No Man's Sky: How to Survive Day One and Repair Your Starter Ship

To survive your first day in No Man's Sky and reach orbit, you must stabilize your suit systems, repair your Multi-Tool Scanner, reach your crashed starship, and restore both the Pulse Engine and Launch Thruster.

Your Hazard Protection begins draining the moment you spawn on a hostile planet. If that gauge empties, your Core Health shields take direct damage. Prioritize your immediate survival before attempting any long-distance travel.

Stabilizing Hazard Protection and Life Support

Manage your two primary suit gauges continuously while exploring:

• Hazard Protection: Recharged using Sodium (Na), harvested from glowing yellow plants. If you run out of Sodium, enter a natural cave or hollow rock formation. Subterranean spaces shield you from the atmosphere and regenerate your hazard gauge without consuming resources.
• Life Support: Depletes as you move, sprint, and use your jetpack. Replenish it with Oxygen (O2), which comes from glowing red plants and hazardous flora.
• Mining Beam Fuel: Powered by Carbon (C), harvested from trees, bushes, and surface foliage.

Sitting inside your crashed starship's cockpit completely shields you from atmospheric hazards and refills your Hazard Protection gauge for free.

Repairing the Multi-Tool Scanner

Your starting Multi-Tool has a broken Scanner module, preventing you from pinging nearby resource deposits.

Use your Mining Beam on small surface rocks to gather Ferrite Dust. Open your inventory, select the broken Scanner module, and repair it using the collected Ferrite Dust.

Once repaired, activating the Scanner sends out a radar pulse that marks nearby elements on your heads-up display.

Navigating to the Crashed Starship

Once the Scanner is active, your HUD will display a white starship icon indicating the crash site. Head toward this marker while managing your travel risks:

• Conserve Life Support: Avoid constant sprinting and boost jumping, which accelerate Oxygen consumption. Use short jetpack bursts only to soften falls.
• Take Shelter During Storms: Planetary weather events increase hazard drain rates by two to three times. Retreat into caves or deep crevices until the storm clears.
• Avoid Sentinel Attention: Floating Sentinel drones monitor resource gathering. Stop mining if a drone enters your immediate area to avoid triggering an attack.

Repairing the Pulse Engine

Your starship requires two functional flight systems to launch: the Pulse Engine and the Launch Thruster.

The Pulse Engine requires one Metal Plating and one Hermetic Seal:

1. Craft Metal Plating: Open your Exosuit inventory and craft one Metal Plating using 50 Ferrite Dust mined from rocks.
2. Locate the Hermetic Seal: Interact with the Distress Beacon sphere next to your starship to extract planetary coordinates.
3. Retrieve the Seal: Follow the plotted waypoint across the surface to an abandoned shelter. Enter the building and access the wall-mounted Holo-Archive to obtain the Hermetic Seal.
4. Install the Parts: Return to your ship, open the starship inventory, and install both the Metal Plating and Hermetic Seal into the broken Pulse Engine.

Repairing and Fueling the Launch Thruster

The Launch Thruster requires 50 Pure Ferrite and one Di-hydrogen Jelly. Because raw Ferrite Dust cannot be slotted directly into the thruster, you must refine it first.

1. Craft a Portable Refiner: Open your build menu and construct a Portable Refiner using one Metal Plating (50 Ferrite Dust) and 30 Oxygen.
2. Refine Pure Ferrite: Place Carbon into the refiner's fuel slot and Ferrite Dust into the input hopper. Process 50 units of Pure Ferrite, transfer the output to your inventory, and pick up the refiner.
3. Craft Di-hydrogen Jelly: Mine blue crystal clusters to collect 40 Di-hydrogen, then craft one Di-hydrogen Jelly in your inventory.
4. Repair the Thruster: Install the 50 Pure Ferrite and the Di-hydrogen Jelly into the broken Launch Thruster slot.
5. Craft Starship Launch Fuel: Combine 40 Di-hydrogen with one Metal Plating (50 Ferrite Dust) to make Starship Launch Fuel, then load it into the thruster to charge it to at least 25%.

Enter the cockpit once both the Pulse Engine and Launch Thruster are fully repaired and fueled. Initiate the launch sequence to break planetary orbit and enter space.