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No Man’s Sky: From Utopia to New Allag – Ship Fixing

Posted on April 10, 2023 by Aywren

Previously, No Man’s Sky dropped a new update that came with an expedition - Utopia. The whole idea was to take a broken-down system and for the community to work to build it back up again. It had some interesting restrictions with a lot of base building challenges.

While you did get a nice ship at the end of the expedition, there was a particular C class that I found on the final planet that caught my eye. The reason for this was due to the coloration – the red and blue patterns reminded me a lot of Allagan technology from Final Fantasy XIV.

In fact, Syn and I had been joking around about making an Allagan-themed system and structures based off of things like the crystal tower. So, when I found this little explorer, it was a sign – especially when I learned that you can’t recolor ships in game. The way you find them is what you get when it comes to how a ship looks. The only way I was getting an S class of this ship type and coloration was to upgrade it myself!

Learning to Upgrade a Ship

Though I’ve played NMS well over 200 hours, and I’ve played on and off since the game’s launch, there’s always something new for me to learn. Expeditions have actually taught me quite a bit whenever we do them – I suppose I’m still very much a noob.

Having found this C class ship, I then had to learn how to upgrade it – probably common knowledge to most, but not for me. Since this save file was based off an Expedition, I had a bit of a boost in terms of materials and upgrades.

For example, since the ship was broken when I found it, I had to fix most of the slots to be able to use them.

The expedition thankfully provided a bunch of repair materials that made it much easier to do this.

The Expedition also gave a boost in the foundational number of nanites I had to put towards the upgrades. I learned after doing some research that you take a ship to any space station, and use the starship outfitting station to upgrade it. Here’s a good video on the topic, though it’s focused on upgrading the new Sentinel ships that came with the most recent content patch.

Once I learned how to upgrade, I then had to figure out how to get the nanites that I needed to make the upgrades – this was not a cheap thing to do! Many guides out there talk about buying and breaking down ships in a wealthy system as a way to get nanites (you sell the modules you get when you break a ship down for nanites – but it’s all RNG).

However, I was having more fun roaming around the planet and digging up buried caches. You could often get modules that you can sell for nanites from those. It helped that I’d discovered a fantastic system with a paradise planet upon which we were building our home base.

Paradise World of Bubbles

I’d seen bubble worlds in NMS before, and always really loved the feel of them. I knew that I wanted to find a special paradise world as a foundation of the new space empire we were building. We researched how to search for systems that have a higher possibility for paradise worlds, and I came across this one – it actually has two paradise planets!

I also learned from the Utopia Expedition that I very much like the Nomad exocraft for planet exploration. It’s a sturdy little vehicle that can bust through just about anything, run up walls, skim water, and fly off cliffs with no worries. It makes planet exploration fun and fast, so it became my new best friend during the Expedition and beyond.

This was what I was using to hunt down the buried caches in order to make nanites to upgrade the C class ship. But then, I discovered something that changed the entire game – again, something known by many other players, but new to me.

Curious deposits. Right on our homeworld!

This resource has been long known as a way top farm quick nanites. You mine them for Runaway Mould, which you then process in a refiner to directly convert into nanite clusters. If you warp away from the spot with the deposits and come back to it, the deposits will respawn, so you can just keep doing this until you make the nanite bank that you need.

It does take time to refine the mould, but it’s worth it. I immediately built several little bases around the deposits I found and got to refining. This was how I financed my final upgrade from A class to S class!

It was a lot of fun to take a broken C class and evolve it into an S class. I could still upgrade the stats further based on the modules within it, but it’s more or less what I want from that ship. It has great hauling potential with lots of slots, so I’m pretty pleased with it. It’ll never be a top notch fighter, but as an explorer type ship, that’s not really what it was meant to be.

With that project complete, it was time to turn my thoughts to working on building a base. But this post has gotten long enough already, so that will be a story for another time!

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