In No Man’s Sky, Tritium is a deeply important crafting material and fuel used for all kinds of things. Though most players will be familiar with the most important ones: charging your Pulse Engine and creating Frigate Fuel. The former is all but necessary (at least in the early stages of the game).
The latter is simply extremely valuable. You should be running as many Fleet Expeditions as possible in NMS. Tritium makes that possible by combining with Di-hydrogen to make Frigate Fuel. More than that, Tritium can be refined into Di-hydrogen, which is further used in a massive number of basic item recipes. Finally, with the release of Update 4.0: Waypoint, NMS introduced the handy Trade Rocket to let players sell items from anywhere on a planet’s surface. This gives players a piece of Exosuit equipment also fueled by — you guessed it — Tritium.
So, where do you get Tritium in NMS? We certainly need quite a lot of it! Let’s take a quick inventory of where to look.
The very simple answer to this question is just “asteroids.” Tritium is the most common resource found within asteroids all throughout NMS (well ahead of Silver, Gold, and Platinum, as well as Anomaly Detectors). In addition, Tritium comes in much greater quantities. Any asteroid resource can be found by simply shooting said asteroid. But, whereas Gold, Silver, and Platinum come in handfuls of five or nine pieces, destroying the right asteroid frequently awards as much as 35-40 Tritium.
Once again, obtaining the Tritium is as easy as shooting rocks. Simply fire your starship weapon of choice at a rock until it “pops.” This will convert the mass into harmless debris (that disappear after a few seconds) before depositing the Tritium (or whatever else you acquire) into your starship’s cargo hold. Any weapon will do! Though rapid-fire devices like the standard Photon Cannon work best.
You will also occasionally find larger asteroids that “deform” as you shoot them rather than pop. These can be mined continuously by “sculpting” away at them with your weapon. However, they seem to always offer rarer metals like Silver rather than the more utilitarian Tritium.
Similarly, different types of asteroids seem to have lesser or greater odds of awarding different metals. Tritium tends to appear in dark brown, bog-standard asteroids. Whereas the more valuable materials appear in more colorful and oddly shaped stones. This is never a guarantee, though.
Recent NMS updates have also begun clumping asteroid belts more densely together. Particularly near landmarks like planets and space stations. These should always be the first place you check when farming Tritium, since you can harvest a whole ton of it all in one spot.
However, since Tritium powers the Pulse Engine, it would be very easy to strand oneself in space without access to at least a few asteroids. This means that there are always asteroids scattered near your ship in space. Even if they’re spread very thin. If you’re worried you’ve gotten stuck, don’t be. Just look closely and you’ll see at least one or two hunks of space metal nearby to mine. To farm efficiently, however, always stick to the thick belts near planets.
Last but not least, keep an eye out for Tritium Hyperclusters. These are uncommon drops from asteroids that appear as separate items in your inventory. Tritium Hyperclusters don’t have much use on their own; in fact, you should probably get rid of them to free up a cargo slot. You can do so by using them directly from your inventory (press the action button while hovering over the icon). This will instantly deposit a few dozen more units of Tritium into your inventory as if you had mined it directly!
And that’s more or less it for Tritium in No Man’s Sky! We hope this helps new players get this very basic resource. Take care among the friendly stars, folks!
