Used for
Synthesis (ammo, AFMU refills, jumponium) and many engineering blueprints.
Guides // Materials
Material Codex
Learn the three material inventories and the Guardian and Thargoid piles beside them, their grade ladders, and how to turn what you have into what your engineering needs.
Most materials sit in one of three inventories — raw, manufactured, or encoded — each with its own gathering loop, storage, and trader. Guardian and Thargoid pieces use those same inventories, but traders will not convert them.
Grade ladder
Every material carries a grade and a rarity, and each grade has a hard storage cap. Caps shrink as grade climbs, so high grades are the scarce currency — the catalogue below flags which grade to gather and which to trade for.
| Grade | Rarity | Cap | Inventories |
|---|---|---|---|
| G1 | Very Common | 300 | Raw · Manufactured · Encoded |
| G2 | Common | 250 | Raw · Manufactured · Encoded |
| G3 | Standard | 200 | Raw · Manufactured · Encoded |
| G4 | Rare | 150 | Raw · Manufactured · Encoded |
| G5 | Very Rare | 100 | Manufactured · Encoded |
Pick an inventory to see its trader lines, grade columns, and the fastest gathering loop.
Chemical elements — iron, sulphur, polonium, and the rest of the periodic table.
Found at
Planet surfaces, signal sources, crystalline shards, and asteroid mining.
Seven element groups, each spanning G1 to G4. The Raw trader treats one group as a sub-category: swapping inside a group (Iron to Zinc) is the cheap sideways move.
| Group | G1 | G2 | G3 | G4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Group 1 | Carbon | Vanadium | Niobium | Yttrium |
| Group 2 | Phosphorus | Chromium | Molybdenum | Technetium |
| Group 3 | Sulphur | Manganese | Cadmium | Ruthenium |
| Group 4 | Iron | Zinc | Tin | Selenium |
| Group 5 | Nickel | Germanium | Tungsten | Tellurium |
| Group 6 | Rhenium | Arsenic | Mercury | Polonium |
| Group 7 | Lead | Zirconium | Boron | Antimony |
Seven groups times four grades is 28 raw materials. The G5 column is empty on purpose — raw has no fifth grade.
Gather G4, convert down. The crystalline shard circuit hits all seven G4s about 1,500 ly out. One evening of SRV (Surface Recon Vehicle: The wheeled buggy you drive on planet surfaces. Needs a Planetary Vehicle Hangar.) work, then a Raw trader fills G3 and G2 from that stock. G1 Carbon, Iron, Nickel, Phosphorus, and Sulphur pile up while you fly — do not plan a trip for them. Lead and Rhenium are icy-ring mining, not shards.