Earning Units — How the Economy Works and Where the Money Is
Earning Units depends less on which item is valuable and more on where you sell it. The same goods fetch wildly different prices depending on the terminal, and dumping everything in one place tanks the price. So it’s worth understanding how the economy circulates before memorising any price list. Prices shift with patches; this structure hasn’t changed in years.
Star system economies run on two loops
There are seven economy types. Each supplies one category cheaply and demands another at a premium, which forms two closed loops.
Loop A (three stops)
Trading → Advanced Materials → Scientific → Trading
Loop B (four stops)
Mining → Manufacturing → Technology → Power Generation → Mining
Read it like this: a Mining economy sells minerals cheap and buys energy sources dear. So you buy energy in a Power Generation system, sell it in Mining, pick up minerals there, and carry them to Manufacturing.
A trade route isn’t “sell high anywhere” — it’s going around a specific loop. Miss this and you’ll burn warp fuel for nothing.
Each economy has four display names. Mining shows up as Mining, Minerals, Ore Extraction, or Prospecting. The names look unrelated, so judge by the icon.
Wealth tiers
Every economy carries a one-to-three-star wealth rating, also expressed as a descriptor on the galaxy map: Declining and Destitute are ★, Balanced and Developing are ★★, Wealthy and Booming are ★★★.
Wealth controls three things:
- Which tiers of goods appear — the most valuable items only show up in wealthy economies
- Stock quantity
- NPC starship class odds — wealthier systems roll S-class more often
Where you sell — the biggest single difference
These three lines account for most of the gap between new and experienced players.
Trading Posts beat space stations. Both for buying and selling, and for all items, not just trade commodities. The buying difference is especially large.
Selling to NPC pilots doesn’t move the market. Trade directly with pilots landing at a station or trading post and prices stay put. For a few inventory slots’ worth, that’s the better option.
Buy at trading posts, sell where the market is still healthy. Following that one rule alone changes your income noticeably.
Install an Economy Scanner and you can locate nearby trading posts straight from the quick menu while flying. It’s an underappreciated feature with real practical value.
Markets crash as you sell
Selling at a Galactic Trade Terminal drops that item’s price. The rate differs tenfold by category.
| What you’re selling | Drop per unit |
|---|---|
| Crafted items (Stasis Devices and so on) | -0.3% |
| Natural resources and harvestables | -0.03% |
| Trade commodities (in an economy that demands them) | -0.25% |
Crafted goods tank ten times faster than raw resources. Dump Stasis Devices at one station and you’ll feel it quickly. Resources, by contrast, you can essentially ignore.
The answer is to move between systems. Prices do recover over time, but how long that takes is unverified — don’t build a plan around waiting.
Note that buying does not raise prices. You can repeat the purchase side freely.
Trade commodities aren’t ordinary items
Three categories to keep straight.
| Category | Examples | Economy modifier |
|---|---|---|
| Trade commodities | Teleport Coordinators, Fusion Cores | Applies (uncraftable, exist purely for trading) |
| Crafted trade goods | Stasis Device, Superconductor | None |
| Resources and consumables | Activated Indium, cooked food | None |
Same rule as in the cooking guide. Food is a consumable, so “sell it in the right economy” simply doesn’t apply.
The main income sources
Crafted trade goods — best late-game rate
Stasis Devices and Fusion Ignitors are the joint most valuable single items in the game at 15,600,000 Units each.
Every material is farmable or extractable, so once the infrastructure exists your material cost approaches zero. This is the best exchange rate from time into Units in the game.
- Stasis Device = Quantum Processor + Cryogenic Chamber + Iridesite
- Blueprint comes from raiding a Manufacturing Facility, or 250 Nanites at the Synthesis Laboratory on the Space Anomaly
The barrier is a large farm plus gas extractors — Nitrogen, Radon, and Sulphurine go in by the hundreds.
One trap: the intermediates are crafted items too, so they crash at -0.3% as well. If Superconductor prices have sagged, turn them into Quantum Processors and sell one tier up instead.
Derelict freighters — mid-game workhorse
Roughly 2–6 million Units plus 1,500–4,000 Nanites per run. It’s close to the only content that pays both currencies in predictable amounts.
- You need an Emergency Broadcast Receiver, bought from the station Scrap Dealer. The price climbs with each purchase and resets daily.
- After your first clear, Iteration: Helios gives you one free receiver per week — that’s what makes it sustainable
- You cannot save mid-mission. Leave and it’s gone
- Derelicts with the same name always yield the same class of fleet unit, so find one that gives S-class and go back to it
The crashed-ship scrapping loop
There is no way to sell a ship. What exists is scrapping.
Navigation Data → buy Emergency Cartographic Data from a Cartographer → fly to the wreck
→ repair only the pulse engine and launch thrusters → dismantle the rest
→ scrap it at a station Starship Outfitting Terminal
Scrapping pays in items and upgrade modules, not Units directly — you sell those on. It also yields rare elements and Storage Augmentations (free slot expansions), and since slots are the biggest Unit sink in the game, that’s arguably the real prize.
Scanning flora and fauna — best early return
Requires essentially nothing. Point the Analysis Visor and go.
Scanner upgrades multiply the payout up to a hundredfold. Three S-class modules push analysis rewards to +6,500–10,000%. They’re bought with Nanites, so it’s the fastest-paying early investment there is.
One caveat worth knowing: upgrades only boost the per-scan reward. Discovery upload payments and the 100%-fauna completion bonus are unaffected. Plenty of people get this wrong.
Scan radius caps at 750u, so extra modules stop helping past that point.
Pirate dreadnoughts — needs a freighter first
5–10 million Units a fight, the best one-off combat payday currently available.
You must own a freighter; they spawn when you warp into three-star conflict systems or outlaw systems. Force a surrender and you choose between taking the freighter or the reward.
Don’t destroy the warp drive first. Disable it and then sink the ship and the S-class module reward is forfeited.
Activated Indium — past its prime
Waypoint cut its base value from 949 to 165. It was the top income source once; now it’s supplementary.
Hotspots appear in blue star systems and Mineral Extractors mine them automatically — accumulating while the game is closed and without provoking sentinels.
Two things to watch:
- Activated Indium cannot be duplicated. Ordinary Indium multiplies with Chromatic Metal, but the activated variants have no such recipe
- Clustering extractors reduces per-unit output. Stack them vertically and they register as separate networks, avoiding the penalty
Everything else
| Source | Value / structure |
|---|---|
| Salvaged Data | 50,000 each, 1–4 per buried technology module, present on nearly every planet |
| Storm Crystals | ~129,000. Only during storms on extreme-weather planets |
| Lost Artifacts | 115,000–2,300,000. Ancient ruin caskets. One per slot, so they eat inventory |
| Salvageable scrap | Yields high-value trade commodities like Starship AI Valves |
| Docked trade frigates | 1,000 Units per 30s, ~120k per hour. Small, but free |
| Smuggled goods | Buy in outlaw systems, sell in lawful ones. Standing only drops when you break cargo pods |
Settlements — inefficient as an income source
Beacon brought up to four settlements, choosing what they produce, and selling directly from the management screen. Thriving settlements also raise their system’s wealth tier.
Even so, the passive income itself is small. The real value is in the wealth bump improving your trade margins and in the hub facilities: crashed-ship location, ship scrapping, guild envoys. Don’t take a settlement purely for the money.
Actual per-settlement earnings are unverified.
What to do at each stage
Early (up to ~1M)
The goal isn’t Units, it’s Exosuit slots.
- Scan flora and fauna — no prerequisites; get S-class modules first
- Salvaged Data — 50,000 each, available everywhere
- Cave harvesting — Albumen Pearls and Vortex Cubes don’t aggro sentinels when collected inside caves
- Buy one slot every station visit — the price escalates cumulatively, so earlier is cheaper
Skip for now: cobalt flipping, trade route circuits, large farms. All need capital first.
Mid (1M to tens of millions)
This is where you build structure.
- Derelict freighters — start with the free weekly receiver from Helios
- The scrapping loop — Units, Nanites, and Storage Augmentations at once
- Economy Scanner (150 Nanites) → trade routes and trading-post location
- Get a freighter → pirate dreadnoughts unlock
- A hotspot mining base — the point is having money waiting when you log in
Late (tens of millions and up)
Go all-in on Stasis Devices and Fusion Ignitors. Build the farm and gas extractors, stockpile intermediates, then craft in bulk and spread sales across systems.
Units cap at roughly 4.29 billion and simply stop there.
What Units actually buy
| Currency | Spent on |
|---|---|
| Units | Ships, freighters, frigates, slot expansions, terminal trading, broadcast receivers |
| Nanite Clusters | Technology blueprints, upgrade modules, ship and multi-tool class upgrades |
| Quicksilver | Cosmetics and base decoration |
Put simply, Units are the currency for space and vehicles, Nanites are the currency for performance. Your two biggest Unit sinks are ship purchases and slot expansions.
Freighters cannot be class-upgraded. If you want an S-class you have to find the same model again in S-class.
Things that don’t work
Collected separately because this is where most of the misinformation lives.
- You cannot sell ships. Trade-in gives you 70% of your ship’s value, and swapping down to a cheaper ship refunds nothing.
- Activated Indium cannot be duplicated.
- There is no freighter class upgrade.
- Scanner upgrades don’t apply to discovery uploads.
- Cooking earns no economy-based markup.
- Cobalt flipping isn’t a beginner strategy. Post-Outlaws, stock is thin and there’s a ~20% buy/sell spread, so it only pays above roughly 30,000 units of stock.
Related
- Nanite Clusters — the currency for performance
- Cooking and the Nutrient Processor — big multipliers, mediocre Unit income
- Getting a Freighter — required before dreadnoughts appear
- Fleet Expeditions — income that runs itself