Indium is the last of the Chromatic Metal types that you’ll most likely come across in No Man’s Sky, with Copper, Cadmium, and Emeril each required to build the subsequent upgrade for your ship’s Hyperdrive. So, if you’re on the hunt for Indium, you’ll need to have added the Cadmium and Emeril Drives already.
As with its Chromatic siblings, Indium can be a valuable resource in its own right, partly as a crafting resource and just for its pure retail value, with an average deposit likely to be worth more than 100,000 Units. It can also be refined into its Chromatic Metal state, a key building block of many of the game’s main structures and upgrades, and you usually get the best returns in your refiner from Indium.
How to build the Indium Drive and farm Indium in No Man’s Sky
As with the other two drives, you can pick up the blueprints for the Indium Drive from the Starship Research merchant on the Space Anomaly at a cost of 200 Nanites. You’ll then need to use 250x Emeril and 5x Wiring Looms to build it ― if you’re short on the latter, you can usually find them for sale at your nearest trading terminal.
With the new drive in place, you’re ready to warp to an Indium-rich star system, which will appear as a blue orb on your Galaxy Map ― although they can look more like a bright white until you zoom in a little closer. Every planet within the system should have a steady supply of Indium, but there may be a few exceptions, so use your ship’s planetary scanner to check.
Indium deposits aren’t quite as easy to spot from afar, as the metallic blue coloring doesn’t stand out as much as the others, but a quick scouting session with the Analysis Visor should find your nearest supply. Then you just need to fire up the Terrain Manipulator and fill your inventory slots with as much Indium as you can get your hands on.
What can you use Indium for in No Man’s Sky?
As mentioned, Indium is a valuable resource in its own right, meaning that it’s not something you’ll want to be crafting with very often. It’s probably why only a handful of items require it, and those are suited more to seasoned travelers, such as the Albumen Pearl Orb, Modified Quanta, Reality De-Threader, and Temporal Warp Computer.
Its value is reflected in some decent 4x Chromatic Metal returns if you refine it with Pure Ferrite (or 4x Magnetised Ferrite if you use Ferrite Dust instead), while mixing one unit of Indium with one of Silver and Gold in a large refiner will get you 30x Chromatic Metal. Although, given its pure cash value, you might be tempted just to sell the Indium and buy yourself a new upgrade instead.
Similar to the other metals, you can refine it with any source of Chromatic Metal to double your Indium supply (Indium + Chromatic Metal = 2x Indium). Given the price difference, there’s merit in using Copper to make the metal and then upgrading it to Indium to sell for a healthy profit. As with Emeril, there’s also an exploit to harvest infinite supplies, though it has been toned down recently. It works by turning 2x Indium into 4x Chromatic Metal. You then combine that metal with 4x Indium to get you eight units of Indium from a starting point of six. It might take a while, but there’s a lot of money to be made in that refiner!
