No Man’s Sky: Where To Find Technology & Adjacency Bonuses Explained

Your starship, your multi-tool and your exosuit are the three pillars of your journey into No Man's Sky's galaxy. In a neat cycle (aka, a gameplay loop), they are also the principal beneficiaries of all your toil, as there’s really no purpose to your resource gathering and money making other than to improve your ship, tool and suit.

If you’d like to increase your inventory space, or find a bigger multi-tool, we can help you out with that. But what to do with all those slots? Apart from filling them up with resources, you’ll also want to improve your equipment’s effectiveness. In this guide we’re going to discuss the best places to find technology upgrades for your ship, tool and suit, and how to place them to optimise your gear.

When technology mentions Greek letters, these denote the strength of the relevant tech. In ascending order of power, the tiers go: Sigma - Tau - Theta - Omega. Not all techs have an Omega rank, and some don’t use this tiered system at all.

No Man’s Sky: where to find starship technology

There are four categories of ship technology: health, hyperdrive, scanning and weapons. Health tech improves your deflector shields; hyperdrive tech improves the fuel efficiency and range of your hyperdrive (and includes other engine types such as launch thrusters and pulse engines); weapons tech improves the damage and cooldown of your ship’s cannons and phasers; and scanning tech presumably increases the range and effectiveness of your ship’s system scanners, but despite many hours of play, we’ve yet to find a single scanning tech blueprint, nor heard reports of one. Perhaps scanning tech for ships will be added later.

General technology blueprints are awarded from various sources, including NPC interactions, plundering certain building types, and loot crates. If you’re after starship technology specifically, though, the best source is damaged machinery. These are mechanical pods, leaking a plume of dark smoke, which are marked on your HUD with blue cog icons. They can be found scattered across the surface of a planet, but also appear fairly often at certain points of interest, particularly abandoned starships and abandoned buildings.

No Man’s Sky: where to find multi-tool technology

The four categories of multi-tool technology are: scanning, lasers, projectile and grenades. Scanning tech improves the range of your multi-tool’s planetary scans (and includes other surveillance techs such as the analysis visor); laser tech improves the damage of your mining beam against terrain and enemies, and reduces its cooldown; projectile tech improves your boltcaster similarly; and what grenade tech does is a dark and terrifying secret. Both grenade and boltcaster tech can also alter the behaviour of those weapons, changing the boltcaster to a shotgun or causing grenades to bounce, for example.

These gold tech boxes are the best source of companion units for your multi-tool

If you’re looking for multi-tool tech, the best sources are the gold wall-mounted terminals inside certain buildings. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a consistent rule determining which buildings will house them; we’ve seen them inside trading posts, abandoned buildings, those otherwise pointless double pods and many others.

As with ship tech, you’ll get some tool tech from other sources, but these terminals offer it specifically. It’s annoying they aren’t more dependable, but they are quite common, so multi-tool tech is likely to accumulate over your journey rather than be something you actively pursue.

No Man’s Sky: where to find exosuit technology

The exosuit’s four tech categories are health, protection, stamina and utilities. Health tech simply improves your hit points, while different protection technologies can improve your resistance to cold, heat, radiation and toxins. Stamina tech extends the time you can sprint and survive underwater, and utilities tech improves your jetpack and life support duration.

Abandoned buildings seem to be the most consistent source of suit tech

Abandoned buildings have a good chance of granting exosuit tech, but they’re less common than tool tech boxes, and can’t be revealed by a signal scanner. They can sometimes be found by scanning a planet from your starship.

Thus, specific sources for exosuit technology are slightly more consistent than for multi-tool tech, but are perhaps more rare. Other sources include those which drop tech in general, which is to say operations centres, manufacturing facilities, alien and monolith interactions and various other loot boxes.

No Man’s Sky: companion unit adjacency bonuses

Companion units which share one of the four categories outlined above, on starships, multi-tools and your exosuit, will gain performance bonuses when placed next to one another. You’ll know when the adjacency bonus has taken effect because the complementary units will each be outlined by a thick border of the same colour.

Note the green borders around all the mining beam upgrades. Minerals tremble before us.

We don’t have precise figures, but it appears that adjacency bonuses are substantial. Redditors report, and we can confirm, that with several mining upgrades connected on a multi-tool they could instantly mine almost anything, whereas “without synergy [they] lost a lot of efficiency”. When one considers how long it can take to mine the rarer elements, you’ll appreciate every extra second of mining performance, especially on an extreme planet where you have to recharge your environmental protection every thirty seconds.

In theory, this system offers a free and easy way to strengthen your essential equipment (while rewarding those of us who like to keep things sensibly organised). What’s annoying is that new multi-tools and ships are rarely arranged with these adjacency bonuses in mind, and companion units can’t be moved. So if you want to optimise your gear, you’ll have to scrap and replace certain companion units until you have all related technologies in nice, neat groups.

This needn’t be an issue if you’ve been maintaining a decent blueprint collection, since many low-tier units are easy to craft. However, do look out for rarer or more powerful units for which you either lack the blueprint or which are annoyingly expensive to recreate. Preserve these, and arrange your refit around them. You can fashion a new scanner from sticks and bubble gum, but a warp reactor theta would be a real pain to replace.

Like this, but didn't learn what you're after? Try our guides to finding creatures, making money, warp cells and how to find the Atlas Pass. Or hit up our No Man's Sky guide hub for everything.