No Man's Sky Oxygen Guide - Best Ways to Farm Oxygen (2023)

In No Man’s Sky, oxygen is life. Well… That’s technically true in the real world, too. Spacefaring can be a messy deal, though, and you’ll need lots of supplies to survive out there in the vastness of deep space. It’s a good thing then that No Man’s Sky players have an entire universe full of easily accessible raw materials to be plucked from any planet’s surface. But not every material has equal value. As a matter of fact, the most important elements you’ll always need to uncover (for your own survival) are carbon, ferrite, sodium, and oxygen.

It’s great that sources of carbon and ferrite are scattered all over the place; you’re hard-pressed to travel five feet on any planet’s surface without bumping into several varieties of minerals and plant life that provide ample quantities of the aforementioned elements. Sodium, which powers your suit’s hazard protection system, is slightly rarer, but still pretty common.

But then there’s oxygen, the life-giving element that powers your suit’s life support systems. Oxygen is also fundamental for crafting important equipment and tech such as the Portable Refiner and the Antimatter Housing component. Not to mention you need it for charging Portal glyphs later on in the game. Yet it’s a lot tougher to find oxygen in comparison to the other common elements, but there are a few reliable ways to get it no matter which star system you’re in.

So how do you find oxygen in No Man’s Sky? We’ve broken it down to four major ways to get this resource depending on how far into the game you are.

How to Collect Oxygen Early on

Collecting oxygen is much easier once you’ve repaired your suit’s Scanner, which happens in the early phases of the game as long as you follow the main story quest. Once you’ve repaired it, you can press C on mouse and keyboard or press L3 on any controller to rapidly scan the entire environment.

Oxygen plants in the environment will appear on your HUD as red “O2” markers, and you can run over to any of those oxygen plants without specialized gear and immediately harvest each of the available raw units of oxygen.

The resource also occasionally appears in several other places you might find on any given planet, including the planet you begin your journey on. For one, you might find several units of oxygen laying around inside of the various containers and storage boxes that you run across while scavenging outposts and abandoned shelters.

There are also some plants and minerals that drop oxygen when you break them down with your trusty Mining Laser. You’ll need your suit’s Visor tool in order to identify which objects can drop oxygen. Once you’re in Visor mode, you can scan unidentified plants and minerals, telling you which materials they drop. But since the distribution of plant and mineral types is randomized, you might not find any oxygen-based lifeforms in your starting zone.

There are a few things that always drop oxygen when beamed to death with a Mining Laser. You can easily identify them by the name Hazardous Flora. These always drop oxygen units no matter which planet you find them on.

How to Get Oxygen in the Midgame

There are two new ways to get oxygen that appear once you’re in the middle section of No Man’s Sky.

The first method is by researching and building Oxygen Harvesters inside of your bases. These automatically gather oxygen from the air as long as you keep them fueled up. Consider that you can place up to six Oxygen Harvesters in one base, and it costs the equivalent of 100 carbon to fully fuel a single Oxygen Harvester. You’ll also only accumulate 250 units of oxygen before needing to unload the machine, so it may only be worth spending time managing the machine while you plan to spend time within close proximity to it.

The second method is by synthesizing large quantities of oxygen at a Medium or Large Refiner with kelp sacs and other materials. Kelp sacs are easy to find underneath any ocean on any planet, and you can find them on common underwater flora such as candle kelp. Once you have some kelp sacs, all you need to do is throw them into a Refiner with a unit of carbon to get two units of oxygen. Or, you can get fancy with your recipes by throwing one kelp sac and one condensed carbon in with another organic material to get ten units of oxygen.

Here’s a list of every item you can throw into a Large Refiner alongside one kelp sac and one condensed carbon to generate ten oxygen:

• Fungal mould
• Cactus flesh
• Frost crystal
• Solanium
• Gamma root
• Star bulb

How to Get Oxygen in the Endgame

By the time you’ve spent a considerable amount of time playing No Man’s Sky, you probably don’t care about wasting ingredients synthesizing or spending time maintaining a machine to collect something as paltry as oxygen. After all, like any respectable space entity, you have animals to breed and dilapidated freighters to plunder.

Once you have the expendable credits for it, you can basically just purchase every last unit of oxygen you find in space stations or in the inventories of the other travelers you meet and trade with. Really, everybody has oxygen in vast quantities, which is a bit ironic, given how much trouble we needed to go through to find it before.

Every space station, every trading post, and basically every trade terminal, including the ones you set up inside your own base, sells at least 100 units of oxygen at an unflinching 41-42 credits per unit. Space stations often carry just shy of 2,000 units of oxygen, so you could viably fly (or portal) between star systems and lap up their whole supply of oxygen, ad infinitum.

After all, nothing says “space colonization” quite like commoditizing all the breathable air on a space station. Happy tidings and may your oxygen barony be fruitful!