No Man's Sky Antimatter guide: Where to find Antimatter and how to craft it for yourself

No Man’s Sky antimatter isn’t anything to sneeze at, and it’s pretty essential to your adventures unless you want to be marooned on the same planet or system for, well, ever. Unfortunately, it’s not something that just grows on trees unlike a good 80% of all the other materials in No Man's Sky, so you’re going to have to put in a little elbow grease to get some. Lucky for you, we’re going to make it easy by telling you exactly what you need to know to get enough No Man's Sky antimatter to reach your chosen destination.

No Man’s Sky – Crafting Antimatter

As mentioned, crafting antimatter is probably the easiest way to ensure that you always have a steady supply of Warp Cells on hand for yourself. Antimatter is a relatively easy thing to put together since it only involves two main components:

Chromatic Metal x 25
Condensed Carbon x 20

Both of those materials are things you’ll learn how to obtain fairly quickly after you step foot into the game for the first time. The easiest to locate and potentially the most plentiful source of Chromatic Metal will be Copper – pick this up or mine it using the Terrain Manipulator and chuck it into a Refiner to get Chromatic Metal. This process can be repeated with Emeril or Cadmium too if Copper is in short supply on whatever landmass you’re currently occupying.

The other material, Condensed Carbon, is also an easy find. You just have to stick a whole bunch of Carbon through a Refiner. Plants are an incredibly easy and exploitable source of this material no matter where you land, so get to deforesting your surroundings if you’re having some trouble netting enough to get the 20 Condensed Carbon you need for your Antimatter.

Once you have your beloved Antimatter, you can use it in a number of excellent and useful recipes. While Warp Cells might be the most common use of them, you can also use Antimatter to make the following: Exocraft Summoning Station, Shield Lattice, and a Teleport Receiver. All that gathering will pay off, we promise. Teleport Receivers and Summoning Stations are both nice quality-of-life upgrades once you’re far enough into the game to feel a need for utilizing that sort of technology.

No Man’s Sky – Finding and Buying Antimatter

You’ll get your first taste of Antimatter by dutifully following through with the story missions as indicated in No Man’s Sky. When you’re no longer a space-faring infant and you’ve gotten access to the Hyperdrive (which makes you warp capable in a flash), the game will encourage you to go explore wonders beyond the planet. When you do so, you’ll luck out and come across an errant signal that will lead you to an abandoned building when marked.

Have a yarn with the terminal inside the abandoned building and it will give you Antimatter and provide you with the recipe to craft it for yourself. And who said that video games didn’t teach self-sufficiency? This is the recipe that you need in order to start making it all on your own, so this is an essential step if you’re wanting to get further in the story and make sure that you’re making the most of this rare material.

You need Antimatter to craft warp cells in No Man’s Sky

As we’ve already mentioned above, the fact that this material is rare is a travesty, since you need it for everyday objects like Warp Cells if you’re someone particularly set on exploring the galaxy: a Warp Cell requires both Antimatter x 1 and Antimatter Housing x 1 to complete. The materials for making Antimatter Housing are also very easily acquired, one being Metal Plating (made from literally harvesting rocks for Ferrite, and those are everywhere), and another being Oxygen.

Just like how the gift of Carbon keeps on giving if you’re a plant, the same logic applies to Oxygen. If you’re not doing so hot on the material front, surround yourself with a bunch of flora and get to harvesting if you want the complementary components needed to put that Antimatter to good use for you. You’re going to want to stay stocked up on Warp Cells if you’re wanting to ensure that you can actually use Hyperdrive, and seeing as how that’s one of the only ways to get around that doesn’t involve wasting a hundred light years, you’ll be getting real familiar with Antimatter soon enough.

If you can’t be bothered with following up on the Crafting side of things, whether it be because of the sheer effort required to gather those materials or the fact that shooting at space pirates seems to be a better way to spend your time, then don’t fret. You can convert some of that sweet pirate booty (read: units) into actionable results on the Antimatter front by buying some from merchants. You’ll want to hit up a Galactic Trade terminal for this, and these are a dime a dozen at outposts and space stations. This isn’t any more expensive than trying to get your inventory upgraded, so it’s a feasible alternative to making your own at least in the beginning if you’re confident that you won’t need to mortgage your freighter to pay off any Antimatter related debts.

Antimatter is a pesky little thing to get your hands on but once you’ve been introduced to the substance, our recommendation would be to craft as much of it as you can. Sure, you can pay some wandering merchant for their hard work in keeping your hands clean and Carbon-free, but that just seems like a waste of money considering the limited quantities of items that vendors often have, and the sheer demand for Antimatter that you’re going to create every time you jet around the solar system. With the ingredients being more than easy to synthesize, it’s just a matter of putting aside some time to harvest them for maximum efficiency. Worried you won’t have enough space to hold all the supplementary materials to make Antimatter? Check out our No Man's Sky storage guide on how to manage your inventory; it’s got a bunch of handy storage tips for even the most gathering-obsessed player.