Resource Categories and Refiners — What to Gather, Where to Process
In No Man’s Sky a refiner isn’t just a processing station. It does three jobs: it purifies, multiplies, and creates materials you can’t mine at all. This page starts with how resources are categorised, then covers the refiner types and the verified core recipes.
Older guides often use an “Oxides / Silicates / Isotopes” classification — that’s the 2016-era system and it’s obsolete. What follows is the current one.
The actual recipes and the loops that multiply resources are in Refining Recipes.
Resource categories
Resources are grouped by division. The ones a beginner actually needs:
| Division | Examples | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Metal | Ferrite Dust, Pure Ferrite, Magnetised Ferrite, Silicate Powder | The backbone of building |
| Fuel | Carbon, Condensed Carbon, Oxygen | Feeds every duplication loop |
| Localised Earth Elements | Paraffinium, Pyrite, Ammonia, Uranium, Dioxite, Phosphorus, Basalt, Crystallised Helium, Lithium | Tied to planet type |
| Catalyst | Sodium, Sodium Nitrate | Charges shields and hazard protection |
| Stellar | Copper, Cadmium, Emeril, Indium, Quartzite | Tied to star colour; feedstock for Chromatic Metal |
| Asteroid resources | Tritium, Silver, Gold, Platinum | Space-only mining; warp fuel and trade goods |
| Flora | Frost Crystal, Solanium, Star Bulb, Cactus Flesh, Gamma Root, Fungal Mould, Kelp Sac | Plant harvesting |
| Special / junk | Rusted Metal, Tainted Metal, Chromatic Metal, Nanite Cluster | Salvage and recycling |
Note especially that Localised Earth Elements are locked to planet types — Paraffinium on lush worlds, Ammonia on toxic, Uranium on irradiated, Dioxite on frozen. If you need one, you go find that type of planet. Stellar resources work the same way, tied to yellow, red, green, blue, and purple stars.
How to gather
- Terrain manipulator and mining beam — buried deposits, rocks, cave minerals (Cobalt), underwater (Salt, Chlorine).
- Some require an Analysis Visor scan first — without scanning, the secondary resource won’t drop.
- Crystal colours — blue crystals are Di-hydrogen, red are Condensed Carbon, yellow are Sodium Nitrate.
- Asteroids — Tritium plus Silver, Gold, and Platinum.
- Hotspots — find them with the Survey Device, then place a Mineral or Gas Extractor for passive income.
- Atmosphere Harvesters — collect Sulphurine, Radon, Nitrogen, or Oxygen depending on the planet type.
The five refiners
People often say “three refiners,” but there are five. The number of input slots decides which recipes you can run.
| Refiner | Inputs | Fuel | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portable Refiner | 1 | Yes (100 Carbon or 34 Condensed Carbon) | Recipe always known; can be picked up |
| Personal Refiner | 1 | Yes | Exosuit tech from the Space Anomaly |
| Personal Refiner Mk2 | 2 | Yes | Exosuit tech |
| Medium Refiner | 2 | No | Base building; can’t be picked up (dismantle only) |
| Large Refiner | 3 | No | Required for 3-slot recipes |
The key difference is fuel. Portable and personal refiners keep eating Carbon, while the Medium and Large ones you build at a base need none — so do your serious duplication at a base. The freighter’s Refiner Room and the corvette’s Refiner Unit also work as 3-slot refiners.
Two cautions: Medium and Large refiners can’t be reclaimed, only dismantled. And a leftover item in the input that doesn’t match a recipe can be consumed with no output, so check before clearing.