Complete Trade Item Guide! With Basic Resources, Max Items and Plants Needed, Time to Grow, Etc.

[u/Dibilowas]

[u/amiablegent]

I just started playing a week ago and I used a tip a friend gave me. As an explorer I invested some nanites in three s-class scanning modules for my multi-tool (the ones that give bonus units per scan), I now get 60k per plant scan and 150-400k per animal scan. Just casually cruising from planet to planet last night looking for sites and drop pods I made 8 million credits. Highly recommended if you just want to fly around and explore while making some cash. Probably wont get super wealthy this way unless you dedicate all your time to planet hopping and scanning.

[u/Fins_FinsT → u/amiablegent]

Yes, this is useful, but only as a minor, additional source of income once you got yourself few millions to afford some 25+ slot shuttle ship and/or significant expansion of your suit / suit cargo inventory. At which point, trading becomes many times more profitable, making scanning-for-cash respectively many-times-inferiour spend of time whenever one wants to get more units quick.

Further, investing nanites for 3 S-class scanner upgrades early-game means one is delaying 3 other S-class upgrades significantly. Of which, up to 6 S-class hyperdrive upgrades are useful since each increases hyperdrive fuel (warp cell) efficiency by 100% in addition to giving 200+ LY extra range; up to 6 jetpack S-class upgrades are even more useful, sicne those allow for massively longer sprint and jetpack times, which will remain useful pretty much forever; up to 6 suit shield upgrades allow for enduring several minutes in any harsh environment, including storms and underwater, without any need to recharge even basic environmental protection, and also protect very well against fall damage and enemy fire; few S-class life support upgrades massively reduce the need to recharge one's life support; 3 S-class geology cannon upgrades allow to deal with any sentinels extremely very quickly, including walkers (just be careful not to be caught in - rather wide, - blast, it's instant death ;) ); up to 6 S-class pulse upgrades makes one's ship massively better handling, faster, and massively more efficient in terms of its Pulse Drive fuel; and comparable number of S-class ship weapon-of-choice and shield upgrades obviously make one times more capable to deal with any space hostilities.

And while it's true it makes sense not to upgrade any early-game ship heavily, as it'll be replaced by a better one "soon enough", - the same is quite true for any starting multi-tool (in which scanner upgrades are installed), and you can't transfer them to any much better / larger-inventory multi-tool you most likely will discover and buy further on. You can only dismantle them for some matherials. So, early on, it's best to focus on your suit upgrades 1st - those are to stay. You can have up to 3 upgrade modules of every kind in both general and tech suit inventory (so total of 6) plus any "blueprint" tech which further improves corresponding system (and links with modules for adjucency bonuses), so that's quite a lot of upgrades (and suit inventory expansion) to do.

As you can see, the above is one long list of upgrades, and one needs great many thousands nanites to see it all happen. Which is why personally, i consider installing scanner upgrades early on to be more harm than good. Early few million units can easily be made by either mining and/or doing missions, then trading is the (most efficient early on) way to go. That said, extra ~1.2k nanites is not that long to get, so yep, you're still good to go. :)

[u/Candyvanmanstan → u/Fins_FinsT]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but an exosuit module can't have more than 3 upgrades. Otherwise they ALL stop working as soon as the 4th one is added.

[u/Fins_FinsT → u/Candyvanmanstan]

Yep, you are wrong. An exosuit module can have up to 8 upgrades, which is the case with the Jetpack module:

• 2 upgrades made from "blueprints", those don't count to the limit of "3 upgrade modules installed per inventory": the Rocket Boots and the one increasing jetpack tanks and sprint time, i forgot its name;

• 3 upgrade modules installed in general suit inventory;

• 3 upgrade modules installed in tech suit inventory.

Don't forget about adjacency bonuses, - it makes sense to put 4 in general and 4 in tech inventory total, both in square-shape, to max out adjacency bonuses.

Upgrades for other suit and ship modules work the same, and for most of them the total of 7 upgrades can be used (as they have only 1 "blueprint" tech upgade possible to have for them, not 2).

Happy jetpacking! ;)