No Man's Sky/Crash course/Death
Did this come as a surprise? Yes, if the game has health, of course you die if it drops to zero. And dying can be a game changer. You drop your inventory, and on survival difficulty, your inventory gets deleted! I bet you don't want to lose your stockpile of 20 million carbon you're saving for later over a single wrong turn in a cave. Nobody does. Yet death does not need to be the setback it was designed to be.
This is where a little common sense helps. If you die on land, you lose your exosuit inventory. If you die in space, you lose your starship's inventory. If you die in an exocraft, it drops its inventory. You die in a freighter... But wait, no you don't! You don't die in a freighter! So a freighter is the only safe place to store items!
A similar issue unrelated to death: you go to sell stuff from your inventory, and accidentally sell your 20 million carbon. Now you need to reload an old save. That can be such a hassle! But if you never sell directly from your freighter, you never lose what's in it!
The trick, then, is to store everything in your freighter, and install the matter beam upgrade to it. Store stuff needed to recharge equipment, as well as a v3 AtlassPass. A complete list:
- Sodium nitrate: starship shields only part damaged.
- Starsheild battery: fully damaged starship shield recharge.
- Tritium: pulse engine fuel.
- Ion battery: hazard shield recharge (don't recharge hazard protection if you have a hazard shield. Having a charged hazard shield will automatically recharge hazard protection for free).
- Oxygen: crafting/repairing (it is much less efficient than life support jelly for recharging life support).
- Life support jelly: fully recharges life support. Ignore the warnings on the tooltip, they are just for show. They do no harm to me after hundreds of uses.
- Unstable plasma: upgrading/repairing and for recharging certain explosive multi-tool weapons.
- Ammunition: used to reload certain multi-tool weapons. Make sure to have a very large amount. 50 ferite dust makes 2,500 ammunition, so it isn't expensive.
- Ferrite dust: crafting. Maybe get a couple of stacks of it.
- Carbon/condensed carbon: charging the mining beam, exocraft weapons, and both are used in crafting.
- Chromatic metal: essential crafting ingredient.
- Repair kit: used for repairing if you are missing really rare resources.
- Warp cells: for recharging the hyperdrive.
- Di-Hydrogen: used in crafting and recharging.
- V3 AtlasPass: used to open locked doors and supply barrels. V1 and V2 also work for some things, but V3 works for all of them.
The following are not essential, but may save time in repairs without wasting expensive repair kits.
- Wiring loom
- Hydraulic wiring
- Microprocessor (also used in some quests)
- Quantum computer
- Pure ferrite
- Metal plating (also used in some quests)
- Sodium (also used in some quests, avoid using to recharge as sodium nitrate is five times as effective as sodium, and only 2 sodium is used to make sodium nitrate)
- Navigation data (can be used for so many things, it isn't even worth mentioning it all)
And you may also add any other items you don't want to lose. Don't add the items to freighter storage containers, as that prevents you using them to recharge with the quick menu.
Now, assuming you did the above correctly, selling everything in your starship and exosuit inventory will give you no guilt, and you will find it slightly faster! Plus your main inventories are emptier, leaving more room to hunt for rare stuff. And of course, death is no longer as bad as it used to be. Unless you're playing permadeath mode. But it was sill a useful precaution to make.