No Man's Sky: Tainted Metal Guide (2024)

If you've been playing No Man's Sky - either for the first time or returning from a while past - you may have seen mention of a resource called Tainted Metal. You may think this is just another type of metal that can be gathered in the game, but Tainted Metal is slightly different from Copper and Gold.

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Tainted Metal is one of the many additional resources and currencies added into No Man's Sky, offering new missions and rewards to be obtained. Here's everything you need to know about the material and what exactly you need it for.

Added into the game along with the Desolation Update, Tainted Metal is a scrap material that can be salvaged and traded for rewards and cosmetics. The scrap dealer on any space station will show you the things you can obtain with the metal and will provide you with opportunities to gather more.

There are a few ways to go about finding Tainted Metal - namely the methods in which to locate the wreckages that house it. There will be plenty to find, but the first task is to locate the desolate freighters themselves. This can be done by a chance encounter, but there are ways to seek them out specifically.

Where To Find Desolate Freighters And Tainted Metal?

You can purchase coordinates from the scrap dealers on space stations, who will then give you an Emergency Broadcast Receiver to locate the wreckages. Use them in your inventory to begin the scan, and then use the Pulse Drive until it finds a source.

The desolate freighters can also be found by encountering an Anomaly whilst using the Pulse Drive in space, though you have a chance to encounter much more than just these freighters.

Alternatively, you can get an Anomaly Detector from breaking asteroids in space, though this method is much less frequent. You’ll get plenty of Tritium and Gold or Silver, but occasionally you can find these Anomaly Detectors.

Just like the Emergency Broadcast Receivers, these can be used from within the inventory, followed by awaiting the location while Pulse Driving in your ship.

With this, you will be able to locate a desolate freighter while in space. These old and ruined freighters will offer No Man's Sky's equivalent of dungeons, allowing you and a few friends to roam the abandoned corridors and quarters to discover what happened.

Logs will tell you about each freighter's incident, and sometimes you may face danger, but there will always be a certainty - Tainted Metal. You'll find it by looting the many containers aboard these vessels and will accumulate quite a bit fairly quickly.

While in a room aboard the freighter, use your scanner to highlight all of the containers that can be looted. Once looted, they will no longer remain highlighted, so it's the perfect way to make sure you have gotten everything you can out of the rooms before moving on. These can contain Tainted Metal, materials, or even blueprints for new building parts for your base.

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You can also collect up as many crew logs as possible while exploring, and then sell them to the scrap dealer later on. He will offer Tainted Metal as a reward for learning about what happened to the crew and what they were working on.

Repeat these missions and loot everything you can in order to build up the amount of Tainted Metal you have, especially if you want to unlock every reward available. Just bear in mind - these missions can be quite expensive, so make sure you have plenty of units.

Purchasable Rewards

The main use of Tainted Metal is as a currency with the scrap dealer. They will offer rewards such as banners, decorations, and even a creepy-looking cosmetic for your character. If you're looking to get everything you can from this shop, then you'll be needing to explore quite a few of these abandoned vessels.

The full list of rewards can be found below:

Refinement

Another use for Tainted Metal, if you have all of the rewards you want already, is refinement. By placing the material in a refiner, it will convert into Nanite Clusters, which can be claimed as standard Nanites - an incredibly useful currency needed for many other types of upgrades and unlockable rewards.

This can be a fantastic late-game way to obtain Nanites in bulk, though the cost of obtaining these missions will add up - the scrap dealer will be charging millions of units for information, and units are scarcely the return for these endeavors. Plus, after purchasing the coordinates from the dealer, his prices will increase. This will reset after a day, so it’s not something that you can do over and over.

NEXT: No Man's Sky: Tips For Derelict Freighters