No Man’s Sky – General Settlement Tips

Tips to Settlements

All credit goes to Comradovich!

General Tips

1. If you found the settlement because you have it marked from space – Another player owns that settlement, that’s why it’s on your world map. It’s marking a “safe” location to ship hunt, use the trade terminal, maybe see if they’ve installed a few refiners…
2. If you found the settlement because you used one of the settlement maps (which you purchase for 5 navigation data from the navigator NPC on the space station), then that settlement is usually marked as Available (Sometimes this gets screwy in high traffic areas, like Expedition routes, and it marks already claimed ones, YMMV).
3. You may only have one settlement active at a time. If you pick a new one, you automatically abandon the old.

You get a free one as part of the old 3 hrs/5 warps cycle for freighters. The distress signal usually occurs in between accepting/rejecting the first freighter and the next cycle of freighter rescue. After you’ve founded that first settlement, you can swap to a new one with a settlement map later on. Or you could just buy a settlement map and try to jump start the whole process before you mess with freighters. I believe subsequent settlements do cost to take over, but as I was at the unit cap at the time I didn’t notice how much it was. When you’ve got 4 billion units, any purchase is kind of a drop in the bucket.

It’s passive income, some NPC interaction, but mostly its a free platform to build on by moving a base computer next to it. (Most of the infrastructure parts are already built in the settlement, so you’re only adding refiners, or special features to the base).