Between major outposts and ancient ruins, planetary surfaces are peppered with compact roadside points of interest that appear automatically on your HUD compass and Analysis Visor as you hike or fly low. Glowing cylindrical Knowledge Stones teach one word of the system's dominant Gek, Korvax, or Vy'keen dialect per pillar (or Autophage words at harmonic camps), gradually translating cryptic monolith riddles and factory terminals into plain instructions. Smoking pods of Damaged Machinery sit alongside scattered cargo canisters; peeling away the Rusted Metal, Viscous Fluids, or Living Slime clogging their gears rewards steady Nanites or free Exosuit and Starship upgrade modules.
Pairing Damaged Machinery with Buried Technology
Whenever you stop at a smoking Damaged Machinery pod, raise your Analysis Visor for two seconds before moving on: almost every Damaged Machinery spawn in the game generates a white shield-shaped Buried Technology Module tucked ten to thirty units away beneath the grass. Excavating those capsules yields two to four Salvaged Data apiece, the primary currency required at the Space Anomaly to unlock base architectures, solar grids, mineral extractors, and Exocraft Geobays, while leftover Viscous Fluids from the pod itself refine chain-style through Living Slime into Runaway Mould and Nanites.
Three-star visor curiosities and Metal Fingers
Keep a sharp eye out for bright gold icons carrying one to three stars inside your Analysis Visor, which mark high-value natural anomalies. Floating Crystals crack open into glowing storm geodes rich in rare condensed minerals, Metal Fingers yield massive stacks of Uranium and Gold from a handful of bulbs, and Sentient Plants or Gravitino Balls pay brisk early Units at the cost of triggering immediate Sentinel attention the moment you pluck one.
Building a Curious Deposit Runaway Mould nanite farm
The undisputed crown jewel of three-star gold visor icons is the Curious Deposit: a cluster of fungal spheres that roll downhill the instant your Mining Beam touches them and burst into hundreds or thousands of Runaway Mould, especially with an Optical Drill placed inside a Supercharged Multi-Tool slot. Every five Runaway Mould refines into one pure Nanite. Because Curious Deposit spawns stay permanently fixed at their exact planetary coordinates, veteran Travellers claim a Base Computer beside large clusters, build four low wooden or stone walls around the balls as a catch basin, and then simply fly, drive, or chain Short-Range Teleporters 600 units away and right back to respawn the entire cluster endlessly.