Pixel

Pixels are a universal currency. They can also be used for 3D Printing.

Common

0

Pixels are the main currency in Starbound and are required for many functions, such as purchasing items from NPC vendors, printing items using the Pixel Printer, and crafting certain classes of objects such as Teleporters.

Pixels, also known as the 'god particle', appear to be the fundamental material that makes up Starbound's universe. Advancements in 3D printing technology eventually led to the invention of the Pixel Printer, a machine that could reorganize pixels into any shape the user desired. Now having immense intrinsic value, Pixels have become a currency used by nearly every culture in the known universe.^[1]

Obtaining Pixels

There are multiple ways of which pixels may be acquired. These include: killing monsters, searching containers and destroying breakables, completing quests, selling crops and other items (see Terramart Shipments), collecting rent, refining ores at a Refinery, harvesting Fish obtained via fishing, buying and selling trading goods between space stations, and rarely by activating Status Pods.

Saving Pixels

When the player dies in Casual difficulty they'll lose 10% of the pixels they currently have. In Survival Difficulty Mode, 30% of carried pixels are lost instead; in Hardcore, no pixels are lost on death - rather, all pixels are dropped on the ground along with all items being carried at the time of death (allowing someone else to take all the pixels for themselves if they happen upon the death site).

Pixels can't be directly stored in containers, but the player can use a Pixel Compressor to compress pixels into voxels, which can be safely stored. Voxels can then be extracted at a later time for usable pixels.

You can hold 9,999,999 Pixels in your "wallet" maximum; as well, up to 40 stacks of 1000 10k Voxels can be carried at a time, allowing for up to 409,999,999 Pixels value to be carried at once (not including the effective Pixel value of items in other tabs which can be sold, shipped or refined into Pixels).

Pixel Farming

There are several ways of viably amassing large amount of Pixels:

If a player can invest 200,000 Pixels into 20 of each elemental Fluffalo egg, the resulting herd will produce 20 each of the elemental items. These can be exchanged at Treasured Trophies for 20 Perfectly Generic Item, which can be crafted into one Perfect Trousers. This sells for 10,000 Pixels--12.5x as much as its raw ingredients. This process can be done once every ~15 minutes, and can be expanded to bigger herds.

If a player has amassed large quantities of Titanium Ore, Gold Ore, and Silver Ore, they may profit by acquiring and selling a Station Transponder from the quest Your Very Own Space Station. This produces a net 29,000 Pixels--nearly 8x as many Pixels as refining the ore.

Since Po Golems do not have a limit to how many Pos they spawn, they can conceivably be used as a source of infinite pixels. This is potentially also achievable with the Mother Poptop too given its similarly limitless ability to spawn Poptops.

Trivia

Pixels seemingly being a fundamental particle of Starbound's universe is in reference to the game's art style, as the universe is literally made of pixels. Pixel printing is likely akin to rearranging and recoloring these pixels to make the desired object's sprite.
- Bounty targets encountered while Bounty Hunting may go insane and yell such lines as "The secret truth is that everything is pixelly and flat! It can't just be me who sees it, can it?!", "EVERYTHING IS SQUARES! EVERYTHING IS SQUARES, DON'T YOU SEE?!", and "DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING! THERE'S TOO MANY SHARP CORNERS!". This may mean that the Starbound universe is canonically built from large visible pixels, or it could just be that only the insane and the Player see it that way.
The Hylotl description for the Pixel Printer calls it the 'god particle', which is a name given to the Higgs boson by Leon M. Lederman in our universe.
The exchange rate in Starbound is very tricky. If we take a royal toilet from the game, which is made of solid gold, and compare its 105 pixel worth to its USD counterpart which is $2,001,232.00, you get 1 pixel = $19,059.35 (or £14723.94). The problem is that the exchange rate is not constant: An average AA Battery in the U.S. is worth $0.81 (or £0.63), but is worth 50 pixels in Starbound which means that 1 pixel also equals about $0.02 (or £0.01). Technically, there is no point to do the exchange rate of it because the only way we'd be able to understand it correctly would be to live in that future where gold is considered so extremely common because of the ability to travel across galaxies in a single bound, and where AA batteries are considered as uncommon because nearly nobody uses them anymore.

Ingredient for

ITEM	NEEDED
Cupid's Wings	150
Cupid's Bow	150
Cupid's Sash	100
Heart Wreath	100
Cupid's Diaper	100
Flower Bouquet	100
Heart Forge	150
Box of Chocolates	150
10k Voxel	10000
1k Voxel	1000
2k Voxel	2000
5k Voxel	5000