No Man’s Sky isn’t a simple game with simple goals. Sure, you want to get to the center of the universe, but there’s a huge amount of other stuff you can do along the way. Like Minecraft, which also has a final and far-off goal, No Man’s Sky is about the journey more than the destination. And as the game nears release, it seems like the driving force behind that journey is going to be trade—and the in-game economy is shaping up to be one of the game’s most exciting features.

No Man’s Sky Economy: The Spice Must Flow

Much of the actual gameplay of No Man’s Sky centers around gathering resources and technologies to improve your ship and weaponry… and to sell off so you can get money to improve your ship and weaponry. The in-game economy has two major components: The player-to-player economy and the player-to-computer economy. Both are set to be interesting for the same reason: arbitrage. Some resources will be very common in one system but very rare in another; as a result, players can harvest in such a system and move to ones where it’s rare to sell for a profit—either to other players or to NPCs.

Moreover, players can use resources to craft finished goods, and not just for themselves. Finished goods—weapons, ship upgrades and that sort of thing—can also be sold to other players so they don’t have to venture off into those remote and dangerous systems themselves. And that’s where the root of the player-to-player economy is going to set in. In a game that’s mostly not really multiplayer, the economy will be a way for players to interact directly, and pursue their own economic ends. And it makes it worthwhile to spend chunks of time mining for rare resources you discover, then ferrying them to another system for big bucks.

The No Man’s Sky economy is going to be really tumultuous when the game first launches on August 9—a good reason to get in on the ground floor. It’ll be an almost literal Gold Rush out there, with players seeking interesting planets with resources whose purpose is initially mostly unknown. What will be valuable rather than super common? What will seem valuable, but not actually be that rare? Who will make huge fortunes in the first few days, and what will they spend it on? It’s going to be the Wild West out there, and even if the in-game economy isn’t as complex as, say, EVE Online, it’s going to be a really thrilling part of the game.