No Man's Sky Quicksilver Farming Guide: Every Source and Weekly Cap

Quicksilver is No Man’s Sky’s third currency and the only one the game refuses to sell. Units buy ships, freighters, and resources; Nanites buy upgrades and blueprints; Quicksilver buys the things other players actually see — visages, capes, base decorations, starship trails, and the Void Egg that hatches a Living Ship. Every source of it is specific and mostly time-gated, which is why experienced travelers treat Quicksilver farming as a small daily habit rather than something you can grind in one marathon session.

Last updated: August 18, 2026. The current payout structure — 400 per daily, 1,800 per weekend mission — has been stable since the Waypoint update (4.0) in October 2022 raised it from 250 and 1,200. Nothing in the 2026 update cycle, including the staged Cosmos rollout, has changed these numbers as of this writing. If a future patch touches them, this page will be updated alongside our 2026 update tracker.

With the tenth-anniversary Cosmos update rolling out and celebratory cosmetics expected to flow through the Quicksilver store as they have in every past celebration — see our anniversary rewards roundup — a healthy Quicksilver balance is the cheapest preparation you can make.

Every Quicksilver Source, Ranked

Ranked roughly by how much each source pays per involvement. Note what is missing from this table: there is no trading post, no refiner recipe, and no shop that accepts any other currency. Quicksilver only moves through the channels below.

Source	Payout	Limits and notes
Weekend Nexus mission	1,800	Once per event, per save; Friday to Monday only; online required
Expedition milestones	900–1,200 per phase, ~4,500 per full run (community-counted)	Only during an active expedition; one-time
Daily Nexus mission	400	Once per real-time day; banks up to three missed days
Space Anomaly story beat	150	Recurs at points through the Artemis Path story
Condensed Stellar Ice	100	Random space encounter while pulsing; roughly 1 in 6 per community testing
Historiographical Dosimeter	15 per site	Once per ruin, monolith, or plaque sampled; requires the item
Frigate expedition events	Small amounts	Rare, random encounter decisions on fleet expeditions
Derelict freighters and Cronus	Trace amounts	Formerly farmable, now exceptionally rare drops

Nexus Daily Missions: The 400 Baseline

The workhorse. Summon the Space Anomaly, dock, and walk onto the Nexus, the large cube at its heart. Beside the standard mission console sits a Quicksilver-tagged research mission — accept it, complete the short objective, and return for a flat 400 Quicksilver.

The objectives are deliberately light: kill a handful of creatures, feed a specific animal, photograph a target, mine an asteroid type, or scan a set of objects. Each takes a few minutes. Two details make the daily worth respecting:

1. It resets on real time, not playtime. One payout per day per save, whether you play for ten minutes or ten hours.
2. Missed days bank, up to three. Skip three days and you can clear the backlog plus the fresh daily — four missions, 1,600 Quicksilver — in a single catch-up session. This is the mechanic that makes Quicksilver farming compatible with a busy schedule.

Nexus missions can be completed solo or in a group of up to four players with shared objectives, which is the fastest way to burn through a banked backlog. If you are brand new, our beginner guide covers reaching the Anomaly and the Nexus in detail.

Weekend Nexus Missions: 1,800 Per Event

From Friday evening to Monday morning, the Nexus offers a weekend community mission worth 1,800 Quicksilver — the single largest reliable payout in the game. Three things distinguish it from the daily:

• It is a true community event. Every player in the world gets the same destination and the same objective for the whole weekend. The mission usually points somewhere far away, often a colorful system worth portal-reaching; community coordinates circulate on fan forums every Friday.
• It requires online play. With Online Discovery Services disabled in your network settings, the weekend mission will not appear at all. Check this before Friday, not during.
• It pays once per save per event. You cannot repeat it for multiple payouts within one weekend.

Skipping weekends is the most expensive habit in Quicksilver farming: one missed weekend mission costs nearly half a week of dailies. For historical context, the weekend payout was 1,200 and the daily 250 before the Waypoint update of October 2022, and the figures have been untouched since — the table above reflects current, live values.

Expeditions: The Biggest One-Time Payouts

Timed expeditions are the only source that can dwarf the Nexus, and 2026 has already run two of them: Expedition 21 alongside the February Remnant update and Expedition 22 with The Swarm in May. Expeditions regularly tuck direct Quicksilver rewards into their optional milestone tracks — during the Omega expedition, phase milestones paid 900 and 1,200 Quicksilver, and community tallies put a thorough run at roughly 4,500 total.

Two mechanics make expeditions unusually valuable for Quicksilver purposes:

1. Unspent Quicksilver carries back to your main save. Finish the expedition track and the balance you earned there is yours everywhere.
2. Quicksilver purchases are shared across saves. Anything you unlock with Quicksilver during an expedition is claimable on your main save too.

The rules, then, are simple: check the current expedition’s milestone list for Quicksilver before you grind anything else, and claim every reward before the expedition ends, because expired rewards require waiting for a possible re-run. Our expedition guide explains the loop, and the expedition rewards list itemizes what each recent expedition paid.

Story Beats and Rare Sources

None of these will fund a Void Egg alone, but they pad the total, and a few cost you nothing extra.

Nada’s story briefings pay 150. At several points in the Artemis Path story, reporting your progress to Priest-Matter Nada on the Space Anomaly awards a 150 Quicksilver bonus. If you still have story missions unplayed, the story is quietly paying you to finish them.

The Historiographical Dosimeter pays 15 per site. This curiosity item, originally a reward from the Beachhead expedition’s fifth rendezvous and reported to surface in Nexus research from time to time, yields 15 Quicksilver each time you sample a plaque, monolith, or ancient ruin — plus lore text. Community testing indicates this is repeatable without limit, making it a slow but genuine trickle for players who explore on foot anyway.

Condensed Stellar Ice pays 100. While pulsing through space you will occasionally meet a frozen asteroid-like object; shooting or interacting with it drops 100 Quicksilver, community-tested at roughly a one-in-six rate among the random encounters, appearing about once per reload. It is not farmable in any serious way — treat every ice cube as a pleasant surprise.

Frigate expeditions occasionally tip Quicksilver. Rare encounter decisions on fleet expeditions can return small amounts. Likewise, derelict freighter containers and feeding cooked food to Cronus were once legitimate farms and are now, by community consensus, exceptionally rare — do not plan around either.

What Quicksilver Actually Buys

Everything is sold by the Quicksilver Synthesis Companion, the vendor at the Quicksilver counter in the Anomaly. The one functional item in the entire catalog is the most important one: the Void Egg, 3,200 Quicksilver, which starts the Starbirth quest and eventually gives you a free Living Ship. Our Living Ship guide walks the whole chain; for currency purposes, know that the egg is the single best purchase most players will ever make here.

Past that, the catalog is cosmetic, and huge. A community tally of the shop in spring 2025 counted 324 items totaling 267,250 Quicksilver — about 58 weeks of maximum Nexus income for one of everything. Typical price bands:

Category	Typical price
Banners	220
Decals and posters	400
Decorative plants and base decor	500–800
Emotes	1,500
Helmets, visages, figurines	3,000–3,200
Backpacks	3,500
Starship trails, bobbleheads, fireworks	Varies; trails and bobbleheads add small stat boosts

Spend accordingly: functional first (the Void Egg), then the cosmetics you will actually display. And before buying anything, check whether a Twitch Drops campaign is running, since drops have historically handed out cosmetics that overlap with the shop’s stock for free.

Your Realistic Weekly Quicksilver Income

Putting the reliable sources together produces a small, predictable budget — and explains why veterans never let the daily slide.

Scenario	Quicksilver
Normal week: seven dailies plus the weekend mission	4,600
Catch-up day: three banked dailies plus fresh daily and weekend mission	3,400
Week with an active expedition	4,600 plus up to ~4,500 one-time
Complete shop catalog	267,250, about 58 weeks

For the Void Egg specifically: 3,200 Quicksilver equals four daily missions plus one weekend mission. Time your grind so a weekend falls inside it and the egg is funded in about four days of casual play — the same figure our Living Ship guide uses.

Quicksilver vs Units vs Nanites

Because the three currencies never convert, each one demands its own farming approach.

Currency	What it buys	Best sources	Convertible?
Units	Ships, freighters, resources	Trading, scrapping, farms — see our money making guide	Freely earned and spent
Nanites	Upgrade modules, blueprints	Scrapping ships, Sentinel kills — see our nanites farming guide	No
Quicksilver	Cosmetics, decor, the Void Egg	Nexus missions, expeditions	No, and it cannot be bought

Units scale with effort and cleverness, Nanites scale with what you dismantle, but Quicksilver scales with nothing except showing up. That is the whole strategy: a few minutes a day, every weekend, and every expedition milestone you can reach.

Related Guides

• No Man’s Sky Living Ship Guide: Void Egg to Starbirth
• No Man’s Sky Money Making Guide
• No Man’s Sky Nanites Farming Guide
• No Man’s Sky Beginner Guide
• Every Expedition Reward in No Man’s Sky
• No Man’s Sky 10th Anniversary Rewards
• Every No Man’s Sky Update in 2026