No Mans Sky Frigate Expeditions Guide: Fleet Setup and Upgrades

Frigate expeditions are one of the laziest moneymakers in No Man's Sky. You buy a stack of ships, launch them from your freighter, then go do whatever else you feel like while they grind out units and loot on their own. Set the fleet up right and it'll fund basically your whole save. Set it up wrong and you get wasted fuel, banged-up hulls, and the occasional ship lost for good. So here's the full loop: recruiting, star ratings, fuel, repairs, and the long grind of turning cheap boats into S-class veterans.

Recruiting Frigates

Getting your first ships

You need a freighter before any of this matters. The cheap route is rescuing a civilian freighter from pirates - win that scrap and the captain hands you the whole ship. Once it's yours, play through the Freighter Command mission. That unlocks the Fleet Command Room blueprint and, as a bonus, all three frigate fuel recipes. The room costs 120 Silver, 40 Gold, and 10 Tritium to build from the freighter's build menu. No room, no expeditions.

The actual recruiting happens out in open space. Fly around a system and you'll spot NPC freighters with smaller ships orbiting them. The ones worth a look have green icons - that's the game telling you the captain is selling. Pull in close, wait for the comms channel to ping, and hail them through the quick menu. Each ship shows its class, stats, traits, fuel burn, and price before you commit. Prices run from about 1.5 million units up to 12.5 million depending on class, so bring a funded wallet for shopping trips.

The five types

Every frigate has one specialty, and each type also banks a small stockpile while it sits idle:

| Type | Best at | Idle bonus | | --- | --- | --- | | Combat | Combat encounters | Warps in with friendly ships if you get jumped while your freighter's in the system | | Exploration | Exploration encounters | Scans the system for an Ancient Ruin | | Industrial | Industrial encounters | Makes 2 Magnetised Ferrite every 30 seconds, caps at 100 | | Trade | Trade encounters | Makes 1,000 units every 30 seconds, caps at 125,000 | | Support | A bit of everything | Makes 2 Condensed Carbon every 30 seconds, caps at 100 |

You collect those stockpiles by landing on the ship and talking to the captain. Honestly it's small potatoes, but a trade boat banking 125,000 units while you're off doing something else is still free money.

Reading the stat card before you buy

Every frigate has four stats: Combat, Exploration, Industry, and Trade. The number you see on the card is base stats plus trait bonuses plus rank-ups, and you can strip that back to the ship's real potential. Add up the four stats, subtract every trait bonus (a specialty always comes with a +15 to its own stat, or -15 fuel cost for support ships), then subtract 6 points for every rank-up the ship has already had. Rank-ups happen at 4, 8, 15, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, and 55 completed expeditions.

What's left is the base stat total, and it runs from about -5 to +14, with most ships landing around 4 or 5. That gap adds up - a 14 that grows for 55 missions ends up way stronger than a -5 that does the same. Check the expedition count too. A ship sitting at exactly 4, 8, 15, 25, or another rank-up number is probably glitched (the generator skipped its last level-up), and those are the ones with junky stats. Pass on those.

Fuel burn matters just as much. Specialists drink 8 to 12 tonnes per 250 light-years, and bad traits can push that to 16. Support ships sip 2 to 5. A specialist rated 8 is great, and anything north of 10 had better have amazing stats to justify itself. And don't stress about class - a C-class junker slowly climbs to S-class as it gains beneficial traits, so buying the expensive S up front mostly just front-loads the bill.

Cap for the fleet is 30 frigates, which also hands you the Admiral title. Got a dud? Dismiss it from the Manage Fleet console the same way you'd delete an item from your inventory.

Reading Expedition Ratings

How stars actually work

Talk to the navigator on your freighter bridge and you'll get five expedition offers, refreshed daily at 0:00 UTC. Each one takes up to 5 frigates, and each active expedition needs its own Fleet Command Room - build more rooms if you want more missions running side by side.

Every offer has a difficulty in stars. Most of the time you'll only see 1 to 3 stars, even though the files allow for 5. The fleet you assemble gets its own star rating too, and the gap between those two numbers decides how the trip goes:

• Fleet rating 2+ stars above the mission: ships come home clean, pretty much guaranteed
• 1 star above: the safe zone most players aim for
• Equal to the mission: damage becomes a real possibility
• Below the mission: damage is very likely, and a badly outmatched ship can be destroyed outright

One trap worth knowing: the little lit dots next to each frigate are not its star rating. Those count positive traits. The rating is calculated from actual stat points in whatever the mission focuses on, so trust the stars shown for the assembled fleet, not the dots.

Picking the right squadron

Match specialists to the mission type - combat boats for combat runs and so on. But don't stack five ships that are amazing at one thing and zero at everything else. Game files show even a combat expedition can throw an encounter that tests trade or exploration, so a glass cannon fleet with holes in its stats will flub those checks. Ships with negative traits on board fail encounters more often too, and a failed encounter can spread a new negative trait to other ships in the fleet. Kind of a pain, but negative traits do fall off as ships level.

There's also a hidden difficulty curve tied to your fleet size. With 3 or fewer frigates total, expeditions stay short (roughly 1 to 4.5 hours) and pay less. The moment you own a fourth frigate, missions get longer, harder, and more rewarding - even ones already in flight. Trips can run from a few hours to more than a day, and the clock keeps ticking while the game is closed. Damage events happen in real time as well, so a ship that takes a hit mid-trip needs someone to answer the call.

What the payouts look like

Each type pays differently:

• Combat: units plus loot like Geodesite and Iridesite
• Exploration: units, nanites, curiosities, and the occasional artifact
• Industrial: units, activated stellar metals, and the big ones - Storage Augmentations and Salvaged Frigate Modules
• Trade: units plus trade commodities
• Balanced: a random mix of all of it, and a mixed fleet does well here

Industrial runs are the ones veteran players chase, because Salvaged Frigate Modules and Storage Augmentations are the exact items your freighter and starships are hungry for. Three-star expeditions have one more perk: sometimes the debrief includes a corrupted record, and successfully decoding it awards the Dream Aerial blueprint. Hold onto that - more on it later.

Since the Orbital update, crews out on missions will also radio in with problems and choices. Some want a decision, some want you to swing by and shoot pirates off them. The answers genuinely move your rewards, and can even pay out Quicksilver, so it pays to answer the space phone.

Preparing Fuel and Support Ships

Fuel basics

Expeditions burn frigate fuel, which you craft from two cheap materials:

| Fuel | Recipe | Good for | | --- | --- | --- | | Frigate Fuel (50 Tonnes) | 50 Di-hydrogen + 50 Tritium | Short trips, topping off | | Frigate Fuel (100 Tonnes) | 100 Di-hydrogen + 100 Tritium | Mid-length runs | | Frigate Fuel (200 Tonnes) | 200 Di-hydrogen + 200 Tritium | Long hauls |

Fuel has to sit in your freighter's inventory for the fleet to use it. Tritium falls out of asteroids in every system, and Di-hydrogen comes from the blue crystals scattered on planet surfaces, so the raw materials are basically everywhere. The game burns smaller units first, and it makes change - spend a 200-tonne barrel on a 150-tonne trip and you get 50 tonnes back, as long as there's room for it.

The math behind the cost: each ship burns its fuel rate per 250 light-years, the game rounds the trip distance to the nearest 250, adds up every ship's burn, subtracts fuel-saving traits, then rounds up to the next multiple of 50. That rounding means a trip has a hard floor of 50 tonnes per specialist, no matter how short it is. (On custom difficulty you can just turn fuel costs off entirely, if grinding Di-hydrogen sounds miserable.)

Support ships: the fine print

Support frigates look boring and are secretly one of the better tools in the box. Their specialty trait cuts a flat 15 tonnes off the expedition total, on top of whatever fuel traits they roll - support ships can get -3, -6, or -9 reductions, the biggest in the game. Better yet, they only burn 2 to 5 tonnes themselves.

So who actually wants a support ship along? Mostly short runs. The reductions are flat, so a support ship on a short trip can zero out most of the bill, and an all-support flotilla can handle some Balanced missions for literally zero fuel. On long runs the math flips - past a certain distance the support ship burns more than it saves, so check the fuel preview before launching. Even then they make decent filler, since a cheap support hull pads your star rating without padding the fuel bill much.

One-shot expedition upgrades

The prep screen has three slots for consumable upgrades, each good for a single expedition:

| Upgrade | Recipe | Effect | | --- | --- | --- | | Fuel Oxidiser | 2 Quad Servo + 50 Gold | Speeds the expedition up | | Explosive Drones | 1 Walker Brain + 50 Gold | +10 Combat | | Holographic Analyser | 1 Quantum Computer + 50 Gold | +10 Exploration | | Mineral Compressor | 1 Hydraulic Wiring + 50 Gold | +10 Industrial | | Mind Control Device | 1 Solar Mirror + 50 Gold | +10 Trade |

Ten points is a real bump when you're a few points shy of a star threshold, and they're handy for propping up a weak stat on a tough mission. Blueprints come from the Upgrade Control research on your freighter, or as rewards from Manufacturing Facilities and Operations Centres. Slotting three Drones onto a combat mission that's borderline is usually enough to make it safe, and that's a lot cheaper than repairing two busted frigates.

Repairing Damaged Frigates

The mid-trip phone call

When a ship takes damage out on a mission, its captain radios in and you get a choice: recall the damaged frigate or let it push on. Push on is the gamble. A damaged frigate that gets hit again on the same trip is destroyed permanently and vanishes from your fleet, no recovery. If you're not sure, recall it. The mission isn't worth a ship you spent 8 million units on.

Recalled or returned, a damaged frigate shows up with a hammer icon and a "Critically Damaged" tag in the Manage Fleet screen, plus a red hologram in the Fleet Command Room. It also comes home with a fresh negative trait, which stings a little but will get shed at a future rank-up.

Fixing the broken parts

Repairs are done in person. Fly over and land on the frigate's pad, or use the Frigate Teleporter straight from the Manage Fleet console. The captain marks the damaged components, some inside the hull and some out on the superstructure, but every one of them is reachable on foot - follow the red markers, maybe up a ladder or two, and you'll find them.

Each broken part costs a modest pile of common materials:

| Damaged component | Repair cost | | --- | --- | | Cooling System | 20 Gold + 5 Oxygen | | Master Circuit | 5 Platinum | | Photovoltaic Panel | 20 Gold + 10 Sodium Nitrate | | Power Distributor | 10 Gold + 20 Silver | | Pressure Chamber | 50 Silver | | Servo Arm | 25 Pure Ferrite | | Solenoid | 25 Silver + 10 Ferrite Dust | | Thermoregulator | 20 Gold | | Tiny Motor | 5 Platinum | | Transmission Box | 15 Tritium |

Materials can live in your freighter, starship, or exosuit inventory - the repair screen pulls from all three. Notice how much of that table is just Gold and Silver. Keep a stack of 200-ish of each on the freighter, plus some Platinum, Ferrite Dust, and Tritium, and you'll basically never have to shop before a repair session.

Leaving it broken (mostly fine)

There's no penalty for letting a damaged frigate sit at anchor, so you can save repairs for when you feel like it. The one hard rule: don't send it back out broken. A damaged hull on a new mission is one bad encounter away from being deleted for good, and no reward tier is worth that. Fix it, or leave it docked.

Improving Fleet Performance

How frigates level up

Frigates grow through rank-ups, and the thresholds are 4, 8, 15, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, and 55 completed expeditions. Every rank-up adds 1 point to each of the four stats plus 2 more points scattered randomly, for 6 total, and either deletes a negative trait or adds a positive one. The growth seed is static, so there's no save-scumming a better roll. Progress caps at 55 missions, which is when the "Progress to Next Rank" dial disappears.

Class works off beneficial traits. A ship hits S-class once it's carrying five beneficial traits and no detrimental ones, and the class label is really just a snapshot of that trait count. Even after hitting S, stats keep climbing until the 55-mission cap. This is why cheap C-class ships with strong base stats are such good buys - every junker in your fleet eventually becomes an S-class veteran, and the only lasting difference between two maxed ships is what traits they ended up with.

Buying for the long run

Since all ships converge toward the same growth pattern, recruitment is really about three things: a high base stat total (that formula from earlier - aim high single digits or better), a low fuel rate, and traits worth keeping. Two +6 bonuses in the ship's specialty are the dream. A pile of weak +1 traits is actually worse than empty slots, because traits never upgrade or leave once they're positive - a +1 is hogging a slot forever. Also remember each class of frigate gets a different name as it ranks up (a C-class trade ship is a Merchant Vessel, an S-class one is a Trade Galleon), which is a handy way to read a fleet at a glance.

Scaling past five ships

Once the credits start flowing, scale in every direction the game allows. Own that fourth frigate early, since it's what unlocks the real difficulty and reward tiers. Build extra Fleet Command Rooms - one per simultaneous expedition - so your daily five offers can all be in flight at once. A 30-ship fleet lets you field six full squadrons, run every mission type daily, and always have ships docked for repairs or banking idle resources. That's also where the daily reset discipline comes in: missions refresh at 0:00 UTC, so logging in right after reset means your longest runs finish right as the next batch lands.

Living frigates

Endgame fleets add organic frigates, the wriggly ones from the Endurance update. They don't spawn normally - the first one shows up after you build the Dream Aerial (that blueprint from decoding corrupted records on three-star debriefs), and later ones only appear through Anomaly Detectors, at roughly a 3 percent encounter rate. Blue star systems improve the detector odds a bit. They're pricey, and each one answers a personality question before joining, which nudges its stats one way or another.

The payoff is real though. Organic frigates cannot be destroyed on expeditions, period, no matter how badly outmatched they are. They also come home laying Psychonic Eggs, which hatch into Living Ship upgrades, or Spawning Sacs, which add slots to a Living Ship. A squad of those tucked into your risky missions means damage stops being something you think about.

If you're working out what to prioritize early, put your first real squad on industrial missions. That's where the Salvaged Frigate Modules come from, and those modules are the bottleneck for every freighter room upgrade you'll ever want to build.