Also inventory is a PITA to mange with super limited on the suit and about the same on my ship. Am I just missing something here?
Here is something i did early in the game that I think made a big impact.
As you noticed upgrading inventory quickly starts costing a great deal of units (caps out at about 300k per slot for basic inventory, and 600k for cargo). Early on you don't have many upgrades so you can't really make those units so quickly with farming or trading or scanning. But you do have a multitool. First find drop pods to upgrade your inventory as high as you can, spend all your units. Then find a planet with Emeril or Gold and mine it until you have either your suit or spaceship completely full of that mineral. Sell or trash anything else that you don't immediately need. Then, sell all the emeril to a trader 1 in shot. You will now have a few million units. Take those units and go find some drop pods until you have spent all your money again. Now you can carry even more emeril to sell. You can do this pretty much indefinitely if you keep warping but there are faster ways to make money later on. but for the early game, this is a really good way to get lots of inventory really fast. I am on my 7th solar system and have 48 inventory slots (max), 12 tech slots (max), and 20 cargo slots (not max but still a lot). So I never have problems with inventory anymore.
There is one thing you should keep in mind. You want to make sure when you sell the emeril you sell it all in 1 go. After the transaction you will notice that the price of emeril has cratered and it will not be worth selling it in that system anymore. So there is no use putting 3000 emeril in your suit and 3000 in your ship. Once you sell that first 3000 the price will be nothing when you go to sell the rest. Better just try to fit all 6000 emeril in either your suit or ship. However, what you can do is sell 6000 emeril, go back down, mine some gold, and sell 6000 gold. Other minerals are not really worth your time.
Another tip, while you are flying around finding these drop pods, mash the "next target" button. This is 1/3 on PC and left/right dpad on console. You might find a crashed ship this way and can upgrade your ship.
I find it's really hard to find some materials in the wild. Like now it looks like I need copper but unless it's a 2nd bonus material I can't seem to find it anywhere. This is just an example. More like, how or what is the best way of finding a certain material?
There's 2 easy ways to get it. In the discoveries menu, look at the planets you discovered. You will notice they all have a classification of stuff you could find. Like one planet might have "Frostwort, Iridium, Aluminium, Heridium." Pretty much every planet has heridium, but the rest are different from planet to planet. Find a planet with Copper listed in on its discovery page and you will find massive deposits just lying around. The other easy way is go to a trade terminal or somewhere with ships coming and going. You might find copper directly on the terminal, and if not, one of the ships flying around probably has some. The price is not expensive and there are usually hundreds available at a time.
So here is the frist question: Is there no middle ground here? I'm just screwed until I can get more units somehow? Can't we craft something? Also are we able at all to upgrade what we have right now?
Personally for multitools just talk to aliens as much as you can and sometimes they will give you one for free. They use the same pool as the purchasable multitools, so you can get a really good deal. Sometimes it'll come with a health loss or a reputation hit but who cares. Sometimes aliens will give you a choice of options, to get the multitool, tell them you want a weapon. You can "grind" alien conversations by leaving to a new location and coming back. So talk to the aliens on your local space station every time you're there.
Also what is the best way to get nanites? It seems like you need thousands over the course of the game if not 100's of thousands.
Simple, just explore. Nanites are just about everywhere. If you find a new waypoint there is probably a source of nanites nearby. Some ways to make big nanites fast include: Find a crashed freighter and dig up all the treasure with the terrain manipulator. Go on a sentinel killing spree and loot the canisters they drop. Find an abandoned building, you can scan for them from space. Look around for "crashed escape pod" looking things, they have a gear icon when scanned and need 15 of heridium/iron/carbon to open and have nanites inside. Look through the small buildings on planets, some of the wall decorations will give nanites if interacted with.