An Outlaw's Guide to Farming Units and Nanites

Requirements
- Economy or Conflict Scanner
- Good DPS ship weapons (just use an Infra-Knife)
- Lots of sodium or starshield batteries (shield recharging)
- A base with a functioning teleporter

Disclaimer: this strategy revolves around contraband and will destroy your reputation with whatever faction controls the system you commit piracy in. Use at your own discretion.

Where

• Warp to or between any Pirate system with a Black Market.

How

• Most of the time you'll see nearby freighters; if not, warp around for a bit and they will pop up. Once they're spotted, destroy all the smaller ships and then go for the big ship. Aim for the cargo crates specifically, which often contain valuable contraband since you're in a Pirate system.
  
• You can simply fly through the ship's shields to avoid having to shoot them down if your DPS is lacking, though you might take more damage from the freighter guns (which you can also shoot). Alternatively, you can stay out of turret range and abuse the range of your ship's weapons to drop the shields and cargo.
  
• Once you're satisfied with the amount of contraband you have, use a nearby Outlaw Station to teleport to one of your bases, then use that base teleport to go to any non-Pirate Space Station. Sell your contraband and reap the profits.

Why

• Sentinels won't attack you if you attack freighters in Pirate systems, making it a lot easier to do so. Additionally, the contraband you get from freighter and frigate cargo is immensely valuable and you basically get it for free, which cuts out the unit investment needed for smuggling large amounts of contraband instead.

Requirements
- Economy or Conflict Scanner
- Access to as many Pirate systems as you can
- A large excess of units to burn (in the millions or tens of millions depending on scale)

Where

• Again, warp to or between any Pirate system with a Black Market.

How

• Run up to the Black Market seller and buy as many Suspicious Packet (Weapons/Tech) as you can. Don't buy Suspicious Packet (Goods) unless you like gambling. You may also purchase contraband to sell later while you're at it to help offset the costs of buying the Packets.
  
• Teleport between as many Outlaw Stations as you can and keep buying out Weapons and Tech Packets until you're satisfied.
  
• Let's go gambling; open every single Packet. Weapons Packets and Tech Packets give X class modules for weapons and tech respectively, though sometimes you may get other miscellaneous items to sell or consume.
  
• Go to any vendor that sells modules and sell your newly-acquired X class modules for about 300+ nanites each.
  
• Black Market vendor inventories seem to slowly refill over time so you'll only be able to buy a couple of Packets if you go to Outlaw Stations you've recently visited. This can be circumvented somewhat by having a large number (9+) of Outlaw Stations to cycle between or by doing something else in the meantime (Unit farming for example) and starting the cycle again later.

Why

• Weapons/Tech Packets have a very high chance of dropping X class modules, each of which are worth quite a lot of nanites. The other stuff you can get alongside X class modules (data records, which yield slightly less nanites than selling modules), broken technology (which is not very useful), or maybe rare artifacts (which can be sold for a large amount of units).
  
• The main advantage of this method is that it's pretty easy to do and extremely low-stress. The disadvantages include requiring a very large amount of starting Units and the pseudo-cooldown after buying out vendor inventories. However, it may or may not be faster than other nanite farming methods.
  
• Runaway Mould farming's limiting factor is refinery speed, though that can be mitigated by just spamming tons of refineries. Still, it needs a base (or the use of someone else's base), refineries, teleporters, manual mining, etc. You can fill the downtime of this method with Mould farming if you want to be super efficient.
  
• On a similar note, Larval Core farming can be solid since the cores refine nigh-instantly and are easy to destroy and pick up, though it's pretty dangerous and the predator AI can be janky sometimes. I'm not sure if you can teleport 600 units away to refresh them or not but I imagine you might be able to, similar to Mould farming.
  
• Bounties kinda suck. Bounties from the Space Anomaly or Space Stations give a pretty measly amount of nanites and the missions themselves can often take a while to do, so it's not ideal for nanite farming.