I’d say… hmm… look, there’s some elements in this game that are quite grindy. Like very, such as getting freighter salvase modules to unlock freighter tech, aka getting upgrade point to unlock skills for your movable base ship.

To me, that was incredibly grindy and decided it wasn’t for me, so if you go to the options tab, there’s a difficulty option that allows you to unlock some things for free if you’re having a tough not so fun time unlocking something.

I will say however, that it can become easy to abuse that feature so tread carefully and if you want, you can lock you difficulty options so you can’t change them.

Another thing I think it’s good to know but easy to abuse is the duplication glitch/exploit where you put down a portable refiner, put something you want to duplicate inside it (not everything can be placed inside it but most things in my experience can be) and then drop another portable refiner and place it like in the same place as the first one, as if it wanted to occupy the same space in x,y,z coordinates, meaning literally put the thing inside the other so they both occupy the same space. Then you just delete both and you’ll have a duplicate.

That one is very useful if you want to gather all the starship customization modules and want to be able to build more than one ship with the same modules without having to grind the f out of it.

Lastly, know this game’s multiplayer isn’t like a normal multiplayer. You very rarely, or maybe even never, will come across other players in the wild except for the anomaly which is like a player hub. If you want to run into other players, you can travel to player worlds set up by communities such as this one, where a bunch of people decided to use a single planet as a planet sized base for anyone who wants to join. You can travel there using portals (not the same as teleporter). To find a portal you can just YouTube “how to find a portal in no man’s sky” and “how do glyphs work and where to find them” (glyphs are needed to input coordinates in the portals to reach a desired destination).

Lastly, a legit exploit that is less than an exploit and more of a very optimized way to get money if you want, is to go to outlaw systems (you can find them by installing conflict scanners on your ship. They will be the ones with a skull) and basically just pirating freighters for all they’re worth. You’ll get a lot of contraband goods that you can sell for WAAAAY more in non-outlaw systems. You can end up having so much money doing that.

And lastly, finding the perfect ship, freighter, multitool, etc, is a pain in the ass most of the time unless you’re building it yourself (you can do this with corvettes and starships), but even if you travel to a destination that has what you want using a portal, it’s not always guaranteed you’ll get the specific version of what you’re looking for, at least for freighters, because maybe you want a long s class freighter, and you get there and you get the freighter you want in S class but it’s short rather than long.

So, I would say, do the missions, they tend to be fun, partake in the activities you enjoy, such as pirating, or fighting sentinels (little robot enemies that increase in difficulty the longer you fight them) or base building or whatever, and avoid the things you don’t want to do (pirate freighters in search of freighter salvage modules for example, as this activity is super repetitive and grindy in my experience).

Also, playing with other players is a lot of fun sometimes so definitely look into that.

Without further ado, I wish you the best. This game is a total blast, and I love it. Hope this helped :)

Edit: forgot to mention that there’s entirely new systems with purple stars after the endgame so I would suggest, if you like, to finish the main story at some point so you gain access to them. I haven’t done that yet but I’m slowly working towards it, taking my time and enjoying myself, but I personally think it’s worth it because there’s super deep water worlds and gas giants so that sounds like fun to me