You’re stranded. The radiation is screaming, your hazard protection is blinking red, and you’ve just slammed a life support gel or a health pack. Nothing. Your bar stays empty. It’s one of those moments in No Mans Sky that makes you want to chuck your controller through the screen. Honestly, the nms use health unit but received no health glitch—or mechanic confusion, depending on who you ask—is a rite of passage for every Interloper from the Euclid galaxy to the center of the universe.
It feels like a betrayal. You’ve spent the carbon, you’ve found the wall-mounted unit in a derelict freighter or a minor settlement, and the game just eats your interaction without giving you back those precious white crosses.
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The Difference Between Health and Life Support
Most players get tripped up because Hello Games uses two distinct systems that look similar but act like total strangers. Your "Health" (the white crosses/plus signs) is your core vitality. Your "Life Support" (the tank icon) is your stamina and breathing. If you use a Health Unit while your core health is full, but your Life Support is low, the machine does exactly zero things for you. It’s like trying to fix a broken leg by drinking a glass of water. It’s refreshing, sure, but the bone is still snapped.
The Health Unit specifically restores your Core Health. These are the squares/crosses in the top left of your HUD. If those squares are full, the Health Unit won't do anything, even if you’re about to suffocate because your life support tanks are empty.
The "Ghost" Interaction Glitch
Sometimes it’s not you; it’s the code. Since the Worlds Part 1 and Orbital updates, there’s been a recurring bug where the interaction prompt triggers, the animation plays, but the server-side check fails to register the healing. This happens a lot in multiplayer. If you’re in a session with a friend and the latency is high, the "nms use health unit but received no health" issue becomes a common headache.
The game thinks you're at 100% because the data hasn't synced, so the unit "fires" but restores nothing. In single-player, this usually happens if you interrupt the animation too quickly by jetpacking away.
Why Settlements and Freighters are Different
If you’re inside a player-built base or a generated settlement, Health Units require power. This sounds obvious, but NMS is weird about "passive" power. If a base is underpowered or on a grid that’s flickering, the unit might look active—it might even have the blue light—but it won't actually cycle the healing process.
I’ve seen dozens of players report that they used a health unit in a derelict freighter and got nothing back. In derelict freighters, certain "cold" mechanics can actually suppress healing effects if you are currently taking environmental damage. You have to step into a heater zone first. If the "Cold" bar is actively ticking down your health, some wall units simply can't keep up with the damage tick, making it look like you received no health at all.
The Shield vs. Health Confusion
This is the big one. Your Hazard Protection (the big bar at the bottom) and your Shields (the bar above your health crosses) are your first lines of defense. When these are down, you start losing the actual "Health" squares.
If you have 100% health (all squares white) but 0% shields, you are one hit away from death. Using a Health Unit will do nothing for your shields. To get your "health" (as in, your ability to survive a hit) back in this scenario, you need a Shield Lattice or a battery, not a medical station. This confusion is usually why people think the machine is broken. They see they are "dying" and hit the machine, not realizing their core health is actually fine—it's the shield that's gone.
How to Fix the "No Health" Bug
If you are certain your core health squares are missing and the unit isn't working, try these steps:
- The Re-Log Trick: It’s a meme for a reason. Save at your ship, exit to the mode select screen, and jump back in. This forces the game to recalculate your stats and usually "unlocks" stuck medical units.
- Check for Infested Inventory: Rare, but if you have certain cursed items from derelict freighters or specific "glitched" items in your exosuit, they can occasionally interfere with stat restoration.
- The Meat Fix: If the wall unit is failing you, stop relying on it. Go kill some local fauna, get some "Meaty Chunks," and process them in a Nutrient Processor. Consuming cooked meals like "Organist Stew" or even just "Processed Meat" bypasses the wall-unit logic entirely and forces a health update to your character.
What to Do Next
Stop relying on wall-mounted units. They are the most unreliable way to stay alive in No Man's Sky.
First, upgrade your Exosuit with Life Support Blueprints from the Space Anomaly. Specifically, look for the "Oxygen Recycler" and "B-Class" or higher Life Support modules. This reduces the frequency of you even needing to look for a Health Unit.
Second, keep a stack of Meat Stew or Bread in your high-capacity cargo. The Nutrient Processor is your best friend for survival. Unlike the wall units, food items have a 99% success rate for health restoration because they trigger a different internal script than the interactive world objects.
Finally, if you are consistently seeing the "nms use health unit but received no health" error in a specific base, delete the unit and move it to a different power grid. Sometimes the "snap points" on base walls are bugged and don't deliver the full power requirement to the attachment, even if the wire looks connected. Move the unit, wire it directly to a battery, and try again.