No Man's Sky: 13 Things You Probably Didn't Know You Could Do

The long-awaited space exploration game No Man's Sky launched on PS4 this week, and we've been immersed in its immense universe for a few days now. There are a lot of things to do in the game, including mining, trading, upgrading your ship, and exploring the stars. But there are several actions you can do that'll make your exploration easier or more lucrative, and we've compiled a bunch of them here.

Check out some things you might not have known you can do in No Man's Sky.

It was an addition in No Man's Sky's day-one patch, but feeding animals is more than just a fun pastime. It can also net you some very lucrative resources, such as Omegon or Calium, two exotic elements in the game. An animal that likes you might also follow you around or lead you to big deposits of more common resources. Or it might just poop out a rare mineral.

It's the perpetual problem facing an explorer of one of No Man's Sky's immense planets: how do you get more quickly to that point of interest or that mineral deposit way in the distance? There is a sprint button, but it's still not that fast.

Thankfully, there's a way to swiftly cover ground: you can horizontally jetpack. If you sprint, then hit the melee button and then immediately hit the jetpack button, you'll jet very close to the ground, allowing you to move way faster than otherwise possible. Be careful, though: it's easy to incur fall damage if you aren't paying attention to how much jetpack fuel you're using.

You'll often find yourself wanting to travel to the other side of a planet you're on to get to another location of interest. Clearly, hiking it is not an option unless you have no fuel at all. But perhaps you've noticed that taking off and flying around the planet is still pretty slow. Well, you've got air resistance to blame for that.

Zipping around a planet can be very fast if you just boost out of the atmosphere. Going into the vacuum of space allows you to fly a lot quicker, and it'll let you even use your pulse drive to get around the planet. This means that a five-minute flight can be cut down to no more than twenty seconds. Just remember to go all the way out of the atmosphere.

This is another feature that was added in the day-one patch: You can brake-drift in your spaceship to quickly flip around. This is incredibly helpful in hectic scenarios like battles with space pirates, so having a good handle on how to navigate nimbly is important to surviving outer space.

To perform a brake drift, simply slam on the brake button and turn as fast as possible. This will allow you turn quicker than otherwise would be possible.

The Atlas Stone is one of the more mysterious items in the game, and you receive it after your first encounter with The Atlas. It's also incredibly valuable in the game, and if you run across a merchant looking to buy it for a premium, then it's your lucky day.

Normally, the item goes for around 70,000 units, but we've seen vendors valuing it at 130,000. Since values for items depend on the star system you're in, hold onto your Atlas Stone until you find a vendor that values it at around 100% above its average galactic price.

If you find yourself stranded at a space station low on funds and fuel, you can still collect resources to refuel your Pulse Drive without having to make the long trek down to a planet. Outer space is dense with asteroids, and shooting these with your ship will net you a bunch of Thamium9 that you can use for your pulse drive. Flying around mining these rocks, you might also come across larger copper asteroids or spiky gold crystals, which will get you some resources you can sell for a fair number of units.

There's a pretty easy way to make some quick cash at space stations: buy up all of the items from the marketplace in the station, then sell them to the visitors who land inside the hangar. Since prices vary from vendor to vendor, wait until you've got a good deal and then sell them. It might take some patience, but you don't have to go anywhere and it's a pretty easy way to net some units.

There's a lot of activity in orbit around planets, and you'll often see ships flying out of space stations and down to planets. There are faint lines tracing these routes that the ships fly, and you can actually follow these to the places where the ships eventually land. These are trade routes, and following them (which is pretty difficult) can sometimes lead you to valuable stockpiles of resources and trade outposts.

Massive, hulking cargo ships inevitably appear when you warp into a new system. They're always there, lurking in the background. They're armed to the teeth with turrets, too. But they hold quite a bit of loot: if you blow up their cargo holds, you can acquire a bunch of resources at once.

Same is true of certain planetary bases. Those bases that you can't enter--they look bulbous--can be blown up to collect the minerals they contain within. This is a dangerous but quick way to gain a bunch of resources.

It'll happen eventually. You'll die, and you'll respawn in a base without your inventory. You might panic at first, thinking that your treasured Atlas Stone and Omegon stockpiles were gone. But fear not, for No Man's Sky is forgiving: you can return to the spot of your demise, both on land and in space, and recover your inventory. Just make sure you haven't picked up anything on the way, because you'll lose some of your old inventory if it's too full.

It can be frustrating to find yourself in a deep crater or pit without any visible means of exit. Luckily, there's a mechanic to assist with escaping even the steepest pits: you can climb up cliffs using your jetpack, and it won't use the jetpack's fuel. Just walk up really close to a wall and you'll see a prompt telling you to hold down the jetpack button, which will then hop you up to the top of the cliff.

While playing the game, you'll acquire a lot of upgrade blueprints. It's important to use these, as well, so that your exosuit, spaceship, and multitool are all as powerful and efficient as can be. There are a few things you can do to maximize the strength of these upgrades: first, don't shy away from using both a +1 and a +2 upgrade, because those numbers stack (i.e., you'd have a +3 upgrade). Second, make sure you place the upgrade right next to the feature it's modifying. You'll see a red circle highlight the upgrade and item, meaning that it's operating at full capacity.

Overheating your multitool is frustrating. But there's a way to very quickly cool it down so that you can avoid overheating it while also returning to mining as soon as possible. To reset the heat meter while shooting the mining beam, simply let go of the fire button, wait for the multitool to stop firing the beam, and immediately start firing again. You don't have to wait for the meter to decrease all the way; all that is needed is for the gun to stop firing. Then you can pick up right where you left off.