No Man’s Sky – How to Upgrade Starship

In No Man’s Sky the Starship (or Spaceship) can be upgraded for more inventory space, improved combat and mining abilities (stronger weapons, more shielding) and better Warp Drive range. Ship upgrades are by far the most expensive of all types.

Upgrade Starship Inventory Space:

Buying a new starship from alien traders will always increase the number of available inventory slots. With the purchase of each ship you will start seeing better ships. They get +2 inventory slots per new ship purchase (slightly varies depending on the ship, what solar system you are in etc.). You should deconstruct all your enhancements before you go starship-shopping. You can’t take your ship inventory with you when you buy a new ship! Also, deconstructing means the ships offered to you will come with less enhancements installed and are cheaper (you can craft them by yourself to save money). New ships start at about 250k units and get more expensive with every purchase.

You can also upgrade the inventory for free. To do this fly close to the surface of a planet and look for orange beams. These beams come from signal scanners on the ground, often found near alien buildings. Use a bypass chip on the machine, then select Transmission Tower. If the Transmission Tower option isn’t available, search for a new scanner. When you’ve located a Transmission Tower, go inside and solve the puzzle. Solving it will reveal the location of a crashed starship. There’s a good chance the crashed ship has more slots than yours. If it does, take it. If it has fewer slots, leave it. It’s a rather time consuming process, but later when ships cost millions of units it is a good alternative to get upgrades for free.

Craft Starship Blueprints:

To make your ship stronger you can craft new technology. This will take up one inventory slot permanently. Examples of craftable improvements are: Deflection Enhancement (stronger shields), Advanced Cooling (faster cooldown on cannon), better Phase Beam, hyperdrive that can jump more lightyears per warp cell. After getting the blueprints you must craft them. Lining up multiple upgrades of the same type in your inventory gives bonuses (they will light up yellow when done correctly).

1. Fly close to the surface of a planet and you will see some black smoke coming from small drop pods (they are blinking blue). The exact in-game name for these objects is “Damaged Machinery”. These pods contain ship upgrades.
2. Talk to the Alien at every space station you visit. The weirder the conversation and the higher your standing with a faction, the better the possible reward.

   Here’s an example: On the right wing of a space station I met an Alien from the Korvax Race. In the multiple-choice dialogue I could select whether to let him extract some of my brain cells or not (for his research). I agreed, which temporarily depleted my shield, but he rewarded me with the “Warp Reactor V1” upgrade.

   When you have dialogues with really weird (or life threatening) options you should always agree to the most risky of things. These options give the best rewards.

Damaged Machinery Example: