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

Well this game is REALLY growing on me. I’m trying to remember what were the knocks on it when it was first released that held me back. What were the recent changes that people like?

So I stumbled through some poor early planets and restarted a few times. Finally I gave in and pursued the game on a planet with a temperature of about -60C which was interesting. Discovering you could ‘warm up’ in caves. Learning I could do all the things like “X” transport goods filling my pack to the ship and even summon my ship to me. Also, courtesy of the thread here, knowledge that I should not default to my norm of being a ‘packrat’ in this game but play it as it comes knowing I’ll always find more of whatever somewhere down the line.

Eventually I found a trading post and then that whole aspect of the game took shape. Ooh! a shiny new ship; much more capable than mine. How much you say; 2 million credits? OK, guess I need to learn to find the good stuff to sell. And then ultimately for that first planet I left it for another.

Now my new planet… OMG, it’s incredible! I could not appreciate it nearly as much if I had not struggled through some poorer planets first. I can totally see myself spending hours and hours right here. Just one thing… need to find a trader and offload some of the rare goodies I’ve been mining.

Man, at this point this is the most Bartlesy Explorer game since Subnautica with the bonus here being the game is practically infinite. While I’m immersed with this single planet at the moment I can’t wait to see what else is out there.

Spent 2 more hours with this last night. I’m officially hooked.

So the second crashed starship I found, the one I wanted to maybe take over and fix up…I lost it. I needed to find a nearby outpost to sell off some excess inventory so I could have the storage space to repair and take over the ship. I tried flying what I thought was due north until I found some buildings. First one was an abandoned base. Second one was another abandoned base. Then I found an actual habitable base, but I don’t have nearly enough resources to start on that path yet. Finally I found an outpost with landing pad, observatory and two aliens. Sold 6 slots worth of stuff, chatted up the aliens and received rewards, looted all the outposts boxes, sold all that stuff back to the market, and took off to find the crashed ship again. Flew what I thought was due south, passed over the second abandoned base…then…nothing. Kept flying a bit more until it was obvious I was lost.

Then I saw another outpost, so I landed and chatted everyone up, looted the freebies, and took off again…and saw another outpost in the near distance. Landed, repeated the process, took off…and a THIRD outpost appeared almost immediately. Holy randomization Batman! I spent most of my first hours in the game longing to find an outpost to sell stuff, now outposts are everywhere! At the third outpost there was a signal tower. Solved the puzzle there and was rewarded with a distress beacon for a crashed freighter! WOOOO!!! That’s got to have some good loots onboard!

So I took off, flew the 5 min trip to the freighter crash site…and all I can do is interact with the distress beacon. I can’t enter or interact with the freighter in any way. The interaction points must be buried, and my mining tool does not have terrain manipulation, nor do I have the blueprint needed to add it.

At this point, I think it might be time to load up on Plutonium and head into space. I can’t mine rare elements without a mining tool upgrade, I can’t manipulate terrain without an upgrade, I can’t harvest the radioactive elements from the plants without an upgrade, I can’t build a beacon without a blueprint, and I am sure there are ship and exosuit upgrades I could use as well. All that requires blueprints, and it sounds like blueprints are easier to acquire in space.

I have several space destinations I received as rewards from Observatories, including one that appears to be located on a nearby moon or planet (visible from the ground on my planet). That way point appears to be Korvax Ruins…as it’s purple with the little monolith symbol. Probably a story point since it’s persistent since I received it. I assume once I launch into space and start exploring there, I will quickly lose the ability to return to my starter planet in the same way I lose the ability to re-find things on the planet itself? Or is there a star map I can use to warp back?

This quote makes me happy. I can’t wait until this gets released on Xbone (and the final release of Subnautica for that matter, heh). I loved the pure-exploration aspect of Subnautica, and have been looking at this as another game that scratches that itch.

It’s good to see the game is still getting people hooked, despite all the bad press it had initially. I think it’s pretty great and whatever they said about the inital release, I don’t think I’ve ever seen developers this committed to such major free updates even two years after it first came out.

I think it’s great that this game has found its legs and not just drifted into obscurity. I’m thinking I’ll have to check it out when it’s released on Xbox, looks like it’s just my thing.

So glad to see some love for No Man’s Sky in this thread! I’m one of the few who liked it from the get-go, and it only got better and better with each update.

I don’t care about multiplayer, but I’m hoping the next update will bring some nice updates for single players like myself. I’m looking forward to that.

And in crazy ARG world, people have been getting the “dev kit” for making games in your dreams, which is a cell phone and a thingy to make holograms(?) with the screen:

203 votes and 26 comments so far on Reddit

Well no shit, they actually produced those? I remember making an early prototype of those on APET back, oh, probably 2015ish. Not for NMS, but for an ad agency.

They’re neat, but finnicky.

Hey… so what’s the deal with “discovery” in this game. I’ve been credited with discovery of a couple of planets in a star system. Not to mention some spots on the planets. I have renamed some to suit my fancy. Is there somewhere that I can look and see how many systems have been discovered since the game’s beginning and see mine among them? Nothing to do with gameplay, just posterity and curiosity. I’m pretty sure I do not have the technology yet to traverse large swaths of the galaxy yet but do others share their discoveries and invite other players to see what they have found, etc?

Well, I’m not sure if there’s a general statistic on what has been discovered by all players, but you can seen your own planet log for recent discoveries. Maybe Reddit some of the websites for the game have more data on that.

You can eventually with a fairly large amount of work find a system’s stargate and publish your coordinates so that others can visit you. It’s a fairly convoluted process with lots of limitations right now, though, but I haven’t tested it much.

When you first get to space you should be able to access the galactic map (from memory it’s locked until you leave the first planet, though I’m unsure if that’s still the case).

That map has a ‘Waypoint’ navigation mode (amongst others); if you select an earlier planet in your Discoveries list and use Waypoint mode then the map path will lead you back there. So you can find earlier systems if you want to burn the fuel.

There is some limited fast travel in the game too, which you’ll discover later.

Stumbled on another crashed ship (could even be the same one from a couple days ago, I can’t remember) and this time had enough inventory space and materials in my exosuit to repair it. I had to get creative, claiming the new ship, repairing some slots, then claiming my old ship, moving inventory into my exosuit, then claiming the new ship a second time and pushing inventory over. Did this a couple of times until all my old inventory was transferred. I’m now the proud owner of a 23-slot Explorer, with better drive efficiency than my starter ship, double the tech slots of my original ship, and best of all it’s worth 2.8mil units (so around 2 mil in trade-in) once I finish fixing it up. The only thing I’m not crazy about it the appearance. It’s a Korvax ship that looks like a giant yellow and black bee head. Flies nice though, and I’ve already fixed up most of the slots so I can haul around a lot more stuff between outpost visits.

Of course, all that repair work means I went broke pretty quickly. Flew around for a bit claiming locations, looting containers, mining Copper, Aluminum and Heridium and selling it all off at outposts. That was slow but steady financial gain. Then I discovered that it only takes 10 iron and 10 plutonium to create a Bypass Chip, which in turn sells for around 3300 units (a 300%+ markup from materials value). So I started collecting loads of plutonium and iron, crafting it into 5 stacks of bypass chips in my cargo hold, and selling off at the outpost when full. This netted me nearly 75K units per trip, and my bank account is back to being fairly comfortable, even after dropping another 70K on an extra exosuit slot from a drop pod.

I’m going to go collect resources again to get a nice stash of Plutonium and Iron (1000 each) in my hold and then probably take off for space finally. I’ve seen most of what there is to see on the planet (at least for the wide swath of it I’ve already explored), and I’d like to see if I can find a space station with a blueprint trader. I’ve got 750 nanites burning a hole in my pocket and a need for the terrain mod for my mining tool and other goodies.

I am kind of bummed that I never found the last two fauna species on my planet though. There hasn’t been any water the whole time I’ve explored, so I doubt they are water-based…I already scanned the only airborne creature I ever found…so where could they be? Caves maybe? Do some creatures only live in caves?

There are land, air, water and cave creatures. They used to be shown in that set order, so you could suss out which one you’re mising from where the empty spot is, but that trick doesn’t work anymore for 1.3, I think.

Cave creatures usually spawn right outside caves too, so they’re easy to confuse with land creatures. I don’t think there can be more than 0 to 3 air, water or cave creatures per planet. The best is to just use your visor and home in on any red dots you see. It’s sometimes easier to see the dots if you dig a hole and look through the rock. Just going somewhere else entirely helps too and you have to wait for a little while for some animals to spawn. It’s also easier to do the fewer species there are on a planet.

It’s still a hassle to get 100% of a planet though. Sometimes it happens naturally, sometimes… not.

EDIT: Oooor… you can always show up on a planet where someone found 9/10 species and find the last one as a fluke. That’s always fun.

Never did find any cave creatures despite looking in several caves last night. In the end I settled for 1500 Plutonium, 1000 Iron, 1000 Heridium, 500 Platinum, 500 Carbon and 250 Aluminum (found a deposit) in my ship’s hold along with Nanites and a couple of other items, sold off everything else for units, freed up plenty of inventory slots on my exosuit and ship, and am ready to launch off-planet and see what the next phase of NMS has to offer tonight.

Maybe if there is a space station close to my planet I can grab the Terrain Manipulator mod for my Mining Tool, then return to the planet and dig out that crashed freighter to loot it’s holds as I’m super curious about that. I can look in some caves again at that point too to see if I can finish the fauna scans. Otherwise, it’s off into the vast expanse!

I’ve got over 10 hours into NMS already and haven’t even left the first planet. I have yet to explore space travel, progress the main storyline, shoot at any pirates, discover a totally new planet or system, upgrade my tool and ship significantly, mess with freighters, farming and the economy, or build a base. Even if I somehow manage to do all that stuff in the next 20 hours of playtime and then put the game aside, No Man’s Sky will have been well worth every single penny of the $18 I paid for it. With NEXT just around the corner, hopefully it will get even better.

From memory the Artemis storyline gives you a terrain manipulator pretty quickly, as it helps when base building. This should trigger soon after you leave the first planet.

No need to return to dig up the freighter loots, you’ll find them everywhere. :)

There’ll be plenty of opportunities to find all the critters too. The last one or two can be tricky as some are rarer so you need to fly around a lot. Keep in mind that many favour either day or night so will be more prevalent depending on time. This doesn’t apply to caves or water, as these always spawn at the same densities regardless of day or night.

I’m pleased that, like Subnautica, there is a narrative and plot lines to explore should you wish (and, which as a newbie, are often great insights into gameplay overall) but that you are not punished should you decide to just free range it.

That being said, what is the deal with being attacked in space? Is this going to happen every time I visit a ‘trade outpost’ kind of space station or just this first one? Maybe it is the game telling me I need a sturdier ship with more DPS pronto but I think more it is my ineptitude in dog-fighting those things. Can anyone tell me whether there are tips and tricks to defeat enemy fighter ‘drones’ in space or whatever? Should I just stand my ground and try to lock on them one after the other while soaking up damage? Or can I succeed in outflying and outshooting them? Right now I’m just a mess.

I have stumbled upon a couple of wrecked ships which superficially appeared to be better than my starter ship. I get it that several of their components are damaged and need repair but why can’t I just swap my working components (inc. my warp drive I’ve already charged up) and upgrade myself? And what is the deal with cargo spaces being ‘red’ and unusable; I did not see a way to ‘repair’ those?

Good to know about the Terrain Manipulation Tool, and the space station only had Exosuit upgrades for sale. How do I start the Artemis storyline? Seems like I’m on Atlas Path exclusively for now?

On the plus side, traded some of my nanites for improved Jetpack and Scanning (both Sigma) modules. After visiting the station, I made my way to a nearby undiscovered planet where I followed the Atlas quest line for a bit, and now have my Warp Drive and a single power cell for it. The planet was pretty barren in terms of POI’s, but was littered with Plutonium deposits (have 2000 in my hold now) and iron…and giant deposits of Gold were everywhere. I mined a full 250 stack of gold and took it back to the space station (while on my quest) to see what it would net. Over 100K units! That means every single one of those dozens of deposits I saw is worth 200K units or more. I may have to make a return trip with empty holds, as the profit from that would easily allow me to finish fixing up my starship’s remaining broken cargo and tech slots.

Next task in my Atlas quest is to warp to another system. Problem is, when I call up the star map, I can’t seem to figure out how to select a nearby system?!

For wrecked ships you’ll only want to swap if it’s a significant upgrade. For mine, my starter ship had 15 cargo slots and was worth 330K, which is like 250K in trade value. The wreck I swapped to had 23 cargo slots, and 8 tech slots, and a value of 2.8 million units (once fully repaired). That was a big enough upgrade to tempt me…but I am still paying to repair the last few cargo and tech slots that were red to start with.

It costs units (money) to repair those, and the cost rises with each slot repaired. I went broke just getting my wrecked ship up to 17 cargo slots, two more than my starter. Since then I’ve spent multiple “runs” doing mostly mining/salvaging for cash and used the income to repair more of my ship. I’ll have probably spent close to the 2 million units it’s worth in trade by the time I’m done, but it’s been worth it for the improvements.

As for the ships systems, they are usually pretty low cost (in materials) to repair. You can deconstruct anything you’ve added to your starter ship and get back half the materials, then rebuild it in the new ship (assuming you have slots available).

My first space station had no pirates or aggressive ships around it at all, so I think it’s just luck of the draw.

You won’t be attacked in space every time. It happens sometimes, and I think the chance increases if you have valuable stuff in the ship inventory.

My one tip for space combat is: you can recharge your shields on-the-fly, so make sure you always have plenty of yellow stuff (iron, zinc, power cells) to recharge them in case you get attacked so you can survive long enough to destroy your attackers. I’m not sure if you can just “lose” them - I think it’s possible though. I’ll test that when I can.

Actually, seems you start the game with the Artemis story, “Awakenings” so keep on it and you’ll get the manipulator. Or for the blueprint, you’d need a Vy’keen merchant as they sell the multi-tool techs.

It’s Atlas that kicks in a bit later after you make your first warp or two. Sorry. :)

The map is a bit of a pain to use at first. Think of it as operating in two modes - by default you’ll rotate and zoom around your selected system. If you ‘unselect’ that system you can then select a new one. It’s A (left mouse) to select a system, and B (right mouse) to unselect. Use D-pad L/R (Q/E) to change the navigation mode, though you’ll likely want to stick to the ‘mission’ pathing mode early on.

Get better shields and guns. ;)

They’re more likely to attack if you have high value cargo, so one old tip was to move that to your suit inventory where it won’t be detected.

You do get warning of incoming hostiles, and a viable early strategy is to run. You can also contact them and pay them off. :)