How to Fix Your Starting Ship in 'No Man's Sky'

The sci-fi exploration of a (console) generation is upon us. No Man’s Sky from Hello Games features a vast procedurally generated universe of 18 quintillion planets, all yours for the discovering. But to travel, you need a ship, and when you boot up the game for the first time you’re graciously given one. But it needs work, and you’ll have to mine resources in order to repair it. Here’s a quick guide to getting you flying high as quickly as possible.

What your ship needs

As you’ll quickly discover, No Man’s Sky is about constantly mining the environment for resources. You’re given a mining beam, so collecting resources is simple: Just shoot at rocks, plants, and other formations to collect minerals. But your ship needs a few specific ones:

Repair Launch Thrusters: Carrite sheets

Repair Pulse Engine: Heridium, carrite sheets, and zinc

Refuel Launch Thrusters: Plutonium

All these materials are easily obtainable (or in the case of carrite sheets, able to be crafted) from around your environment no matter what planet you land on. Just do some exploring! Here’s how and where to find everything you’re looking for:

Carrite sheets

To obtain carrite sheets, you have to craft them. From the Inventories, select an empty slot to Craft Product. You’ll see carrite sheets as a craftable item, but to make them you need to collect iron, which are common yellow-colored oxide elements.

Iron is scattered abundantly throughout the environment. Just look for rock formations or clusters. When you’ve found enough iron, head back to the Inventories screen and craft carrite sheets in the Starship tab. Make sure you’re near your starship; if not, you can carry items in your exosuit, but inventory space is a limited resource of its own.

Zinc

Slightly less common than iron, zinc is another yellow oxide element used for other purposes. You need 20 zinc in order to repair your ship’s pulse engine. To get zinc, look for yellow vegetation and flora, which you don’t need to shoot your mineral laser for. Just walk up to them and hold the square button for several moments to collect zinc.

You can also dismantle tech for zinc or even buy zinc from the marketplace, but at this early in the game you can’t do either of those yet. So, rummaging around it is.

Heridium

A common element in the blue-colored Silicate family, heridium can be obtained from mining planetary structures — like big ass rock pillars, though they can also be found alongside edges of cliffs. After you perform a local scan with your visor (which also needs to be repaired, costing 25 iron), heridium will be outlined by holographic cubes, like a TRON-esque Qbert* level. If you hadn’t yet fixed your visor, just look for the big rocks. You can’t miss ‘em.

Plutonium

At last, after fixing your Launch Thrusters, you’ll have to refuel. Plutonium are red-colored isotopes in the shape of extremely sharp red crystals protruding from the ground. They’re usually among flora or caves and are easy to spot. Shoot ‘em to get ‘em.

After collecting the necessary amount of elements, your ship should be repaired and good to go. Of course, you’ll also have to make sure your exosuit, life support, and mining lasers are also charged up. Oh, and, don’t fly too fast, space cowboy: You’re just getting started.