Combat

Upon landing on a new planet, it is always wise to stop and look around high and low for any drones and/or sentinels nearby. These things will usually ignore you unless you attract too much attention by causing many animal deaths, excessive mining or breaking into locked buildings. Once a drone classifies you as a threat, you will have limited time to destroy it before the bigger sentinels are called in. It can be difficult to survive once the swarm rolls in, so make sure you're prepared and your weapon is full before you engage. The game doesn't pause when you open the inventory to recharge things; keep that in mind. Also the more sentinels you kill the more wanted you get. And the only way to calm things down is to escape to your ship and fly out to space.

But what happens if you die? Dying will cause you to lose pretty much everything your inventory, and you will have to go back to your "grave" to retrieve them. If you were to die again before retrieving those items, then they will be gone forever just like in Dark Souls. The thing is if you go down the path of violence, choose targets that will give the most benefits. Killing wildlife for example doesn't give you anything other than common minerals, while destroying merchant ships as they leave the space station gives you plenty of good stuff. Again, excessive destruction will increase your wanted level so watch out. Attacking a space station is one way to die quickly however. Feel free to try that if you're in a particularly suicidal mood.

The other thing of note here is you are just as likely to get attacked by space pirates, particularly when your ship is loaded with valuable resources. You can try to hold off an ambush in space if your ship is strong enough to do so. Otherwise, stay on planet and find a trading outpost (shelter) to unload all that cargo before blasting off to explore another planet.