In a recent publication [1] the importance of measuaring light clusters at future NICA and FAIR experiments as "rare probes" for in-medium characteristics was presented. Within theoretical conciderations is shown how clusters would be affected by medium affects as given collider energies. PACS numbers: 25.75.-q Relativistic heavy-ion collisions 21.65.-f Nuclear Matter 21.60.Gx Cluster models 05.30.-d Quantum statistical mechanicsTo decide on characteristics of the matter produced in energetic nuclear collisions a variety of probes is needed that provide different perspectives. One class of such probes are nuclear clusters. Here we discuss the insights that the clusters can provide within the NICA program, both within fixed target and collider setups, at BM@N and MPD, respectively.To provide a general background we show in Fig. 1 a phase diagram of dense nuclear matter including lines for Mott dissociation of deuterons (d), tritons (t) and alpha particles (α), taken from [2], see also [3], together with the parametrization of the chemical freeze-out line [4] from statistical model fits of hadron production in heavy-ion collisions. Several laboratory energies from the energy range accessible at the NICA accelerator complex are shown as labeled dots on that line.For the sake of generating the illustration, the hadronic phase is described by a DD2 equation of state [5] with a liquid-gas phase transition (blue line with critical endpoint), extended by adding components of the hadron resonance gas, in particular pions and kaons. The quark-gluon matter phase for the figure is described by a PNJL model exhibiting a first * Presented at Critical Point and Onset of Deconfinement 2016, Wroc law (1) arXiv:1711.05631v1 [nucl-th]