No Man's Sky: how to get a 48 slot ship without paying through the nose
No Man's Sky is all about inventory management. Here's how to improve your cargo haulage. Now including the Gek Transmission Tower exploit.
No Man's Sky offers players a couple of way to improve their inventory space, the most important of which is by upgrading their ships. While your Exosuit and Multitool can both be expanded with extra slots, your ship is the best option, boasting stacks of up to 500 units and a maximum size of 48 slots.
So how do you get a 48 slot ship in No Man's Sky? Well, you can always try buying one, but it's not easy. For starters you'll need an obscene amount of money, and you'll also need to be lucky enough to meet an alien driving one around at the same time as you happen to be carrying a gazillion Units in your space wallet.
If you're determined to get a 48 slot ship, you can force No Man's Sky to give you one by hunting down and repairing crashed ships. Thanks to jordyvanhuissteden on Reddit, we're pretty sure that crashed ships in No Man's Sky will always have one more or less inventory slot than your current rig. In other words, every time you visit a new crashed ship you've got a 50% chance of finding an upgrade.
Similarly to how you always wear your best gear when you visit the Cryptarch in Destiny, you can force the game to give you progressively better crashed ships simply by taking every upgrade you find as you play No Man's Sky. Every time your inventory slot increases by one, you unlock the possibility of finding a crashed ship with one more slot - all the way up to the 48 slot ships.
To find crashed ships in No Man's Sky, fly over planet surfaces looking for map beacons emitting an orange light. Craft a Bypass Chip (10 Iron and 10 Plutonium, easily gathered on any planet surface) and use it on the beacon, then select Transmission Tower.
At the Transmission Tower, you must solve a sequence puzzle to receive a map update with the location of a crashed ship. These sequences are usually pretty simple but if you have any trouble just plug the first few numbers into Google and you'll almost certainly find the answer, usually in response to someone begging for homework help. Do not select an answer if you're not sure, as this will close off the quest for ever; press cancel (Circle) to back out of the interface.
Follow the new waypoint to the location of a crashed ship. If the crashed ship you find has one better inventory than your current vessel, repair its damaged systems and swap on over. You only need to repair the pulse engine and launch thruster, which is easily achieved with resources found on every planet in No Man's Sky, so the cost is virtually nil.
In this way you can gradually work your way up to a 48 slot ship, either gradually by visiting beacons when you see them playing No Man's Sky normally, or rapidly by determinedly seeking out beacons and ignoring all other goals. If you're forcing your way into a 48 slot ship as quickly as possible, you should avoid investing in tech upgrades as they'll be wasted when you swap ships.
No Man's Sky Gek Transmission Tower exploit
If you happen to be on a Gek planet, gosh, you're in for a treat. For some reason, the Transmission Tower puzzles on Gek planets are repeatable. Wait for the interface to close and fire it up again. Repeat this until it stops giving you new ship locations.
Once you've got a stack of ship locations, go ahead and harvest them as per the directions in the previous section, then just head to a map beacon and find yourself a new Gek Transmission Tower. You can find hundreds of ships on a single No man's Sky planet within a few hours using this trick.
A "Gek planet", by the way, is just a planet on which Gek aliens appear. There are multiple alien races in No Man's Sky, and this trick doesn't seem to work on planets inhabited by the other two.