No Man's Sky: How to get plans and formulas

 Discover all the methods that exist to obtain and unlock plans and formulas in No Man's Sky, fully insured. Don't be left without any.

The No Man's Sky blueprints, also known as recipes or formulas (in English blueprints ), are what allow us in the Hello Games game to create all kinds of resources, technologies, products, or improvements. Once the blueprint of a product is obtained or unlocked, we can know the materials necessary for its manufacture and create it as many times as we want.

There are hundreds of blueprints to obtain, but the game does not make it entirely clear how each of them can be obtained. Don't worry, on this page of our guide we are going to show you all the methods that exist to unlock plans and formulas in No Man's Sky.

Methods to obtain plans and formulas in No Man's Sky

Currently, in No Man's Sky, these are all the known methods to obtain plans safely.

Find plans in locations

Many plans can be obtained and found in a considerable variety of different places. You can mainly reveal the location of these places by acquiring planetary navigation charts from space station cartographers. Specifically, you are interested in those that reveal secret geographic data (which will mark these locations with symbols on nearby planets). To obtain them you can exchange the navigation data you find with the cartographer.

All these places must be taken into account:

• Production facilities: as a general rule, their doors are blocked and you have to destroy them by shooting at them (which activates the presence of Sentinels). Additionally, inside you must solve a puzzle to be able to override the factory security and thus unlock a new blueprint.
• Operations Centers: These function similarly to production facilities, although they have a higher chance of rewarding tech blueprints or frigate consumables.
• Observatories: they have satellite dishes on their roof and inside you must solve a puzzle.
• Derelict Freighters: Introduced in the Desolation update, they can be located in space after purchasing coordinates from a scrap metal dealer on a space station. Within them, it is possible to find plans for technological improvements.

Buy plans

Some blueprints, especially those that have to do with technological improvements, can be purchased with nanites from merchant NPCs located in stations, in centers, trading posts, and so on.

Unlock blueprints in missions

There are a large number of blueprints that can also be obtained by doing and completing quests. We talk directly about threads of main missions such as that of Artemis or Atlas, and also secondary missions such as those of the base (for example, the base computer files). Especially the base supervisor, farmer, scientist, or weapons expert missions will reward you with quite a few blueprints.

Acquire blueprints in the Space Anomaly

In the Space Anomaly (unlocked by following the Artemis quest thread), you can go to the construction research computer and purchase tech blueprints to upgrade your base in exchange for recovered data.

You will also find NPCs in the anomaly from whom you can acquire blueprints with improvements for the exosuit, the multitool, the ship, etc...

How to use the plans

Once you obtain the blueprint for a product, you can manufacture it whenever you want and have the necessary resources to do so, such as raw materials. In order to make a blueprint you must have a free space or hole in your inventory (if it is a technology or structure blueprint for your base, you must open the construction menu on a planet to be able to install the object wherever you want).

The more plans you discover, the more you can advance in the game in the long run as you will improve aspects such as your Exosuit , your Multi-Tool or your spaceship . The plans are a very important part of the progress of the title, so we hope that our guide will help you on your way to the center of the galaxy.