No Man's Sky Refiner Recipes: The Complete Guide

The Refiner is one of the first tools you unlock in No Man's Sky, and it never stops being useful — every phase of the game leans on it in some way. It turns raw ore into something more concentrated and valuable: Ferrite Dust becomes Pure Ferrite, three different star gases become Methane, and rare metals become the fuel that gets your ship across a galaxy. Knowing what refines into what saves you dozens of hours you'd otherwise spend digging.

There are three separate refining devices in the game, and they aren't interchangeable — each one only runs recipes built for its own input count: one slot, two, or three. The tables below are grouped by exactly that split, starting with how the refiners themselves work and how you get your hands on each one.

Portable and Personal Refiners

The Portable Refiner is the simplest device in the game — its blueprint is known from the start, and you can have one built within your first few minutes. It only costs 1 Metal Plating and 30 Oxygen. Unlike the other two refiners, it can be picked back up and redeployed anywhere with a single button press, which makes it perfect to carry along and drop right next to whatever deposit you're mining.

The Portable Refiner has one quirk the others don't: it needs fuel. Drop Carbon, Condensed Carbon, or Oxygen into the top slot of its interface, or nothing gets processed. Condensed Carbon is the best deal — the same mass lasts noticeably longer than raw Carbon does.

The Personal Refiner does the exact same job as the Portable one — one-ingredient recipes only — but it lives inside your exosuit instead of taking up ground space. Its blueprint is sold at the Anomaly for Nanites, and building the technology itself costs Chromatic Metal and Oxygen. It doesn't need fuel the way the Portable version does.

Medium Refiner: Two Ingredients

The Medium Refiner is the real jump in capability — it takes two resources at once and combines them into a finished product. The blueprint is bought at the Anomaly's construction research terminal, and building the machine itself costs Magnetised Ferrite and Di-hydrogen Jelly. Unlike the Portable Refiner, this one is a fixed base part: it has to sit on an active base, doesn't need fuel, and draws power straight from your base's grid.

You can only place three Medium Refiners on a single 50-unit plot, but they're allowed to sit in clusters of five side by side — handy when you want to run several conversions in parallel.

Large Refiner: Three Ingredients

The Large Refiner sits at the top of this chain: three input slots unlock the most valuable conversions in the game, from precious-metal alloys to starship launch fuel. Its blueprint comes from Scientific Research missions, but you have to own the Medium Refiner blueprint first — the Large Refiner only unlocks after it. Building it takes Chromatic Metal, Sodium Nitrate, and Microprocessors.

The Large Refiner needs to sit inside a habitable part of your base, but unlike the Medium one, it draws no power from the grid at all. The same 50-unit plot only allows two of these at once. Dismantling any of the three refiner types refunds every material you spent on it, so there's no risk in experimenting with placement.

Once the Large Refiner is available, the Medium one loses almost all of its appeal — the only real reason to keep using it is running out of room for a second Large Refiner. Unlock them in order: Portable/Personal from the very start, Medium as soon as you can afford the blueprint and materials, and Large right behind it.

One Slot: Basic Refining

Single-ingredient recipes are available from your first minutes in the game and form the backbone of the whole resource economy. Here one resource converts directly into another with no catalyst involved — the fastest way to bump up a material's purity.

A separate one-slot group runs the other way — converting refined alloys back into sellable metal: Aronium and Dirty Bronze both give Silver, Lemmium/Magno-gold/Grantine give Gold, and Geodesite/Iridesite give Platinum. All of these alloys are themselves made on a Large Refiner — the full chain is covered further down.

Chromatic Metal and Colored Metals: Trading in Both Directions

Chromatic Metal is the shared intermediate for four colored metals — Copper, Cadmium, Emeril, Indium — plus Quartzite. The conversion runs both ways: a metal turns into Chromatic Metal, and Chromatic Metal plus one more unit of that same metal turns back into a larger amount of the metal. The exchange rate is different for every metal in each direction, and that gap between the two rates is exactly what decides whether shuffling a metal back and forth is worth doing at all.

The reverse conversion always gives the same output — 1 metal plus 1 Chromatic Metal becomes 2 metal, no matter which metal you're feeding it. But how much of that metal it costs to make the one Chromatic Metal is different for each of them, and that's what makes the profit from the loop different too.

Take Indium: 2 Indium makes 4 Chromatic Metal, so a single Chromatic Metal costs half an Indium. Running the reverse recipe spends that half-Indium (as Chromatic Metal) plus one seed Indium, and hands back 2 Indium — one of those is just the seed coming home, the other is pure gain. Net result per application: spend 0.5 Indium, gain 1 Indium, for a profit of +0.5 Indium, or +50% on whatever you put in.

Copper and Cadmium run the exact same loop backwards, into a loss: 2 Copper only makes 1 Chromatic Metal, meaning that one Chromatic Metal costs a full 2 Copper — and the reverse recipe still only hands back +1 metal on top. Spend 2, get 1 back: the loop eats half your stock every time you run it. Don't bother spinning Copper or Cadmium through this cycle unless you genuinely have nowhere else to put them.

Here's the loop worked through on Indium: starting from 6 Indium, convert 2 of it into 4 Chromatic Metal, leaving 4 Indium in reserve. Run the reverse recipe four times, each time spending 1 Indium and 1 Chromatic Metal to get 2 Indium back — that's 8 Indium total by the end. Started with 6, ended with 8: a clean 33% gain on the original stock across one full pass, once you account for the Indium spent making the Chromatic Metal in the first place. None of this works on the activated form of any metal — those can only be mined, refining never restores them.

Earlier in the game's life the reverse recipe for Cadmium, Emeril, and Indium gave ×4 instead of ×2 — the loop really was an effectively unlimited duplication trick back then. The developers cut the output down to ×2 in a dedicated patch specifically to close that hole, so any old video or spreadsheet floating around with a fourfold return is describing a version of the game that no longer exists.

Quartzite: The New Star Metal

Quartzite behaves as a fifth colored metal alongside Copper, Cadmium, Emeril, and Indium — it multiplies through Chromatic Metal the same way, and it also comes in an activated form.

Activated Quartzite has its own dedicated reverse recipe — refining it with Carbon turns it back into ordinary Quartzite, the only activated metal form that gets one. It's there for the case where the first purple system you find only has the activated variant sitting on its planets, with no plain Quartzite available for crafting technology: without that fallback, progress through that part of the game could stall out entirely.

Crystallised Helium, Lithium, and Uranium

Quartzite acts as a switch between two other star-system resources, Crystallised Helium and Lithium: adding Quartzite or its activated form converts one into the other and back again, with the activated form always doubling the return.

Methane and Plant Materials

You don't strictly need an atmosphere extractor on a gas giant to get Methane — it can also be synthesised by refining three other star gases together in equal parts: Nitrogen, Sulphurine, and Radon. That's a handy fallback on a planet that has everything else you need except a gas giant nearby.

As an organic hydrocarbon, Methane converts into almost any plant material once you add the right second ingredient — everything from Gamma Root to Star Bulb.

Two Slots: Catalysts and Gas Chains

The Medium Refiner unlocks the core trick of refining — "resource plus catalyst," where the second ingredient is almost always Oxygen, Ferrite Dust, or Pure Ferrite. Oxygen specifically is what turns a modest amount of a basic element into a large batch of something more valuable, so it's worth keeping a steady supply of it on hand for any serious refining run.

The Medium Refiner also gets Oxygen out of ten different types of plant material, paired with a Kelp Sac and Carbon — a useful fallback when there's no Oxygen harvester nearby but plants are everywhere.

Multiplier Loops: Turning a Little Into a Lot

A separate group of two-slot recipes hands back more resource than you feed into it — keep folding part of the output back in as input and the stockpile grows with every cycle. They all lean on the same catalyst: Oxygen is what turns a modest starting stock into a permanently growing one.

You can bootstrap any of these loops from scratch: Salt combined with Oxygen gives you starter Chlorine on the spot, and plain Cobalt with Oxygen gives starter Ionised Cobalt — from there the sixfold loop takes over on its own.

Chlorine has its own separate branch through the Kelp Sac too — an underwater resource that itself refines into Chlorine when paired with practically anything else you're carrying.

Faecium, beyond the familiar chain through Di-hydrogen and Mordite, also comes straight out of a pair of star gases, and Condensed Carbon or its regular form squeezes a fourfold return out of Mordite.

Three Slots: Alloys and Fuel Combinations

The Large Refiner opens up the family of "alchemical" alloys — Aronium, Herox, Grantine, Lemmium, Magno-gold, and Dirty Bronze. All six share the exact same recipe shape: a base resource, a Cobalt- or ferrite-based catalyst, and one of four interchangeable expensive metals in the third slot. The result is always identical — 1 unit of alloy in 45 seconds, no matter which of the four third-slot options you use.

Gas concentrates follow a similar pattern: a base star gas, Carbon or Condensed Carbon, and a choice of Salt or Chlorine in the third slot.

The remaining triple recipes cover starship fuel, batteries, and Nanite Clusters in their purest form:

Another three-slot recipe turns Silver and Gold into Chromatic Metal when you add any of the five colored metals as the third ingredient — the yield scales with how rare the added metal is, from Copper all the way up to Quartzite and Indium.

Nanites: What to Refine Your Loot Into

A Nanite Cluster can be refined out of almost any halfway-valuable loot, but the return varies a lot depending on the source — worth knowing what's worth carrying to a refiner and what isn't.

Runaway Mould deserves special mention: it restocks itself from ground deposits that respawn just by flying off and coming back, and the refining runs with zero player input the whole way — arguably the most passive nanite source in the game. Loot from corrupted worlds and harmonic-camp guardians pays out far more per unit, but shows up a lot less often.

Rare Trophies and Glass

A few of the rarer things you pick up on your travels are worth refining rather than just selling outright — some of them turn into more useful metal or raw material than the sale price alone would suggest.

Both Glass recipes give the same result, so which one to use just comes down to what's easier to collect: Frost Crystal only grows on cold planets, while Silicate Powder can be dug up almost anywhere.

Basalt and a Few Minor Recipes

Basalt is the one building material that also comes out of a refiner instead of pure planetary mining. It's a two-slot recipe with a choice of second ingredient.