This page details everything you need to know about how to use Mineral Extractors and Gas Extractors as part of your base in No Man’s Sky. We’ll cover how to build each of these items, and what you need to do in order to find mineral or gas hotspots with the Survey Device upgrade for the Analysis Visor. We’ll also cover how to store more mineral and gas extractions by using the Supply Depot and Supply Pipe items.
How to Use the Survey Device Upgrade for the Analysis Visor¶
The first thing you’ll need to do before you can consider using a Mineral Extractor or a Gas Extractor is purchase the Survey Device upgrade module for the Analysis Visor. This can be obtained from Iteration: Eos, the Multi-Tool Research merchant on board the Space Anomaly. Once you have this, you’ll need 3 Magnetic Resonators, 1 Quantum Computer, and 2 Wiring Loom to craft it in your Multi-Tool slots. The next time you use the Analysis Visor while on a planet, you’ll see three new Survey Modes available: Power Survey Mode, Mineral Survey Mode, Gas Survey Mode. Power Survey Mode is relevant to identifying suitable sites for Electromagnetic Generators, but the Mineral and Gas modes are the ones we’re interested in for the purposes of this guide.
Concentrated Gas Clouds and Deep-Level Mineral Deposits¶
When you first select either the Mineral or Gas Survey Modes, you might only see a “No Nearby Hotspot” message. If this is the case, you’ll need to travel across the landscape and reuse the Analysis Visor to check after every few hundred metres or so of movement. You should eventually see the “Hotspot Proximity” message appear, with details of how far away either a Concentrated Gas Cloud or Deep-Level Mineral Deposit is, depending on the type of extraction site you’re looking for.
The type of mineral or gas available from the site that you find will depend on the specific planet that you find yourself on. In general, if a mineral is stated on the overview tab when you scan a planet from your starship, there’s a good chance that it will appear at a hotspot. If you’re looking for activated minerals in particular, these are usually found on stormy planets only. Once you locate and analyse a site, it will appear on your compass as a Concentrated Gas Cloud or and Deep-Level Mineral Deposit, allowing you to return to it with ease at any time.
How to Setup a Mineral or Gas Extractor in No Man’s Sky¶
Now that you’ve located a suitable site for mineral or gas extraction, the next thing to do is setup the machinery required to extract the material or element. The first thing you’ll need is a Base Computer, since you can’t begin to build Gas Extractors or Mineral Extractors without one. Once you’ve claimed a base in the area via the Base Computer, you can build the relevant extractor. Next, you’ll need a power generator of some type.
If you’re lucky enough to be in an Electromagnetic Power hotspot, you can build one of these here for efficient power generation. Otherwise, the Solar Panel is the next most efficient power generator. You can build just one or a couple of these, depending on the scale of extraction that you want to take place. If you want to ensure that the extractors keep running overnight, you can build a few batteries and connect them to the Solar Panels, thereby supplying and storing excess power to the battery.
If you want to have multiple extractors running at the same site, you should connect them together with Electrical Wiring. This will ensure that they can all be powered by the same power generator. You can also connect the extractors using Supply Pipe to make the whole process more efficient.
How to Use Supply Depots and Supply Pipes¶
As soon as you link a power generator to an extractor, it will begin extracting the mineral or gas. However, by default the extractors can only store a quantity of 250 of the relevant mineral or gas, so if you want to increase the amount that can be stored from extraction, you’ll need to build a Supply Depot and connect it to the extractor with a Supply Pipe, both of which can be found in the Power and Industry section of the build menu once you’ve purchased the blueprints for them from the Construction Research Station on board the Space Anomaly. One Supply Depot will provide an extra 1,000 slots of storage for the extraction material, but you can build as many as you can connect to a single extractor, or even more if you want to build more extractors on the same site.
There is no limit to the amount of mineral or gas that you can extract from a site once you’ve located it. However, the extractions will cease once all the available storage from the extractors and Supply Depots is used. You can build as many extractors and Supply Depots as you want, connecting them together for an efficient farming project of a particular mineral or gas. If you’d rather not do this, you’ll need to visit the site every few hours to collect the extracted materials and put them in storage elsewhere to ensure that the extractions can continue uninterrupted.
Class Tiers for Mineral and Gas Extraction Sites¶
The last thing you’ll want to consider when setting up an extraction site for minerals or gas is the class tier of the site. This can range from Class C, B, A and S, as with many other class tiers for things such as Multi-Tools and starships. You can see the potential class tier of a site when you identify it with the Analysis Visor, but the concentration range of material will be obscured until you reach the site and analyse it. You can always deconstruct the extractor (and the Base Computer and power generators), then move on to try a different site if you’re looking for a higher class tier site. In general, the higher class tier sites will have higher concentrations of a material, and increased extraction rates compared to the lower tier ones.
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