Originally posted by dr4296:

Portal is especially useful when you unexpectedly die far far from your last bed /respawn point.

This is it. Think of portals like checkpoints. You explore with you ship, find a nice place to mine and gather stuff, and you build a portal to go back and forth in order to:
- Repair your tools and weapons.
- Prepare better if you encountered high level threats.
- Take some basic materials back.
- Keep going back and forth, resupplying, while you keep all mined materials in a settlement or even your ship and then deal with the logistics when you think you emptied the area.
- You can avoid night time threats by going back through the portal and sleeping in your bed. If you die you can easely retrieve your corpse through the portal and go back to improving your base for a while to take a break.