space on your ship. Resources that you mine build as a 'stack' in either inventory, but items that you get either for crafting or for selling each take up one full space. If you collect something yourself it goes in your inventory. If you collect something while in your ship, it goes in your ship's inventory. You may also transfer resources/items from your exosuit to your ship, even from great distances, and of course you can move things back and forth when you are near your ship, however you may only send things to your ship at a distance and not recieve them. In addition, both your suit and your ship have functional components that also take up space, like your life support or your ship's deflector shield. The multi-tool also has an 'inventory' of sorts, but that consists purely of these functional components and you cannot actually store any items/resources there, so I won't be dealing with that.

So there are a few questions that need to be addressed, then. What do I keep, and what do I get rid of? How much of an item should I be handling? Where do I store things, my ship or my suit? And where can I get more room for each? I will do my best to answer all of these questions in this guide.

TL;DR section (Interlude)

I thought I would post a summary of the basic points that I made, since I said at the start it would be a 'short and sweet' guide and then I went on to discuss everything at length. I suppose what I meant is that it would be a guide focused on one specific topic rather than a catch-all tips and tricks guide. So here's a quick round up of the major points for better inventory management:

- Exosuit inventory expansions are pretty cheap and easy to find. Ship inventory expansion requires a new ship though it is more effective.

- Take only what you need to survive, or what you will immediately use for crafting. Beyond that, any surplus should be high value items/resources to sell.

- Your ship holds 500 resources per slot, exosuit only holds 250. Store resources on the ship, store items in your exosuit.

- Carbon and Iron can basically be ignored, but things like Platinum, Zinc, Chrysomium and Titanium are worth carrying an extra stack around for convenience. One extra stack. One.

- Neutral (Green background) resources are important for upgrades but it's better to note the planet/solar system you found it in than it is to try and carry a stack of each 'just in case'.

- Set a limit for yourself for surplus, and then get used to ignoring resources unless you know you need them. Allows you to keep exploring at a good pace.

Expanding Your Inventory

To begin, I'll start with what may be the most important part, and that is how you go about getting an increased inventory space. It isn't ever brought up directly by the game, but you can actually increase the size of your exosuit inventory! Not only that, but buying a new ship or repairing a crashed one will almost always provide you with more storage slots as well. Buying a new ship or repairing a crashed one is pretty self-explanatory, you just need the money or resources to get it. Finding exosuit expansions is a bit of a different matter though.

The first way that you can expand your exosuit inventory is to find Drop Pod locations scattered accross the map. For reference, a drop pod will look like this:


They can be a little difficult to notice while flying around, but once you know what you are looking for they become easier to spot. Each one of these stations will offer you a single extra inventory slot, at a regularly increasing pace. The first costs you nothing. The next costs 10k units, the next 20k, and so on. These can be found on just about any planet, so it is always possible to expand your inventory wherever you are. The simplest way to find them is to use a Bypass Chip with a Signal Scanner (small beacons with orange beam coming out) and then search for 'Shelter'. This option may lead you to an actual shelter instead, usually a location with just one or two little buildings rather than a full sized outpost, but this option can also lead you to drop pods! And there's nothing that says you can't use 2 or 3 or 4 bypass chips on the same scanner to make sure that you find a couple drop pods.

This is probably the most effective method for finding inventory expansions; however, you can also find one of each of these on every space station. The problem is that they will be behind the door on the left which requires a level 1 Atlas pass, something not immidiately available to users. It is something to keep in mind as you progress though.

Inventory Management Best Practices

Now that you know how to increase the inventory space available to you, it is time to talk about how to make use of it. There are, of course, different approaches to this, and people will have different preferences about what to keep and what to leave behind. However, in my title I hinted at a general rule I will make about storing items, and that is that you should do your best to carry with you as LITTLE as you possibly can. It can be tough to try to embrace this philosophy, especially when other games allow you to stack almost any item in your inventory and provide you with more space as well. That doesn't mean that this game should change to fit that suit, but rather that the player simply needs to make some small adjustments and approach this game differently.

The easiest way to follow this rule is to only carry on you what you actually need for survival, and to only gather what you need for crafting. Beyond this, anything that you gather should be gathered with the intent to sell it. At the start of the game this may be harder to follow, as you may not yet know what you do and do not need for crafting or supplies. But then again, at the beginnning of the game you don't already have anything taking up space in your inventory or your ship's inventory, so it really isn't as pertinent. Learning the concepts of what is necessary for crafting and for survival is something that each player will come to learn on their own over time. The trick, then, is to make use of that knowledge once your inventory starts filling up.


With that in mind, I'll get back to answering more of the questions I posed before. I'll start with a simple, yet very helpful point about where to store things. This is actually a pretty easy concept to break down once you understand the main different between your exosuit and ship inventories. The difference is that your ship can hold a stack of 500 of the mined resources, while your exosuit can only hold stacks of 250. This is the most crucial aspect of inventory management. The method that follows from this is to store items like Neutrino Modules or Shielding Shards or Power Canisters in your exosuit inventory, and send your excess resources like Plutonium or Titanium to your ship. Holding your surplus resources on your ship allows your to have twice as many resources saved, and because items always take up 1 slot wherever they are placed, it is more efficient to keep them in your exosuit inventory instead. This can get a little messy once your inventory starts filling up, but it remains true at all times. This is also the best way to maximize your profit as you travel, as it allows you to retain the most resources that you can collect while still enabling you to collect green items to sell as well. It may be difficult to understand why it is better to keep these items in your exosuit inventory rather than your ship's inventory, but I hope that I have explained it enough here for it to make sense. Just think about it in terms of what else could potentially take up that space. Ship slots can hold double the planetary resources, but only one of any item, same as the exosuit. Putting an item in your ship's inventory is like taking up two slots with that item in your exosuit inventory, since two full stacks of a resource in your exosuit only takes up one slot on your ship.

Best Practices, pt. 2

After understanding where you should be keeping different types of items and resources, the next step is to determine what things you should be keeping and what you should throw away. Below I have included a couple of screenshots to show you how I currently operate my inventory, and then i'll work from there to give some better 'Do's and Dont's'.



Now I hate to have to admit this, but even I don't follow my own best practices religiously, at least in terms of what to keep and what to throw away. But I thought I would include these images as reference points to work from. The method that I will provide you to better manage your inventory is not a system with zero flexibility. What I will do is provide the best possible means to follow this system, and then allow for users to make their own adjustments according to their needs.

The first step is identifying what is important and what isn't. The game does a good job of doing this for you based on how many 'atoms' you see on the image of the resource. Resources like Carbon and Iron (1 atom) are the most common form of their respective element, and therefore are the easiest to gather and least important to keep. You can see that I have a stack of each in my inventory and not on my ship, but since these aren't as important I would rather keep free space on my ship for better resources. However, the best practice here is to keep none of these resources on your inventory. Both Carbon and Iron are incredibly easy to locate so you can collect them on a largely immidiate-use basis. When your life support or mining laser runs low on power, simply gather some Carbon quickly to make use of it and then discard the rest. Iron is used more in crafting, and when you do need it you often need larger quantities. However, since it is easy enough to find, it still does not need to be kept. The only reason I have some Carbon, Iron, and Heridium in my inventory is because sometimes the Aliens you encounter will ask you for some resources for one reason or another, and I hate coming to them unprepared. In reality, all you have to do is remember to grab some of each on your way into an inhabited outpost. Heridium is a little different as it can harder to find, especially at first, and is a bit tedious to mine. But even this can be easily discarded once you have your ship up and running, and since it is mostly used to build ship attachments you don't really need to have any of it until you decide to make a specific attachment or two. In truth I have only started carrying them around recently as my inventory size has grown to the point that I can accomodate this. Earlier on I definitely did not carry this kind of surplus around. I also have Heridium on my ship since I don't like going and hunting it down, but it is also easy enough to find once you have a functional ship.

So the point is that stockpiling resources like Iron and Carbon is pointless. Even having one full stack can be too much, especially towards the start of the game. It's definitely not worth saving a full stack in your ship either. So let's move onto the next levels of resource. If you've ever been into outer space, ever, then you understand why we don't need to talk about Thamium9. Let's skip that then and go straight to Zinc and Platinum. Now these are a resource I like to keep a surplus of on my ship because they are kind of annoying to provide on-demand. So I would say these can be a more important resource to hold onto simply for the sake of building it slowly over time in order to have it when you need to spend it all at once. Zinc is also more important as you begin travling to new solar systems, but you can just build up the fuel on your harddrive a good deal in order to avoid having to save up extra Zinc. Moral of the story: keep maybe a stack and leave the rest behind.

The next set to discuss then is the third tier of resources. These are Plutonium, Titanium, and Chrysonite. In some ways these are rarer, though when you do find them you find them in greater numbers than Platinum or Zinc. Or at least, Titanium and Chrysonite are. Plutonium is pretty easy to find since you need to use it to launch your ship each time. As you can see from my screenshots, I have a full stack of these on both my inventory and my ship. The inventory stacks, once again, are more for the purpose of giving to the Aliens when i encounter them if they want it. And again, this isn't really necessary nor actually the optimal strategy. These resources are more useful and can be harder to come by so its best to save a larger amount of them. Titanium and Chrysonite are not always on each planet, so when you find a planet with one of these you would do well to fill a slot on your ship with them. In addition, when you are exploring a planet with these, they are the resource you should be hoarding. Don't stockpile Carbon or Iron or even Thamium9 to make money. Stockpile Titanium and gather a ship slot or two worth of Plutonium whlie you gather green items to fill your exosuit. Being efficient about what resources you collect will save you time and get you money much faster.

I didn't touch on the green resources yet, and although I will here there isn't really much else to say that I haven't said already. You can see that I don't have any on my inventory besides one stack of Emeril that i'm keeping in my inventory, since that is one of the rarest green minerals. Otherwise, this should be treated the same way as both Iron and Titanium. These resources should not be stockpiled, they should be either gathered on-demand for use with a crafting blueprint or gathered and put in your ship to sell the next chance you get. I realize this part sucks, and I really hate that I can't carry around some extra Aluminum and Copper in case I need it in the future. Honestly the best practice here is just to make a note of where you can find it, whether it is a planet that has it or if it is in asteroids in the solar system. If you try to store a stack of each of these you will be beating yourseful up over how limited your inventory space is especially if you don't have an amazing ship, and if you try too hard to keep some of each resource you will end up having to sacrifice functionality on both your ship AND your exosuit. I definitely have some exosuit upgrades that I could do away with, but I've tried to balance between expanding my inventory and adding equipment.


So what's the bottom line here? Really, it's to not save more than one stack of any resource that you really want, unless you are building surplus to sell at a nearby trading post. Having Platinum and Zinc on hand rather than supplying it on demand is the better strategy. And since not all planets have Titanium or Chrysonite, you don't want to run all the way back to them if you only need to use a little. 500 of each should be more than enough unless you are trying to build an entire ship or multi-tool from scratch. Saving any more than this is just wasting space, and really saving ANY Carbon or Iron when you aren't going to use it immediately is also a waste. Even my screenshots here are not an example of the very best strategy. I personally have trouble with it (obviously) because I'm not used to playing with this approach in games, but once you adapt to it a little things move much more quickly and you don't have to feel like you're 'wasting time mining' unless that is what you want to do anyway.

Conclusion

And that is why managing your resources and items is so important: so that you can continue to add perks to your equipment. It can be difficult to pass up all these resources you see on your adventure but you can't take everything with you and if you can deal with passing up some of these resources then you can progress through the game much faster. A big part of this is being selective. You can ignore a lot of stuff once you have the surplus level you desire, and if you set yourself certain objectives for each trip then you won't have to deal with the issue of inventory management as much. Exploring the planet and making money can go hand in hand but if you want to do both at the same time you have to expect to start passing up certain resources or to discard the things of lesser value in your inventory. Choosing one or the other can help move things along, and finding a trading post or outpost to work from definitely aids in this as well. Or just being on the planet next to the space station.

But anyway, I think that I have gotten in all I wanted to say on this topic. I have been loving this game but I can totally understand why some people have issues with it. This particular aspect of the game is something I was able to adapt to quickly and so I thought I would share my perspective with the world in hopes that it will help as many of you out there as I can reach. Best of luck and happy travels to all :)

[poiromaniac]

Outdated AF

[MRF]

Found having a big cargo ship stripped back to bone in tech with inventory stuffed with what is needed for those opportunity encounters. For repairing things with unusual elements and stacks of carbon and ferrite and other useful items for base building.

Just call it down when you need it and re-stock it every now and again. Trick is to not fly it about as its so weak but just fill it from safe bases and call it when needed before hopping back in your main ship when you're done with it.

[Harbingerman]

Great Guide ! Thank you !

[xax]

Thank you, very helpful still.

[InertFurry]

Outdated AF: Ship inventory carries 5, freighter and dedicated storage holds 10 of each item like Neutrino Modules.

[itsmeHawkeyeG]

@nolanp19 I can't seem to find any option for that. You can change some key settings but the only one that defaults to the middle mouse button is the 'fire grenade' setting but changing that doesn't change the button for deleting. Maybe search online for some alternative?

and @PlayerA I should have said this before but instead i'll say it now. I believe that I did say in my guide what iron and carbon are used for and why they are useful. But my point is that they are so plentiful that it is rarely if ever necessary to hold onto it for something. It can instead be collected on-demand, so that you only have it when you use it. And again this is the 'ideal' approach to this and I wouldn't blame you for carrying some around. The point is just that it isn't something that's hard to get so you shouldn't have it until you actually need it for something.

[nolanp19]

I am using a PC with touvh pad ( No middle button) so can't drop or stack resources. Very annoying. Does anyone know if that command can be assigned to a key stroke?

[cjallday1130]

"Take Only What you need to survive" I read that in Lone Starr's Voice

[kbennett_thetoad]

Very Very Helpfull. Thanks for taking the time to share.
Will no doubt enjoy the game even more.
The Toad

[itsmeHawkeyeG]

Thanks for the feedback all :) glad that this has helped some people out there