Glitching
There are many ways to use glitch building in No Man’s Sky to both create otherwise impossible things as well as increase efficiency.
In this section, we will only be covering Adjacency Glitching as, without a macro, wire glitching is hellish, though a Macro for the Wire Glitch will also be provided in the Macro section.
Adjacency Glitching is a technique where you use the positioning of one item to place another item that will often not otherwise be possible to place in that circumstance.
Anything in the build menus can be Adjacency Glitched, the limitation is that it can only be glitched from what is next to it.
To Adjacency Glitch, first, you position the item you are glitching from.
This item must be in a green, ready-to-build state, we refer to this as Greenlighting.
You also require both the materials to build what you are glitching from as well as what you are glitching too.
Once you have the greenlit part positioned, press both to move left or right to the item you wish to glitch in within the menu as well as the button to build.
These 2 buttons need to be pressed at the same time, and I mean the same time, though it appears that having the direction key be pressed first is important.
On my macro for this glitch, I have both buttons pressed within the same millisecond, but it only works consistently with the direction button first in the order.
Doing this will build the next item with the same positional information as the first.
Each item has an anchor point, this is almost always centred on the horizontal, and bottom on the vertical, so a wall or frontage with have it’s anchor bottom centre, as will a flooring, so glitching from a frontage to a floor will place the floor centred on the horizontal but at the lowest point of the frontage allowing you to perfectly glitch in a floor among other floors with only the need to be able to fit a frontage in a thin line in the centre.
I won’t go into it in detail, but just so you have a basic idea, the Wire Glitch essentially allows you to place any buildable item in the position and orientation of a wire placement point.
It should be noted that this will often leave a gap on the surface, as wires usually standoff from the surface of other things.
Infinite Refiners:
Obtaining any number of one type of refiner in your base is very easy.
It should be noted that the limitation recently put on Refiners per area, has likely been implemented to better control the inventories of those refiners.
Items disappearing from the refiner inventories has been a big problem for the longest time, the placement of refiners when they were first introduced caused many bugs including shared inventories which caused duping exploits among other things.
So it is recommended that you still space them out at least a bit to hopefully lessen the chances of items disappearing, though that risk is always there.
Generally, you are very unlikely to lose items if you are near the refiners in a stable base that has no pop in and a not insane amount of them, 12 seems to be very stable for me.
So to avoid this limitation, you just need to adjacency glitch.
The limitation is on Refiner type, so you can always glitch from a large to a medium if you don’t have more than 1 large already built in that area, or vice versa.
You can also glitch from a wall unit to a medium, though note that this will have the medium refiners orientation be twisted, also I would advise not glitching them on to walls or ceilings as this can make it impossible to reach the output which if you refine something, it will never be removed and so the refiner cannot be deleted.
For Large Refiners, you can glitch from the Appearance Modifier, though you will just have to rotate it 180 degrees if you want the refiner to face you.
If you wish to have lots of both types, I would recommend setting up medium first, then large for the neatest setup.
Galactic Trade Terminal:
Galactic Trade Terminals can be a tad annoying due to having no way to power them with a wire.
They are natively powered via conduction, which without glitching means, they must be snapped to a wall within either a Circular or Cuboid type room and that room then be powered.
But there are 3 effective ways to conductively power Trade Terminals outside.
First is the sort of Outdoor ATM-style, which I fully cover in this video here.
The basics are that you use a wire horizontally across where you wish to glitch the terminal into, then Adjacency Glitch from a Salvage Storage Module to the Trade Terminal on top of that wire.
You delete the wire hoping it doesn’t take the Terminal with it, which sometimes it will, then you can glitch other things like a frontage into the terminal from a floor to provide a backing and position a cuboid room behind the terminal that you can glitch from a cuboid window to cuboid room twice to phase it into the terminal.
Powering the room that is phased with the Terminal will conductively power it.
Darklord Xelrick did lot’s of testing around this and found a superior way to conductively power the Terminal.
This is through a Hydroponic Tray.
You glitch the Trade Terminal in, and then position a wall plant, which is to the left of the single Hydroponics Tray in the build menu on the back of the Trade Terminal and Adjacency Glitch to the Tray, if you position this correctly, powering the Tray will conductively power the Trade Terminal.
Correct positioning is on the back, but closer to the sides as a Trade Terminal has a spherical boundary that is invisible, you can see this if you place a light or wall plant on it, and it is possible to have this positioned nicely while still having the trays connection and general appearance hidden behind a wall or under a floor that you have the terminal glitched into.
I have favoured placing the Terminals on the floor, I did this glitching from the Wall Unit to the Terminal on the edge of a flooring.
You will need to rotate the Wall Unit 180 degrees for the Terminal to glitch-in facing up, then glitch the tray upside down beneath it for power.
The 3rd way is something I just discovered now while writing this section, we had tried lights in the past to no avail, but I had a thought, and it works!
This third method uses a light to add a wire connection inside the Terminal.
For this you must place the light exactly where the terminal will go, the positioning of this may take a few tries, but it will be beautifully clean afterwards.
Lights have odd clipping, in a good way, you can put them in very small places and then don’t affect a lot, you can even hide them between pipe connections for a cool ambient glow.
So for this method, you place your light first, then glitch in your Terminal, then just power the light and job-done, you have a working Galactic Trade Terminal, with a tiny footprint that is easy to fit into any build.
Bio-Domes:
Synthesis added an incredibly useful and fantastically time-saving method of Harvesting crops, this is a computer terminal at the top centre of the Bio-Dome that upon interacting will fully harvest the dome.
Darklord Xelrick got right into this and started testing after he noticed a Bio-Dome he had previously built and glitched in 140 or so Gamma Weed, harvested all the plants he had glitched in.
He tested further with Hydroponics Trays which also had their contents harvested upon interaction with the computer.
With Darklords findings as a base, I did some testing of my own, and it would seem that the bio-domes harvesting works on area, not connection or phasing, which makes sense, and that this area is a cylinder and not a dome, the area is as wide and deep as the dome and as high.
So I came up with this method which is very aesthetically appealing and allows for 32 crops to be harvested per dome, which isn’t as high as you can get glitching in trays, but it’s certainly high enough, as it halves your harvest time.
First, you position a circular room to where the dome that you will harvest will be.
On top of that Circular room place a Bio-Dome.
You must now fill the Bio-Dome with what will be harvested as you will not be able to plant crops in thereafter the next step.
Also note that this Bio-Dome will not need to be accessed, so no need for doors or anything of the like.
Next, greenlight a Circular room snapping beneath the dome and Adjacency Glitch to a Bio-Dome, this will phase the lower dome into the upper dome bringing the upper domes crop-locations into the harvest area of the lower dome, meaning if you harvest the lower one, it will harvest both.
Also note that if you fill all crop points with crops, then place your door in afterwards, the crops won’t disappear, allowing you to have a full 16 per dome.
One big thing to note in this glitch is that if you mess up the Adjacency Glitch from Circular Room to Bio-Dome, and place that circular, when you delete the Circular it will also delete the crops in the dome it is snapped to.
You won’t lose your items though and will just need to replant it.
Another trick for shorter walking distances is general dome placement.
If you snap a line of corridors where you want your domes to be, then delete 3 of them, snap a dome in, delete the next 3 and snap a dome in, you can have your line of domes without corridors, so less to run through.
By placing a door in both bio-domes at the connection, it will make an opening acting as a tiny corridor.
Though this can cause a few odd clipping issues making walking through it not 100% smooth.
One last thing to note is that when you unload your farm and come back, you can often place crops again in plots that already have crops, I have done this a single time on my test farm and it appears to harvest fully, meaning that both crops in that singular location are growing and being harvested.
I have not fully tested the limits of this, but it would appear you can have many many crops in a single location, which would mean that you can harvest one hell of a lot more than 32 at a time and still have it looking pleasant.
Awesome. Glitch knowledge here.
Great info, and cleared a few things up which others leave out.