You’re cruising a new radioactive planet, your multi-tool is glitching after a run-in with sentinels, and you’re short on salvaged tech to upgrade your exosuit. I’ve been there too, and I spent my first 20 hours of NMS wandering aimlessly digging random holes before I figured out the tricks to locate hidden caches fast. Learning how to find buried tech in no man's sky doesn’t just cut down on grinding time—it also lets you stock up on rare upgrades, sell excess salvage for fat stacks of units, and skip the worst parts of early-game resource farming. You don’t need any endgame gear to get started either, just a few basic tools and a little know-how.
How to Find Buried Tech in No Man’s Sky Using Your Analysis Visor
Your analysis visor is the single most important tool for hunting buried tech, and you get it within the first hour of playing the game. A lot of new players only use it to scan flora and fauna, but it’s designed to pick up hidden caches from hundreds of units away if you use it correctly.
Buried tech caches show up as a small, grey gear icon that only appears when you’re within ~300 units of the cache. Don’t waste time scanning from your ship high in the atmosphere—you need to be low to the ground, flying a few feet above the terrain with your visor active, to pick up the signal. If you get a partial signal that cuts out, circle the area where you first spotted it, because the cache is almost certainly just outside your scan range.
I usually fly in slow, zig-zag patterns across flat stretches of a planet, since caches almost never spawn under steep mountain ridges or deep underwater unless you’re on an ocean world. You can also use your ship’s scanner to ping nearby points of interest, which will often lead you right to clusters of buried tech caches in the surrounding area.
Prioritize Planets With High Salvage Potential for Faster Cache Runs
You don’t have to check every planet you land on for buried tech. Some biomes have way higher spawn rates for caches, and you can spot them before you even land from your starship. Look for planets marked with “High Salvage Activity” or “Abandoned Settlements” in their system description when you’re browsing the galactic map. These worlds have 2-3x more buried tech caches than standard biomes, so you can fill your inventory in a single 10-minute run.
Avoid extreme weather planets unless you have a fully upgraded exosuit, because the constant storms will break your scan lock and force you to take shelter every few minutes. I once wasted 45 minutes on an ice world with constant blizzards and only found two caches the entire time—save yourself the headache.
If you spot a crashed freighter or abandoned outpost on a planet, circle the surrounding area. Caches almost always spawn within 500 units of these points of interest, since they’re leftover debris from the crash or abandoned settlement. I once found 8 caches within a 2-minute walk of a crashed freighter, which gave me enough salvaged tech to unlock 3 exosuit slots in one go.
Use Terrain Manipulator Shortcuts to Uncover Caches Faster
A lot of new players dig huge, messy craters when they find a buried tech signal, which wastes time and can even make you lose track of the cache if you dig too far down. There’s a far faster way to get to your loot without all the extra digging. First, stand directly on top of the signal marker before you pull out your terrain manipulator. The distance number on your visor will drop to 0 when you’re in the exact right spot, so you don’t have to guess.
Switch your manipulator to flatten mode first if you’re on uneven ground, then swap to mine mode and dig straight down 3-5 units. 9 times out of 10, the cache will be right there, no extra digging required. If you don’t see it after 5 units, stop digging and scan again—you probably drifted a few feet away from the exact marker while you were digging.
You also don’t have to fill every hole you dig after you grab the cache—the game will reset the terrain after you leave the planet, so you don’t have to waste time fixing the mess you make. There are a few common mistakes new players make that slow down their dig runs by a huge margin:
- Digging in a wide radius instead of straight down from the 0-unit marker, which wastes 2-3x more time per cache
- Forgetting to turn off hostile sentinel alerts before you start digging, which can trigger a fight mid-loot run
- Leaving extra ferrite dust in your freighter instead of your exosuit inventory, leaving you stranded without power for your manipulator
Make sure you keep your terrain manipulator’s power topped up with ferrite dust before you head out on a run. Nothing is more frustrating than being 2 units away from a cache and running out of power mid-dig.
Maximize the Value of Every Buried Tech Cache You Find
Buried tech caches don’t just drop generic salvage—they can have rare upgrades, upgrade modules, and even ancient artifact parts that sell for hundreds of thousands of units each if you know what to look for. Always open caches while you’re standing next to your exocraft or ship, so you can sort your loot immediately without running out of inventory space. If you’re early in the game, hold onto all salvaged tech you find to unlock exosuit, multi-tool, and starship upgrades at the anomaly.
Once you have all your core upgrades unlocked, you can sell excess salvaged tech at space stations for 50,000 units a piece, which is one of the fastest low-effort ways to make money in the mid-game. I usually do a 20-minute cache run before I head to a space station to restock, and I walk away with 2-3 million units worth of salvage every time.
Also, keep an eye out for rare buried tech caches marked with a gold gear icon on your visor—these have a 70% chance of dropping S-class upgrade modules for your gear, which are almost impossible to find anywhere else without grinding expensive missions. I once found three S-class shield upgrades in a single run on a high salvage planet, which saved me millions of units I would have spent buying them from the anomaly.
Buried tech caches are one of the most underrated resources in No Man’s Sky, especially for new players who don’t want to grind hours of missions or trade runs to get better gear. You don’t need any fancy upgrades to start hunting them either—just a working analysis visor and a terrain manipulator are enough to get started. Once you get the hang of how to find buried tech in no man's sky, you’ll never run short of upgrades or units again, and you’ll get to explore more of the game’s weird, wonderful planets without all the tedious grinding. Next time you land on a new world, take 10 minutes to cruise around and scan for caches—you’ll be shocked at how much good loot you can find.
