So you want to survive better or perhaps are tired of dealing with the game's shitty inventory system.

NO PROBLEM!

I'm here to help you get your feet even further off the ground even if the game crashes to keep you there. This is by no means a comprehensive guide -- it's only a friendly collection of bits and bobs that I've learned while playing the game. If you have anything to add or correct, please do! No Man's Sky is a big game and my method is definitely not the only method that works out there.

But be warned, there are probably a lot of spoilers down below since these are tips that will get you moving faster towards being a more effective explorer. If you're the kind of player that likes to find things on their own, DON'T READ ANY FURTHER.

I mean it.

You're still reading aren't you?

Don't say I didn't warn you...

Planet Basics or What to Do On a New Planet That's Trying To Kill Me
Not everyone starts in the same idyllic conditions that other players might, but there are a few tips that are uniform across any planet depending on what your focus might be.

* Those Damn Sentinels - Everyone seems to hate these little guys but I never had a lot of problems with them for most of the game. They're annoying, get in your face when you reduce a flower into its component elements, and generally like to police whatever planet they're on. But they're also amazingly dumb and this can work to your advantage.

The most common kind are the flying sentinels that routinely wander around and get upset at any holes you leave in the scenery. Blasting a few of these eventually raises the alert level up until they start sending bigger versions after you. Early in the game, these can really wreck your day unless you run away by jumping into your ship. But you also don't have to live like prey, either.

* Sentinels have short memories - If a sentinel starts scanning you, just let it and sit there. "Yes Officer Sentinel, I understand. I won't do this again *snicker*". It will go away and you can go back to destroying the planet's ecosystem.

* Breaking and entering made easy - I got into trouble early in with sentinels when I found a building with a locked door and tried blowing it open. Not a good idea. But you can still get in there if you're patient enough.

Instead of unloading a series of 'nades into the door (like I did), time a few seconds between shots (or to play it super safe if super slow, fire a 'nade, wait until you automatically lower your gun, and fire another, rinse and repeat). Having sentinels go aggro on you will be a thing of the past -- unless you run across a planet where they get mad at you anyway, that is.

* Signal Beacons are Awesome - Signal beacons look like triangularish pods with an orange light beaming out from their center. When you try to use one, it will tell you that you need a bypass chip. Bypass chips are cheap and easy to make and you want to use them a lot (they consume themselves after every use). Why? Because signal beacons are super awesome. This is what they do:

- They can locate alien relics for you, important if you want to learn more about alien races (plaques, relics, and ruins) or engage in dialogue challenges in the hopes of getting a special upgrade you might be able to use later (alien monoliths). You can keep feeding a signal beacon bypass chips to activate multiple sites so you don't have to keep returning to it to find another one, though you might run into a situation where the area gets saturated with all of the ones you've found. If that happens, just roam around the planet surface some more in your ship and find another signal beacon. Or leave the planet and come back.

- They can find colony buildings for you - Colony buildings are special buildings that have closed, steel doors that you need to blow up using your multi-tool's grenade function. Depending on how powerful it is, it may take several shots or just one (and depending on how impatient you are, you might get sentinels on your ass about breaking and entering). The buildings are important because once you meet and pass the challenge inside (a dialogue choice), you can get an upgrade or a recipe for making things. I didn't really care for these too much and thought they were a waste of time because why make things when you could just as easily find a planet covered in rich stuff and mine that instead?

- They can home in on transmissions - The beacons can find buildings that specialize in homing in on transmissions (like an observatory or a transmission station). Or they can help locate a crashed ship that you might want to try and rebuild if it's better than yours.

- Find shelters where alien buddies are or drop pods - The last option locates buildings where aliens might be. That's great because the aliens it locates are usually the kind to have a multi-tool upgrade locker in the room they're in along with a shop interface. But even more useful is that the beacons can also randomly locate drop pods which have inventory upgrades. Each pod allows you to add an additional slot to your inventory for a total maximum (at least for me) of 48 slots as long as you have the units to spend. And they do get expensive after awhile.

* Caverns are super awesome - Plutonium is one of the biggest resources you will ever need in the game and one of the safest areas to mine this stuff is underground in caverns away from sentinels. Sentinels won't bother you down there unless there's a hole in the roof or you're near an entryway, but most of the time, it's a farmer's paradise down there. Whenever I need to top off on plutonium, I always try and find a spot to land at near what looks like a cave mouth and head in.

* There are giant metal boulders and towers of wealth everywhere - Metals like gold, aluminum, copper, and nickel can sometimes be found on planets as giant soaring columns or huge blobby boulders. This will vary planet to planet, so finding an ideal world with a good selection of minerals to mine might take a few tries. The crystal variants of some of these minerals, though, have higher yields than mining them on the surface giving you another reason to head down into the caverns (especially if your planetary scan shows "treasure chest" icons next to red lightning bolt ones in a cluster).

The Multi-Tool
Absolutely your first and best friend in the game. It's your paladin, your resource gatherer, and your quick exit expert all rolled into one. At first it kind of sucks because it doesn't have a lot of upgrades, but believe me, it's totally worth investing into early and quickly. So a few tips:

* Upgraded guns are found with special aliens - Signal beacons are the best at finding these guys on any planet you are on. Just keep feeding them bypass chips until you get a signal pointing to an alien and fly right over. They'll have a landing pad and everything for you. The weapons locker is on a wall in the room, either immediately to your left or somewhat behind them. It looks like a longbox attached to the wall and inside you'll find a weapon that's roughly equivalent to yours and sometimes with a few extras to make it a bit more appetizing (like more mod slots).

Now a few words about these. I found that the only reason I really upgraded mine was either for a gun that focused more on increasing my mining efficiency or had more slots. Depending on how you handle yourself on a planet, you may never get into a fight with a sentinel meaning that the combat features with the bolt attachment are pretty wasteful. At least for me they were. Remember, we're focusing on mining.

The following upgrades were after I was satisfied with my mining upgrades:
Upgrading your grenade function is also a good thing, if only to blow down those steel doors that are locked on some buildings faster. At this point in the game, I've upgraded my gun to blow through those doors in one or two shots and wondered why I put myself through torture before with anything less.

The bolt add-on is the offensive function for your gun although your mining laser can be used, too. But I liked upgrading the bolt function because it was clearly made to offend as many lifeforms as possible. Once you slap on multiple upgrades to this, sentinels won't be the hunters...you will. Need a fast exist from a cavern even though you know the way out? Thank goodness you upgraded those grenades. Now you can just tunnel your way to freedom in your own version of the Great Escape.

IMPORTANT THING ABOUT UPGRADING SHIPS AND MULTI-TOOLS
Remember spending all of that time adding upgrades to your ship and multi-tool, naming both after your favorite pets, and then feeling the adrenaline rush of finding something even better? I do. Then I saw that I couldn't move upgrades from my old stuff to the new thing which was dumb as all hell.

Yes, you can't. I've tried. So if you slapped that Omega impact mod along with a few more +3 and +4 items on that multi-tool or added new hyper reactors to your ship, NONE of that is making it over.

You get to upgrade all of that over again meaning that it's back to hunting for any exotic elements that you scraped around for the first time around. So my advice is this -- go as big as possible with your ship or with your multi-tool. Hold off (or try to be conservative) on upgrading either until you can get something reasonably big. I waited a long time to find the multi-tool that had max slots on it so that I could start upgrading it with the mods I wanted.

Upgrades for Everyone
Okay, so what I focused on was mining in the early game. A lot of mining. This was the fastest way to getting units for me at the time which fed into buying more inventory slots which allowed me to stack more minerals etc.. You see what I'm driving at. At one point, I was making a few million per hour. During the process of hunting minerals, I also visited buildings, aliens, and a bunch of alien monuments all of which kept feeding me upgrades (and allowed me to find a great multi-tool with a strong mining aspect).

I traveled around until I found a planet with giant boulders and columns made up of a rare mineral called Emeril. It goes for a high price on the market (higher than gold) and you can stack 250 units of this per slot in your suit inventory (your ship can hold up to 500 per slot so it's also a good idea to cram as much of whatever you're mining in there, too). It's also a "neutral" mineral meaning that sentinels won't bother you if you start strip mining the surface for this stuff. That is, unless they're already aggressive (it's possible to find planets were the sentinels are already aggro).

At that point, start filling your pockets with as much ore as you can carry, visit either the space station or an alien with a shop interface on the surface (or a trade station, though they're a bit hard to track down) and dump it all and repeat. Don't forget to occasionally mine a bit of plutonium to keep your gun fed and it's off to the grind. With this method, I was able to buy a ship with a much bigger inventory space to keep even more minerals, and the money just kept rolling in. That's it, really.

Other smaller notes...
- I didn't upgrade my suit too much, like with that +3 jet pack enhancement I found long ago. Add-ons = less space to hold money-making minerals

- Held onto a crappy combat multi-tool with awesome mining abilities for a really, really, really long time. It was starting to grow whiskers (not really).

YOU CAN DO (MOST) OF THIS ON ONLY ONE PLANET
The crazy thing is that by the time I left the one planet I mined to death (and then refreshed by leaving the game and coming back), I had most of the upgrades that the game seems to be able to give me. That goes for my ship, my multi-tool, and my suit. Using the signal beacon to find stuff made collecting upgrades easy while having tons of minerals nearby (and using the beacon again to find an alien shelter) fed into the loop of money I was making to buy more slots enabling me to get a better ship. The only things missing from all of the blueprints I found were the more exotic things I needed to build those -- that would come later as I explored other planets after leaving that one.

You also can't learn the histories of all of the races or their vocabulary by staying on one planet, either, since different planets are usually under the jurisdiction(?) of one of the other races. But as far as upgrades and cash were concerned, I did most of the legwork on one world that rolled lucky for me (though I did buy a new ship on another planet where I knew it would spawn having seen it earlier and wishing that I could buy it then).

As a parting word from one explorer to another, I hope this helps if you're really stuck or are just curious to know how others are approaching the game.

And if you see a planet called R'lyeh out there, remember - Cthulhu fhtagn.