No Man’s Sky – Starship Scrapping at No Cost

This is a method I sort of tripped over while working to make my starship fleet into S-Class. Hoping that this will help some other impatient souls out there to make some real capital.

Introduction

Note: Credit goes to Averus Retruthan

Note: This guide was written as of the ByteBeat Update. Fingers crossed that this isn’t picked up on anytime soon.

This is Ascalon, presently an S-Class 48/21 slotter. I picked this ship up as a 15/6 C-Class during my first steps in the Hesperius Dimension. Some of you are probably aware that to get this ship like this up to S-Class snuff from a C-Class requires AT LEAST 85,000 Nanites, as well as millions upon millions of Units if you wanted to buy out storage augmentation. Sounds like a massive pain to me, too.

Thankfully, I sorta of tripped over, and subsequently researched, a little method that’s fairly inexpensive, and yields you, the player, a quick and sizeable influx of not only Units, but also Nanites, Storage Aug Units, and even some Ship Upgrades. All of it hinges on a strange little bug/mechanical loophole.

Requirements

1) To make this method work, you need to find an Abandoned Starship. The better the type you can find, the wider your profit margin. Ideally you’ll want to find a wrecked Hauler, since their trade-in value is usually very high.

To make this easier to reference, I will hereby referring to this scrap ship as SHIP A

2) A Space Station, more specifically, the space station of the system you found SHIP A. It must be the same system for this to work.

1) Find SHIP A

I’m not going to go into exhaustive methods of finding an abandoned starship, but for those who are sort of left in the dust about how to find wrecked ships, I’ll list one as a fairly easy example.

Cartographer Method

Navigation data is fairly easy to scrape up, but you’ll need to acquire Emergency Charts and/or Planetary Data Charts(The standard ones with the house icon) Get a few, go out into space, and activate them. What you’ll be looking for is:

– Planetary Data: Transmission Tower

– Emergency Chart: Distress Signal

Investigate accordingly, and see if you lucked out.

I won’t lie, this is probably going to be the longest and most difficult part of the quest. The more effort you put into it, the better your future profit margin.

Once you’ve found your ship, all you need to repair for this to work is just the Launch Thrusters and Pulse Engine. Fixing slots or technology will raise its trade-in value, so choose wisely, and don’t settle for a lesser one. Keep in mind, wrecked ships do eventually respawn so if you find a good one, save the location. Chances are, you’ve found your future gold mine.

2) Exchange SHIP A for SHIP B

Once the repairs are complete, bring your ship to the system’s space station. We’ll now be looking for SHIP B, referring to one of many ships we’ll be scrapping during this escapade.

This part is easy. Find a ship whose trade-in value is equal or less to your current ship. I would say, anything B-class or above is acceptable, but some C-class haulers can yield a good unit profit, so decide what your parameters on, and get to exchanging.

Once you’ve found your SHIP B, make the exchange. We’ll then move onto scrapping.

3) Scrap SHIP B Immediately

Once you’ve found Ship B, it is imperative you scrap it immediately. I’ve attempted to acquire multiple ships at the same time with this method, and all it does it leave useless ghost ships hogging up valuable hangar spots. Just do yourself a favor, and scrap one ship at a time.

4) Reclaim SHIP A

So this is where the magic happens, the bug/mechanical loophole, if you will.

Once you’ve scrapped SHIP B, go back to SHIP A. See how it’s suddenly labeled as an Abandoned Starship again? Well, hell, let’s claim it, who’s going to say no to a free ship?

Remember, this whole thing needs to be done in the same space station of the same star system you found the abandoned ship. Attempting to do this elsewhere will cause the ship to be traded normally and you can’t reclaim it for free.

5) Repeat Steps 2-4

The title says it all. At this point, you can do this process for as long as you want, getting tidy millions for your free scrap, getting as many storage augmentations as you want, and the scrapped ship upgrades can be sold to the local merchants to start building nanites up fairly quickly.

So, that’s basically it. Turning abandoned ships into endless cash. Very little startup capital required. Hope this is as helpful to you all as it was to me.