Recover Disappearing Inventory in No Man’s Sky: Waypoint

The Waypoint update (October 2022) overhauled the No Man’s Sky inventory system. The most obvious changes are that “General” and “Cargo” have been combined, the max inventory size has been increased, and technology can only be installed in the “Technology” section. Tech items can now be uninstalled and kept in storage until needed, not just dismantled, so anything that used to be installed in “General” gets boxed up and put in cargo when you update the old save. It’s a bit of a pain to prioritize your tech to start with, but after that, opening new slots is just grinding.

That’s not the problem I want to talk about.

I ran into an actual bug with the new inventory.

Imaginary Inventory

When I picked up items from frigate missions after the upgrade, some of them disappeared. It seems like it kept adding them to full inventories instead of flipping over to the next one with room. So I ended up with items that I couldn’t see, couldn’t use, couldn’t move… but I could sell them at a trade terminal. Or install a storage expansion on the station. And it would remind me to use those phantom drop box maps.

Unfortunately, this included upgrades to the living ship. And because it’s better at adding items to existing stacks now, when I picked up some more after the next day’s expeditions, they went into the same invisible stacks.

I went looking for other people who’d encountered missing inventory and mostly found players complaining about how awful the changes are and they had the perfect ship and now it’s all ruined and so on.

But I did find a post with a workaround!

The Workaround

On the Steam Community Forums, I found this post about the problem with a simple workaround for getting (most of) the items into real inventory slots. It’s not just trade terminals that can see the hidden inventory. It’s refiners too. And you can take things back out of a refiner!

Open a refiner.
Put the inaccessible item in.
Take it back out.
Do the “Hokey Pokey” and turn yourself about. (Just kidding)

And that’s it!

I got the Spawning Sacs out of my exosuit’s imaginary inventory that way!