No Man's Sky - Exploring a 60s-Scifi-cover themed universe (post-release thread)

FYI

That’s great news, exactly what I was hoping for. Hopefully the roughest of the edges are smoothed out by the weekend.

Patch notes

  • Fixed a rendering related crash.

  • Fixed an out of memory crash.

  • Fixed an issue that could cause a crash when manipulating inventory in close proximity to a high number of players.

  • Fixed a crash affecting VR with supersampling enabled.

  • Fixed a situation where network connectivity issues could prevent players from speaking to NPCs aboard the Space Anomaly.

  • Fixed an issue where storage containers could not be accessed.

  • Fixed a crash affecting unsupported VR hardware.

Players are encouraged to submit bug reports here
https://hellogames.zendesk.com/

Oh dear, I may have to relocate my large, perfect base because it’s not located near any electromagnetic hotspots, which must be within the bounds of a base in order for the electromagnetic generator to work. Bioreactors eat through carbon like nobody’s business, and solar panels only produce juice during the day. Going to craft a bunch of both and a bunch of batteries, but Im worried that’s just not going to cut it. And I just finished relocating this one yesterday. Not sure if I have it in me to do it again.

Looks like it may be a good thing you hadn’t started on your base yet, @SlainteMhath!

I have an incoming message. I try to access the communication system on my ship. Nothing happens when I push the button. Why? Who knows? I try to exit my ship. Push the button. Nothing happens. Dear god how infuriating. The “music” is the same repeating monotonous drone for 30 minutes just pulsing and pulsing and pulsing. Fuck this game all over again.

Give it a couple days and some patches. Historically there have been noticeable bugs after a major release but Hello Games are usually quick to fix them. This studio always makes it right. My faith in them exceeds most of the industry.

Hit another roadblock in adapting my base to the new power requirements: construction limits. Adding a bunch of solar panels and batteries won’t be possible unless I trim a bunch of other stuff, not all of which I consider to be non-essential. Starting a new base from scratch is beginning to look more and more like a better way to go.

I’m nearly certain my base doesn’t have 3,000 components (counting the plants) but maybe I’m overlooking something.

Whew! I’ve been seeing a lot of crashes tonight, so it’s good to see they have some fixes coming.

I think the new player experience is much better now. That first hour of guided play is improved.

Build is up on Experimental with an additional Nexus crash fix. Enter 3xperimental in Steam’s beta tab for the game to access it if you don’t already have it.

Nice, I’ll be starting yet another new game - in VR! For some reason, I dig the early game.

Be sure to scout carefully, if you plan to do the base building stuff. The days of build anywhere are behind us. Now you need power for everything, even accessing storage, and the simple power sources are crap, even if your farm is small or you don’t have one.

And while scouting has changed with the update, it’s not any easier. If anything, it’s harder now. Exchange nav data or 15 nanos for random structure coordinates at a space station, land somewhere on a planet and roll the dice. Small chance it’ll reveal a trading post in a good area, if at all. Almost easier to simply fly around and periodically drop down a signal booster (which has one basic search function now, no longer can you specify what you’re looking for).

I’ve spent the last few hours scouting my planet for a spot that has both water and an electromagnetic hotspot and (ideally) a large flat area to build on, near a trading post. Very tall order, but that’s what I believe is the best way to experience the underwater stuff (which I haven’t seen yet), have a convenient place to unload my manufactured goods and have adequate base power.

I may end up having to compromise on the trading post and use a teleporter to sell my goods instead.

Yup, definitely need to start from scratch, or maybe try to relocate (main reason I don’t want to start anew - ALL THE WORDS I’VE LEARNED!!).
Plus they changed the planet I’m on? Lol. Had to scan (and yes they also changed the controls, so scanning is different too) a few new plants and stones and crops which is fine… but it has an overall orange/red hue now that I don’t like. Need to move.
Only had time for a quick check but I liked the changes to the discovery log, that you can see the solar system with the planets a bit better now.

Will have to spend some more time with it this weekend =)

For VR users, can confirm the TAA antialiasing makes the game super blurry. Nice and sharp with it off. The FXAA doesn’t do much.

Spent all my time near the starting ship tweaking settings so far. :)

On Rift S btw. GPU is mostly fine. 2080ti:

  • Tesselation is of course the first place to look for cutbacks if you need to. I have it on ‘high’, as it mostly removes the ‘draw-in’ you can see on ‘enhanced’ and is not much more expensive. ‘Standard’ is a fair bit cheaper, which I think is ‘off’ as it needs a restart to go bewteen this and anything else.
  • HBAO is a small hit but worth it. Though with the lower setting you tend to get dark outlines sometimes.
  • Textures actually have small performance impact. I stopped seeing improvement after ‘high’ so stuck with that.
  • Shadows I have on ‘enhanced’ for now, but going to ‘high’ doesn’t seem much more costly.
  • Volumetrics is for the clouds I think, doesn’t make any difference to anything when on the ground (haven’t taken off yet).
  • Biggest visual difference to me is Post Processing. You want this on ‘high’ for nice morning/dusk lighting, which seems non-existant on ‘enhanced’. Small hit but worth it.
  • This leaves a bit of peformance room for storms etc, as lots of alpha effects are costly.
  • I have SteamVR set to ‘100%’ supersampling which weirdly seems to set Pixel Density of 1.23. I might try override this somehow and use Oculus’ ‘adaptive pixel density’ feature.

CPU is where it struggles a bit to maintain framerate for me, on a stock i7700K.

  • Animation quality I think may a CPU thing, but it’s made no difference at all to me yet since I’ve not met anything animated.
  • Planet quality is the big ticket item. On ‘standard’ it stays well around 8 or 9ms (Rift S target is 12.5ms for 80Hz). On enhanced, it often climbs to 13ms or more which of course drops fps to 40 and kicks in the ASW. The curious thing here is that ‘high’ and ‘ultra’ don’t make much difference to performance, the big hit is going up from ‘standard’. Yet to take off though, maybe things are different high up.

Overall pretty happy. Seems very cool and running pretty well even with SteamVR. Hopefully some cpu optimisation can be done in the future.

Have fun scouting! I’ve given up on my strict requirements, and now I simply want to be by an electromagnetic hotspot that’s on a flat area and somewhat close to a trading post. To do this, I locate a trading post (very long, painful process unless you’re lucky), start scanning, and slowly move further and further away from it while I continue scanning, until the right hotspot comes up. Unfortunately, I’m having trouble using the beacon to mark locations as I scout and plan; often, the icon for the beacon I dropped by the hotspot won’t even show up when I fly over to the nearby trading post I started from. Nor does the exocraft I drop down in the same location.

RE the performance issues, to me they have been noticeable without VR, even though I’m sure they’re tied closely to the VR features, if that makes sense.

For example, each time you enter a new area, it takes forever now for terrain objects (including sructures) to load in. At first I thought it was just my big base that was causing this, but it’s everywhere. On planets anyway. It’s so bad that you literally can’t land at a given location until you’ve hovered in the air for 10-20 seconds or so, first, at which point the game is able to identify safe landing spots where things like trees or minerals won’t be occupying the same space where it let you land your ship. Occasionally it will sometimes let you land early anyway, but half the time when you do this, upon exiting your ship you end up under the map, falling, and have a 50/50 chance of dying of fall damage, of all things. It’s so bad, you can’t even land on a landing pad that has the green “you can land here” circles until stuff has fully loaded in.

Another example is NPC ships. Before when you studied them, they had clear flight paths which took them to and from locations. You could use this to deduce where trading posts might be. Now, they fly around randomly, often bouncing off the landscape, blinking in and out of existence, and you never (at least, I never, I don’t think) actually see them landing anywhere. They’ll even vanish from sight right as they approach a landing platform. I’m certain these things are somehow linked to compromises they had to make to support the heavy requirements for the new features.

I was wondering about the ships too on PSVR last night. In my short time on two stations, I never once saw another ship land to trade with… Whats going to be the best way to purchase new ships now if they don’t ever land in the bay anymore?

For some reason, some of my NPC ships began to land again when I reloaded from a save. So it’s probably easily fixed whenever they get around to it.

I’m one of those stuck not able to get the game to run now. Probably aggravating this is that I had to completely reload since I’d uninstalled a while back. I get the Hello Games screen and about 10 seconds of music, then POOF. Nothing.

I’ve set it for the experimental branch but can’t seem to get Steam to “patch” to that? How do I force it?

The experimental branch version has been pushed to the public branch now so nothing to patch.

Noted. I switched back. Still no change.

Thinking it might be tied to VR, I launched in VR mode and got just a bit further, passed the Havok screen flash, before crashing. Then retried normal mode and got to the same point. So, further along but still crashing, with no error popup.

EDIT 2: Just noticed I have a pending Nvidia driver update. I’ll apply and test again.

EDIT 3: SUCCESS!!! I’m in!

What exactly is a “hotspot”? Is it just an arbitrary set of conditions you look for when planning a base or is it an actual thing you find on the planet?

I’ve got about 20 hours invested in the past couple weeks and have a small starter base right next to a trading post (at least I was smart enough to do that!) but I didn’t really assess the area for anything else.

As an aside, it seems the new inventory slot cap increase is only for Normal games, not Survival… I was really looking forward to this QoL improvement more than anything else.

Used to be you had to be in space to communicate but the alert would still sound when on a planet.