How it works

How do you get the best item in No Man's Sky? Every star system on this site lists up to six multitools and two ships, the best that system holds. A single system holds thousands of places that hand you a tool, so that short list is the end of a long trail.

This page walks that trail, from a galaxy of trillions of stars down to a list you can read while your starship cools down. Every number here is an average over voxels of Euclid, with a smaller look at three other galaxies, rounded to something a person can remember.

What you can find here

This site is an item guide for No Man's Sky. It lists three things, each with the glyphs and the spot where you go to pick it up.

• Multitools from shops, monoliths, harmonic camps, sentinel pillars, space stations, and Autophage terminals.
• Crashed ships you can claim where they lie.
• Creatures you can adopt, each with its grades.

The guides say where each kind of item comes from, from the galaxy down to the planet. The Sentinel Interceptors page shows every Interceptor the game can build, part by part. The capital freighters page shows the shapes of capital freighters. Already holding one? How lucky am I? scores it from 0 to 100.

Everything below turns on supercharged slots. A class S multitool or ship has four. A module in one of them is worth far more than the same module next door, and modules of one kind boost each other when they sit side by side. Put both effects together and the best build is a block of four adjacent supercharged slots, all one kind of technology. Scattered slots cannot do that, so where the four slots lie matters more than the class, the name, or the colour.

The size of the haystack

A galaxy is about 1.6 million light years across and 100,000 thick. Think of it as cut into voxels: cubes of space about 400 light years a side. There are 4.3 billion of them.

Looking at one system every second, day and night, you would finish in about 76,000 years. Bring snacks. Not all of those systems are worth the second.

Where a multitool comes from

Five kinds of place hand you a multitool, and planets are far busier than they look from orbit.

A planet can hold thousands of these spots, or none, as empty worlds shows. Spots count above sea level and off the cliffs only, for a reason the funnel below makes plain.

• A shop weapon cabinet sells a pistol or a rifle, and now and then something stranger.
• A monolith of the Korvax gives an Atlantid tool, in one of three colours. Gek and Vy'keen monoliths give none.
• A space station has two weapon cabinets, and a pirate station one, with a pistol or a rifle, and now and then something stranger.
• A harmonic camp holds a Sentinel tool in a sealed crate, a pistol or a rifle.
• A sentinel pillar is the only source of Royal tools and the main one for Experimental and Alien. Every pillar of a planet gives the same tool, so however many stand there, a planet counts once.

Here is the twist. A cabinet does not hold one fixed tool, and that goes for the station's cabinets too. What it offers depends on where in the system you start your session: any of its planets, or the space station. So every source is really a handful of different chances, and each system ends up with about 320,000 of them.

A staff is the exception. No place hands you one whole: you assemble it from parts at an Autophage terminal, which stands hidden by robot heads, beacons, crashed freighters, drop pods, and debris, until you scan close by with the right part fitted. The result depends on the head you fit and on the terminal where you build it, so the same parts at two terminals make two different staffs. The core and the backbone only change the look.

The multitool funnel

Now the sieve. Each row keeps only what passed the row above.

Reading it from the top:

1. Sea level and slope. A building cannot stand under the sea, nor on a slope steeper than the game allows, so where a spot falls in the water or on a cliff the game builds nothing: no shop, no monolith, no pillar, and no tool. That rule takes about 29% of the spots away before anything else is asked.
2. Chances. Here the count grows instead of shrinking. A cabinet, a monolith, a camp, and a pillar give one chance for every place you can start from, each planet and the station. A staff spot gives seven, one for each head. Four spots in five are staff spots, so on average a spot turns into about seven chances, the ×7 of that row.
3. Adjacent at S. The four slots must form one tetris figure. Only 1.4% do. This one step drops 99 of every 100 chances, and it is the step everybody cares about.
4. No trips. Some of those tools appear only if you start elsewhere and come back. We keep the ones you get by starting on that planet and walking up.
5. One of a kind. Two pistols with the same four slots are the same pistol to us, wherever they stand, and the higher class stays. The name does not count, since you can rename a tool anyway.
6. The list. At most six per system, one of each type first, so a short list shows the widest choice.

A tool below S is fine here. The slots we show are the ones it has at S, so you pay for the upgrade yourself, and they do not change.

From 320,000 chances to 44. That is one in about 7,200, and the average system is not even the interesting one. We will get to that.

Here is what survives, type by type, counted in one voxel: families stay together, largest first, and the last column is what reaches a system page.

Look at the Royal row among the multitool types. A pillar pays a Royal about one time in 7, which sounds generous, but a planet gives one pillar tool against thousands of shops and monoliths. Royal tools are rare because pillars are.

Staffs are not in that table. A tool waits for you to find it, while a staff does not exist until you build it, and every terminal can build seven, one for each head. Counted with the others they would swamp everything, so they get a table of their own.

Five little figures

Four adjacent slots can only make five shapes, if a mirror image counts as the same shape. Turn them and mirror them, and they are 19 different tetris figures. Turns says how many figures a shape holds, and Places how many spots it fits on a multitool and on a ship: 257 for a multitool, 239 for a ship.

The square is the one everyone wants, since every slot sits beside two others. It is also among the rarest: about 7.9% of adjacent tools, or one in about 1,100 of all tools at the pillars.

One voxel is enough to see how crowded this gets. In a single voxel, pistols and rifles each filled all 257 placements once any class is allowed. There are simply more chances than places. The hard part was never finding a figure. It is finding one at S, on the spot, with no trips, and multitool classes shows how few lie there.

The ship funnel

Ships are simpler. The same rule of sea level and slope comes first: a crashed ship lies on dry ground that is not too steep, or deep enough under the sea for the sunken kind, and never on a cliff. That leaves out about 35% of the spots. After that a crashed ship needs no trips, and any class is fine, since the slots are what you cannot change.

Note the drop from adjacent to kept, across all the ship types. Wrecks of one system share a small set of layouts, so a system with one good ship tends to hold many copies of it: about 130 adjacent wrecks for each ship we keep. Interceptors make up 2.7% of wrecks and 79% of what we keep, because each one has a layout of its own. The Sentinel Interceptors page shows every form.

What a good system looks like

The honest average is small: a system keeps about 44 multitools and 0.27 ships. But that average mixes full systems with empty ones.

About 15% of systems hold no multitool worth listing, and 89% no ship. Where there is a ship there are usually a couple: 2.4 per system that has one. Where there is a multitool, there are about 52. Planet by planet it thins out further: about 70% of planets hold a multitool we keep, and 2.5% a ship.

A system with six multitools and two ships at once is rare, about one in 24. Those are the systems we go looking for, and even then a full list is not always there. So the list on a system page is not a typical system. It is one of the best we could find.

Does the galaxy matter?

For tools and wrecks, not much: a system gives about the same in each type of galaxy, and the small differences below are within the wobble of a smaller look. The planets and the Sentinels are what really change, as galaxies shows.

The star of the show

We show 19 systems across four galaxies: Euclid, Calypso, Budullangr, Eissentam. Each of them shows tetris figures without a square.

They are good finds, and none of them is the best of its kind. No multitool or ship on show beats what the same one found at class A becomes once you upgrade it to S. The ones that lie at S with the strongest stats are still out there, and so is every square but one. There is plenty left to find.

One more system holds the exception: ψ-Gatch, a staff with a perfect square, in the Iroish system of Dugnowarilda Galaxy. Nobody finds it lying around: you build it, then upgrade it from class B.

Dugnowarilda Galaxy is a long way from Euclid. How to get there, and how to build it, we leave to you. It is meant for the patient.

About these numbers

Everything here is an average over about 3828 voxels of Euclid scattered around the core, rounded, and 1276 voxels each of three other galaxies. Star counts cover 3,800 voxels. Finds come from about 60 stars of each voxel, scaled up to the whole voxel, and the averages hold to ±1%.

The numbers say where to look. The finds are still yours to make.