This page details how to upgrade the Freighter in No Man’s Sky. Includes how to increase Freighter storage slots, where to find Salvaged Frigate Modules and Salvaged Fleet Units, how to change the appearance of a Freighter and how to build a Fleet Command Room. Also includes how to find the best Frigates and send your fleet on expeditions. If you haven’t yet found a Freighter, see our How to Get the Best Freighters page. If you have but you want to know more about Frigates, see our How to Send Frigates on Expeditions page.

How to Increase Freighter Storage Slots¶

One of the most useful things about having a Freighter is the immense amount of storage space that they have to offer. The base amount of storage will vary depending on the class of a Freighter, and the random amount allocated to the one that you happen to find. However, keeping in mind that there is currently no way of upgrading the class tier of a Freighter from C, B, or A to S tier, it’s a good idea to focus on finding one at S tier to begin with. If you haven’t yet found a Freighter at S tier, see our How to Get the Best Freighters guide, which includes a section on how to farm for not only the best S tier Freighters with good stats, but also one with an appearance that you prefer.

Where to Find Cargo Bulkheads¶

Assuming you have an S tier Freighter, you can now upgrade the storage slots to 48 for the General inventory and 21 for the Technology inventory (or fewer if you have a lower class tier Freighter, see the table above). To do this, you’ll need Cargo Bulkheads. These are relatively rare items which can be found primarily on Derelict Freighters as rewards from Engineering Control terminals. The Engineering Control terminals are usually found at the end of the exploration of a Derelict Freighter, so it can take some time to grind enough Cargo Bulkheads to upgrade all the possible storage slots for your Freighter.

Emergency Broadcast Receivers and Derelict Freighters¶

There are two main methods that you can use to find Derelict Freighters reliably. The first is to purchase an Emergency Broadcast Receiver from a Scrap Dealer on space stations. You’ll need to select the “Acquire Coordinates” option, which involves paying 5,000,000 Units for the first Emergency Broadcast Receiver, 10,000,000 for the second, 20,000,000 for the third, then 30,000,000 for any further purchases. However, it’s important to note that if you wait one day after purchasing one of these, the price will reset back to 5,000,000, so you can save a lot of units if you’re willing to wait. After you’ve purchased your first Emergency Broadcast Receiver from a Scrap Dealer, you can obtain one for free every week from Iteration: Helios, who can be found on board the Space Anomaly, if you choose to “Ask about derelict freighters” when you speak with them.

Once you have an Emergency Broadcast Receiver, you can interact with it in your inventory to activate it. Now all you need to do is enter your Starship and activate the Pulse Engine (or Pulsing Heart for a Living Ship), then wait for the receiver to notify you that the coordinates for a Derelict Freighter have been reached. At this point you can stop the Pulse Engine and dock onto the surface of the Freighter, then enter and follow the completion instructions as you explore it.

Although Cargo Bulkheads are most reliably found on board Derelict Freighters, you can also sometimes acquire them as rewards for defeating pirates who are attacking Freighters, or as rewards from missions given by the Bounty Master at outlaw stations.

Freighter Storage Units¶

In addition to the base inventory storage slots for a Freighter, you can also increase its capacity by constructing up to 9 Freighter Storage Units, each with 20 storage slots available, providing an additional 180 storage slots overall. These are also very cheap to construct, requiring only 50 Magnetised Ferrite and 20 Sodium each. You can place these anywhere in the Freighter as part of the base building process, providing easy access to whatever you want to store in them. You can even customise the name of each storage unit to make browsing and storing items a little more organised.

Where to Find Salvaged Frigate Modules¶

Now that you know how to increase storage slots on a Freighter, we can focus on where to find technology upgrades and how to install them. There are two types of items that you need to install upgrade modules to the Freighter: Salvaged Frigate Modules and Salvaged Fleet Units. The former can be exchanged for specific upgrade modules that can be acquired from the Upgrade Control terminal, which can be found on the bridge of the Freighter. Here you’ll find 7 upgrades, 6 of which are related to Hyperdrive improvements, while the other allows you to access the Freighter inventory from a long distance, similar to the way the Teleport Receiver upgrade works on Starships. Each of these upgrades are shown in the table below.

You’ll need a total of 53 Salvaged Frigate Modules to purchase all of these initial upgrades for a Freighter, or 58 if you include the upgrades for Frigate expeditions, each of which cost 1 Salvaged Frigate Module. One of the easiest ways to find Salvaged Frigate Modules is by destroying Cargo Pods on Freighters and Frigates. You’ll find plenty of Frigates flying around their associated Freighters, and all you need to do is get close enough to inspect the contents of the Cargo Pod. In this way you can check whether it has any modules, and only shoot those which do, thereby reducing the amount of fighting necessary. If things get too hot, you can always land at a nearby space station until you’re no longer being hunted, or travel to a new system to check for Frigates there.

There are other methods to find Salvaged Frigate Modules, but they’re not as reliable as stealing from Cargo Pods, and they can take a great more time. However, if you happen to find a crashed Freighter site on a planet (or if you locate one using distress signal Planetary Charts, purchased from Cartographers on space stations), you may be lucky enough to find a module or two in the wreck. They are still fairly rare from this source, so you may find that you’ve wasted your time hunting them via this method. Another way to get them is by completing Nexus Missions from the Space Anomaly, which can sometimes provide them as rewards. Finally, there’s also a decent chance of acquiring Salvaged Frigate Modules from Frigate expeditions.

Where to Find Salvaged Fleet Units¶

The other type of item required to provide upgrade modules for Freighters are Salvaged Fleet Units. These cannot be purchased from the Upgrade Control terminal, or anywhere else. Instead, you’ll need to find them from Engineering Control terminals on Derelict Freighters, as with Cargo Bulkheads mentioned above. When you interact with an Engineering Control terminal you should always have the option for “Fabricate Technology Module” or “Fabricate Freighter Bulkhead”. The former is what provides Salvaged Fleet Units, which is a broad term for a set of upgrades that you can acquire between C, B, A, and S class tiers. The upgrade that you get will be random, but if you board enough Derelict Freighters it shouldn’t take you too long to acquire all of them. These upgrades are mostly involved with improving the base stats of the Freighter, such as Hyperdrive Range, Warp Efficiency, and Fleet Coordination. However, some are also used for improving the stats of your Frigate fleets during expeditions.

There are 7 different types of upgrade modules that can be acquired from Salvaged Fleet Units, each one offering improvements to different aspects of your Freighter or Frigate performance. Only 2 of these improve stats for your Freighter, while the other 5 improve stats for your Frigate expeditions. The value of the increase will depend on whether it’s a C, B, A, or S tier upgrade module. Each one has been listed in the table below.

How to Change the Appearance of Your Freighter¶

The appearance customization options for Freighters is unfortunately rather limited. At present you can only change the colours of your Freighter, and to a limited degree. Once you’re inside the Freighter, interact with the Upgrade Control terminal located on the bridge and navigate to the Freighter Recolouring menu. Here you’ll find 10 different colours available for purchase: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Turquoise, Blue, Purple, Pink, White, and Black. You can use these to change the Freighter’s primary colour, secondary colour, and accent colour. The effect will vary between ships, as some Freighters have default colouring which can’t be overwritten. On top of that, each colour costs 5,000 Nanites to purchase, so it’s not necessarily a wise investment unless you have a ton of Nanites to spend. In terms of other appearance modifiers, there’s also an option to change the layout of the base building part of the Freighter back to the original.

How to Recruit Starship Squadron Pilots¶

Once you own a Freighter, you’ll have the option to recruit almost any visiting pilot that you see in space stations, at trade outposts, or even those which dock inside the hangar of your Freighter. When you inspect a pilot you’ll see that they have a number of attributes and attribute ratings from Poor, Average, Above Average, Good, Outstanding, Unrivalled, etc. The attributes themselves are usually related to Leadership Potential, Mechanical Aptitude, Dedication, Eyesight, and Confirmed Kills. This will give you an overall indication of their effectiveness in combat, while the Notes attribute at the bottom will tell you something trivial about their personality.

You can recruit up to four Squadron Pilots, each slot costing Nanites to unlock from 800 Nanites for the first, 3,500 for the second, 7,500 for the third, and 10,000 for the fourth. You also have the option to upgrade the class tier of pilots in exchange for Nanites, which can be done at the Manage Fleet terminal on the Freighter bridge. All of your Squadron Pilots will warp to your location whenever you’re engaged in a battle, and you can also summon them to fly in formation beside you. However, they aren’t generally necessary for most fights, so you don’t need to prioritise recruiting them.

NMS Endurance Update: Changes to Freighters / Capital Ship¶

The new 3.94 Endurance update for No Man’s Sky has introduced some major changes to the ways in which Freighters are constructed and used. You can now further expand your Freighter to create an even larger buildable space, and you’ll have access to a number of new construction and technology blueprints, all of which can be purchased for 1 Salvaged Data each from the Upgrade Control terminal on the main command deck of the Freighter. These blueprints are broken down into the following categories, each with a specific purpose or use:

Freighter Construction¶

Freighter Technology¶

Freighter Agricultural Modules¶

Freighter Industrial Modules¶

New Immersive Freighter Features¶

Aside from the above new blueprints for Freighters, there are also a number of quality of life changes which help to make Freighters feel more alive when you’re inside them. The first change you’re likely to see when you visit your Freighter is the new teleporter, located at the centre of the Starship docking bay. This will teleport you directly to the main command deck, giving you quick and easy access to all the most important features of a Freighter. You’ll also notice that the docking bays themselves feel more alive, since they now have NPCs patrolling around them, or standing around looking busy.

The new Freighter Construction modules also add to this sense of immersion on board, since you can now see out into space from the interior of the base building parts of the Freighter, through the glass corridors, windows, and exterior viewing platforms and catwalks which can now be built. This is all the more welcome as certain deep space phenomena have also seen graphical improvements, such as enhanced nebulae and deep space storms. In addition, you will now be able to hire and control organic Frigates, which are essentially regular Frigates but in Living Ship form. See our page on How to Upgrade the Starship and Living Ships to learn more about the differences between regular Starships and Living Ships. The main thing you need to know for now is that the Living Ships can be fed Offal Sacs or other food types, thereby allowing them to evolve and improve their stats.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that each of the new Freighter Construction and Technology elements can be further customized once you’ve built them. This allows you to bring a unique feel to each type of room and living / working space on board the Freighter. At present the main way to modify the appearance of a specific room or space is by changing the colours associated with it, but you can also move specific parts within some of the rooms, so be sure to experiment with whatever you build.

New General Improvements and Technology¶

In terms of other new features introduced for Freighters, you will find that the exteriors have been visually upgraded, with enhanced textures, improved colours, and high-detail surface decoration. These visual improvements can now be appreciated not just when you’re outside of the Freighter, but also whenever you warp to new systems from it, since there’s now a third-person perspective on the Freighter whenever this happens. You will also notice that any new Freighters you encounter will already have something of a unique base structure already built inside, rather than the default empty space which all Freighters used to have before being purchased and built on. Finally, the capital ship’s exhaust trail can now be customized with a range of engine colour modifications.

One of the most useful new construction blueprints for Freighters is the Scanner Room. This room comes with a pre-built Planetary Probe which allows you to scan for all the nearby planets in a star system. In this way you can quickly learn about the type of atmosphere on a planet, the weather, flora and fauna, sentinel threat level, primary resources and other useful information, such as whether it has already been discovered by another player, of if it hasn’t yet been visited. This provides a much more efficient way to scout a new star system for specific planet types and resources, without requiring you to land on the planet first.

Another new useful piece of Freighter technology comes in the form of the Stellar Extractor. This allows you to automatically harvest resources from deep space, such as Nitrogen, Radon, Sulphurine, and other material types based on the system star classification. In addition to this new tech, existing technology such as the Teleporter, Fleet Command, and Appearance Modifier modules have been integrated into sleek, extendable glass-floored rooms. Another useful new feature allows you to instantly teleport to any Frigates in your fleet from the Manage Fleet terminal on the main command deck. This allows you to quickly reach it for repairs, rather than having to fly out to it on your Starship.

In addition to all of the above, Freighters now benefit from a dedicated Cargo Hold Inventory, allowing the storage of even more items. Like other Freighter inventories, this hold can be upgraded with Expandable Bulkheads. As one final note of general improvement: you can now teleport directly to your Freighter from any other Base Teleport Module, so long as you have at least one of these installed on your Freighter already.