No Man's Sky: 15 Tips & Tricks The Game Doesn't Tell You
11. You Need To Use Beacons To Save & Upload Data For Currency
No Man's Sky is essentially a game about discovery. While you very rarely encounter other players in the game, you can leave your mark on the universe by being the first person to discover planets, plants and creatures, renaming then uploading them so that others who one day encounter them will know it was you got their first.
When you land on a new planet, it's a good idea to find its beacon quickly, which will let you save your game, earn some units (the in-game currency) as well as become the official 'discoverer' of that planet.
Another good reason to hit up that beacon is that if you die, any items or discoveries you made will be left on your corpse (kind of like Dark Souls), which means that to get them back or upload them you'll need to make a perilous corpse run. If you die on your way, then you lose your precious discoveries.