Best Method for Farming Nanites (for Wealthy Players)

Notice

This guide is for experienced players who have made decent progress in No Man's Sky, i.e., players who have already managed to farm a significant number of units. This process requires a decent portion of units to work, so go check out a guide on how to farm units first if you haven't already.

If you're still here, great! Grab your units and let's get started.

For this, you will need - at minimum - an economy scanner installed in your starship to locate a pirate controlled/outlaw system. When you view a system in your galaxy map with this installed, you will see a descriptor in the system details that tells you how wealthy a system is and what type of trade it specializes in.

A pirate controlled/outlaw system will be labelled as "Black Market" instead of the usual "Affluent", "Comfortable", "Failing", etc. A skull with the label "Pirate Controlled" will also be in place of where it tells you the conflict level is if you have a conflict scanner installed as well.

If you only have the base hyperdrive installed, this step may take a little longer as I find that a good number of pirate systems spawn in systems that require the Atlantid Drive, Indium Drive, etc. However, it is possible to find one in a regular yellow system (labelled with the capital letter G or F in the orange text in the description as pictured). You'll just have to look for a little while.

Once you've warped it to the pirate system, go ahead and head to the space station (labelled "Outlaw Station" with the same yellow hexagon symbol). There will be a Contraband Agent on the right-hand side in front of the Bounty Master.

Once you've found the Contraband Agent, buy up all of the Suspicious Packets of the Arms and Tech varieties, Hadal Cores, and Larval Cores.

Hadal Cores and Larval Cores can be refined directly into nanites using any kind of refiner,
but they will not yield as much as the Suspicious Packets - so these are optional, but recommended. The extra nanites don't hurt, after all.

Rinse and repeat the process of finding pirate controlled systems and buying these items until you are satisfied, run out of units, or have no more inventory space.

Once you've got all your goodies, head back to a regular commercial system and head to its space station. Start opening the Suspicious Packets from your inventory, and ideally you'll get loads of "X-Class" Suspicious Modules. Something important to remember is to NOT install any of these modules in your exosuit, multitool, starship, etc. They lose value if the stats are revealed, so it's better to just
sell them as is. If you bought any Hadal/Larval Cores, stick those into any refiner and they'll yield 50 nanites each. Once you've got all your modules ready to sell, head to any Technology Merchant on the second floor of the shop area. You can then head to the "Sell" tab on the shop menu and then sell all
of your modules for nanites.

And that's all there is to it!

You can repeat this process any time you need nanites, and I personally use this method to this day. When taking screenshots for this process, I ended up visiting about 7 or 8 pirate systems and got a total of 28,000 nanites out of it. If you have any questions, leave a comment and I'd be happy to answer them :)

Happy farming, Travellers!