When I first started playing No Man’s Sky, I spent 12 straight hours mining tritium and selling rare resources just to afford a beat-up C-class hauler with 22 slots. A random stranger I met at a space station laughed when I told him that, and walked me through my first crashed ship hunt. By the end of that same day, I owned an S-class hauler with 48 slots that would have cost me 12 million units if I’d bought it from a ship dealer. Learning how to find crashed ships in No Man’s Sky completely changed how I play the game, and it can do the same for you, no matter if you’re on your first save or your tenth.
How to Find Crashed Ships in No Man’s Sky With Emergency Signal Scanners
The most consistent, beginner-friendly method for hunting crashed ships relies on Emergency Signal Charts you can pick up from any space station cartographer. You can buy these charts with nanites, or trade excess navigation data you collect from observatories, save beacons, and planetary ruins for them completely for free. This is one of the most consistent ways to find crashed ships in No Man's Sky if you prefer exploring on your own instead of using community coordinates.
When you use an Emergency Signal Chart, it will mark a random distress signal on your current planet. You might get a stranded NPC, a damaged frigate, or a crashed ship. If the signal isn’t a crashed ship, you don’t have to travel to the site—just use another chart immediately to reroll the result, no cooldown required. You can farm these charts easily by trading useless navigation data you collect from observatories and save beacons, so you never have to spend hard-earned nanites on ship hunting supplies.
Once you reach the crash site, you can inspect the ship to check its class, slot count, and design before you claim it. If you don’t want to keep it, you can scrap it immediately for upgrade modules, rare resources, and units that you can put toward your main ship or base builds.
Leverage System Scans and Freighter Sensors for Faster Hunts
If you want to cover more ground faster, use your ship’s system scan when you first jump into a new star system. The scan will highlight all planetary points of interest, including distress signals that point to crashed ships. You can also install a distress signal booster module on your freighter to get real-time alerts for crashed ships anywhere in the system, even when you’re exploring on foot.
Systems with high conflict levels have way more crashed ships than peaceful systems, because regular pirate skirmishes lead to far more ships getting shot down and crashing on nearby planets. You’ll have to dodge occasional pirate attacks while you’re hunting in these systems, but the payoff of finding far more high-class crashed ships is well worth the minor hassle. Many players don't realize that high conflict systems are the best places to look when you're learning how to find crashed ships in No Man's Sky, since pirate skirmishes happen every few minutes.
Before you head out to any crash site, make sure you have these essential supplies on hand:
- Bring at least 50 units of ferrite dust and 20 tritium to repair basic life support and thruster systems on the crashed ship, so you can fly it back immediately
- Clear enough space in your inventory for all the scrap and resources you'll collect from repairing and claiming the vessel
- Save your game before interacting with the crashed ship, in case you accidentally claim a low-class ship you don't want
Scrapping an S-class crashed ship can net you over 2 million units in rare upgrade modules alone, even if you don’t want to keep the ship for your own fleet. It’s one of the fastest ways to make units in the early to mid game without grinding boring resource runs.
Use Community Shared Coordinates for Guaranteed High-Class Ships
If you don’t feel like hunting for ships randomly, you can use coordinates shared by the massive No Man’s Sky community to jump directly to confirmed high-class crashed ship sites. Thousands of players share locations of S-class haulers, exotic ships, and rare fighter designs on forums, social media groups, and dedicated NMS fan sites every week.
All you need to do is input the system and planet coordinates into a portal, and you’ll be teleported directly to the exact spot where the crashed ship spawns. The process takes less than five minutes, and you can walk away with a top-tier ship completely for free. You have to match the game mode the coordinate was shared in, otherwise the ship won't spawn—if the coordinate was shared for normal mode, it won’t appear in survival or permadeath saves, and vice versa.
Just note that if you’re playing in a public multiplayer lobby, you might have to wait a few minutes for the ship to respawn if another player recently claimed it. If you don’t want to wait, you can switch to a single player lobby and the ship will spawn immediately.
Avoid Common Mistakes That Waste Your Ship Hunting Time
Plenty of new players spend hours hunting for crashed ships with little to show for it because they’re making simple avoidable mistakes. First, don’t waste time searching on dead, uninhabited planets with no atmosphere—these worlds barely have any crash sites, since there are almost no NPC pilots flying over them to crash. Stick to planets with flora, fauna, and NPC outposts for the highest chance of finding crash sites.
Second, don’t claim every crashed ship you find. It’s tempting to grab every vessel you see, but you only have a limited number of fleet slots, and most low-class crashed ships are only worth scrapping. Unless the ship has a better slot count or class than your current main ship, or has a unique design you love, just scrap it on the spot for resources.
If you're a new player, even a B-class crashed ship is a massive upgrade over the starting starter ship, so don’t pass those up early on. You also don’t have to fully repair a crashed ship to claim it—you can add it to your fleet immediately, and summon it later when you have the resources to fix all its damaged systems.
Once you get the hang of how to find crashed ships in No Man's Sky, you’ll never have to grind for hours to afford a new ship again. I still hunt for crashed ships every time I boot up the game, and last month I found a neon pink exotic ship crashed on a frozen moon that’s still my main ride 70 hours later. The best part of ship hunting is the surprise—you never know what weird, powerful, or beautiful vessel you’ll stumble on next as you explore the galaxy.
