No Man's Sky

[grandpab]

I finally got the extreme conditions milestones finished. This was easily the worst part of the game. Fuckin hated it. If you never die it's not too bad, but I wasn't aware of this. To get the final milestone you have to survive extreme conditions for 32 sols. I thought it would just save my progress after each milestone and I could continue from there, but for example if you're at like milestone 7 and you die then you don't lose milestone 7, but your progress goes back to 0 sols and you have to redo all that work you did to get to back to milestone 7. There's also no way to track your progress so you have no idea where you're at until you catch up to where you were. I read you can just sit in a bunker afk, so that's what I did yesterday...

Also each sol is about 14 minutes, so altogether it takes about 7 and a half hours to finish it...Don't die when you're about 5 hours into it or you have to do those 5 hours all over again.

Only 2 more milestones to go and I'll get my platinum. At least they're easy ones, just need to do a lot more warping and kill some space pirates.

[Endus]

But unfortunately that's all Steam allows for. And honestly, if a game can't hook you in the first few hours there are other issues with it. It shouldn't take a dozen hour for a game to get to "the good part", that's a major design flaw.

Eh, I'd say NMS "hooked" me early. Still playing hard. I wasn't following the press stuff TOO closely, though I was interested, so maybe I wasn't building castles in the sky like some people were, but the game hits a nice groove with me.

Currently got my inventories maxxed out, almost done the Atlas path, at about 164k light years out. When a fully-warp-upgraded leap takes me ~400 light years per jump (it appears to follow the paths between stars, so it's not a straight line on free explore, even if it skips intervening stars), it's gonna take a while to get to the center.

I wouldn't say it takes that much time to get to "the good part". The issue is that it's a game of continuous incremental exploration. You launch into a world, and that's ALREADY the good stuff. You're playing the endgame, from day 1. It just gets better from there on out.

Because if it didn't, you'd get bored and complain that there was never anything better.

Even in the small distance I've gone, and upgrading to hit green/blue stars, I've noticed a SIGNIFICANT bump up in diversity, and I'm still regularly seeing new stuff.

Found a forest planet AND dinosaurs last night.

I've had forest planets where the trees were at least 4-5x my height.

I've had dinosaurs.

I've had teeny-ass butterflies; there were weird red dots hovering in the sky, and I thought my game was glitching, since there was nothing there. And then I got REAL close to one, and zap, it scanned. Little bastards were practically microscopic. Should've screen-capped it, but I didn't bother.

Heck, I've actually seen a predator chase down and kill a prey animal. Sure, "eating" involves the prey dying and vanishing, but the actual attack was definitely there. After I thought I saw it the first time, I watched the bastard and he chased down a second one, so I'm certain that's what was happening. It's unusual, because you need 1> an aggressive predator (which seems rarer than most), and 2> a smaller prey animal nearby at the same time.

Cant wait to see the haters cry when I find a desert planet.

Sandy desert? Haven't seen it. HAVE seen plenty of dry-rock deserts with cacti and such.

[grandpab]

Currently got my inventories maxxed out, almost done the Atlas path, at about 164k light years out. When a fully-warp-upgraded leap takes me ~400 light years per jump (it appears to follow the paths between stars, so it's not a straight line on free explore, even if it skips intervening stars), it's gonna take a while to get to the center.

You should be able to do about 1600 light years with all 3 warp upgrades.

[Selastan]

I find myself wishing there was the ability to explore gas giants and stars. I mean, Gas Giants could have cool gameplay, diving down into storms to pick up rare elements from the atmosphere, trying to get out before you die from storm damage and avoiding going too deep and getting crushed.

[Endus]

You should be able to do about 1600 light years with all 3 warp upgrades.

Yeah, it's about 1600 light years (actually, with the linkage I've got, almost 1700; I've managed a 1684 ly jump I believe) in what it calls "linear distance", but going by "distance to the center", that latter only changes by about 400 ly.

I go to Free Explore, I fly directly at the big light to my max jump range, and get about 400ly closer, consistently. Unless I'm doing something staggeringly wrong for a reason that doesn't seem clear to me.

That's why I think the "linear distance" is basically following the paths between stars that you can cap along with the mouse, so it ends up being a circuitous and winding path, and that "eats up" most of the potential distance. I don't think it actually ends up being a 1600 light year span as the crow flies, so to speak.

[grandpab]

Yeah, it's about 1600 light years (actually, with the linkage I've got, almost 1700; I've managed a 1684 ly jump I believe) in what it calls "linear distance", but going by "distance to the center", that latter only changes by about 400 ly.

I go to Free Explore, I fly directly at the big light to my max jump range, and get about 400ly closer, consistently. Unless I'm doing something staggeringly wrong for a reason that doesn't seem clear to me.

That's why I think the "linear distance" is basically following the paths between stars that you can cap along with the mouse, so it ends up being a circuitous and winding path, and that "eats up" most of the potential distance. I don't think it actually ends up being a 1600 light year span as the crow flies, so to speak.

Oh, I get what you're saying now. I haven't payed enough attention to notice if that happens to me or not...

[Endus]

Oh, I get what you're saying now. I haven't payed enough attention to notice if that happens to me or not...

TBH, I didn't notice this either until I decided I wanted to dash further in-galaxy (I'd been trying to get an Atlas Pass V2/V3 by farming Operations Centers, and getting nothing but recipes I already had). So I was watching the numbers pretty closely, and I didn't seem to be making as much progress as I should have, which is when I clued in to this; I was chain-jumping rather than exploring anything in-between.

Got about 7000ly closer, hit a few more op centers, got my pass, for whatever that's worth. Probably just pure chance.

[DarkAmbient]

Dunno what I'm doing wrong but the upgrade path to a decent ship seems way too much of a grind. How are people getting maxed out ships so soon? I still only have a 23 slot ship, it's pissing me off.

[grandpab]

Dunno what I'm doing wrong but the upgrade path to a decent ship seems way too much of a grind. How are people getting maxed out ships so soon? I still only have a 23 slot ship, it's pissing me off.

Find a planet system with geks. Find one of the orange beam beacons and use a bypass chip until you get one that says 'transmission tower'. It has to say transmissions tower for it to work. Once you find one of those fly over there and use the terminal. There's a bug that allows you to use the terminal multiple times, so use it 10-15 times or so and it'll mark the location of a bunch of ships. Now just go around and switching ships. You'll either find a ship with +1 inv space or -1 inv space. If it has +1 inv space keep that ship and move on after transfering your items over, and don't forget to dismantle the upgrades in your old ship. If it has -1 inv space take it, but leave all your stuff in your old ship, and then dismantle everything in the new ship, then go back to your old ship, transfer the stuff you just got from the new ship into your old ship, and hop back into the old ship to continue searching. Just keep doing this and eventually you'll get to a 48 slot ship.

I sure as hell wasn't going to farm millions of credits to buy a ship, so I did it this way.

[Endus]

Dunno what I'm doing wrong but the upgrade path to a decent ship seems way too much of a grind. How are people getting maxed out ships so soon? I still only have a 23 slot ship, it's pissing me off.

The simple answer is this; there are two ways to get a new ship. Buy one, or repair a crashed ship you locate on a planet. Buying them gets prohibitively expensive VERY quick (23 slots is already millions).

So how do you find crashed ships?

That's a question we can answer; Transmission Towers. On-planet, look for the beacons with the orange beams of light coming up out of them. Use those, look for "transmissions", and the ones you want are Transmission Towers (not Beacons or Observatories; ignore those while doing this). Go to the transmission towers, solve the little math puzzle (there's only 10 or so, so you'll start remembering answers pretty quick), and you get a beacon to a crashed ship.

Every crashed ship you find is going to have either one more, or one less, inventory slot than your current ship. Obviously, ignore the ones with less. Swap into your new +1 inventory ship, and keep going. You'll need to repair systems, but the ONLY things you need to repair are Launcher Jets and Pulse Engines. If you're getting annoyed by the alarms, you can also repair the deflector shield (takes more mats, but can be worth doing, or just turn your audio down/off). They'll often have a lot of damaged upgrade systems; you can dismantle all of those for bonus mats to boot.

Every time you find a new ship, it's a 50% chance of an upgrade. You'll fly some absolute garbage-looking beasts as you go through this, but you don't care about looks, you care about farming this to a 48-slotter. THEN you find a ship that looks pretty.

Also, crashed ships apparently pull from the same pool as ships you see in flying around, so if you see a kickass-looking ship in the space station, you can find crashed versions. Don't bother until you hit a 48-slotter. Once you do, it can be worth finding at least one ship you can stand looking at, and sidegrading to that.

At that point, you can settle in and upgrade to your heart's content. You might still find a better ship, appearance-wise, but if you do, you can always hunt it down and replace it at that time.

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I sure as hell wasn't going to farm millions of credits to buy a ship, so I did it this way.

It can be worthwhile to buy a ship of 22-24 slots for a couple million, but prices start climbing steeply after that, and this saves you a few transmission towers along the way.


Edit: It bears mentioning that this IS a grind. My trick was to multitask; I'd hit a planet that had critters, and I'd use this hunt as an excuse to explore and look for full completions of the species record. If I finished it, I'd switch planets.

[rhorle]

There is a design flaw in them not being able to hook you in sooner. Honestly, the game gets really rewarding later on, it really does. But people by nature have short attention spans, so it's necessary to put the game's "hook" early on, which they did not do. It comes later as you get deeper into the story.

While it is a design flaw that a game can't hook its players I disagree about NMS having this flaw. If you look at what the game aims to be it will hook those players. Part of the problem is the game had enormous amounts of hype. Some the devs fault, some the marketing fault, and some the players fault. Which made the game attract more then just those interested in the niche the game was designed around. I was always unsure if I would actually like the game which is why I didn't pre-order right away (ending up doing it around the steam summer sale because I figured I'd play it anyways so why not).

But it has enough hooks to get those it was aimed at. And it rewards those players later on. It doesn't have enough hooks to keep those that don't really like the style and genre of the game that would maybe play with the rewards later on. But you can't fix that in a game like NMS because if you reward early on then there is nothing to reward later on. But having over 24 hours in-game now I can say I'm glad I did. There are lots of QoL changes I'd like to see and some other stuff but it is a nice game to relax to or pick up and play when I'm bored with my other stuff.

[DarkAmbient]

Thanks for the answers guys, very helpful. How do I utilise the bug that lets me use a tower multiple times?

[Faroth]

I don't think it actually ends up being a 1600 light year span as the crow flies, so to speak.

You mean as the space-crow flies.

[grandpab]

It can be worthwhile to buy a ship of 22-24 slots for a couple million, but prices start climbing steeply after that, and this saves you a few transmission towers along the way.

I was up to a 34 slot that I got the legit way from farming credits, but then I started to see the prices on some of the more expensive ones...I was gonna need to buy at least 2-3 more ships to be able to find a 48 slot ship to buy. It would have meant grinding at least another 150 million credits probably. I wasn't up for that at all.

[Endus]

Thanks for the answers guys, very helpful. How do I utilise the bug that lets me use a tower multiple times?

It's just Gek towers, and we haven't actually heard whether it's a bug or a "feature". If it's a bug, it's odd that it's only Gek towers, and only three times.

But you just re-use the tower panel after you get the first crashed ship beacon. How do you know it's a Gek tower? If the dude in the Space Station is Gek, it's a Gek system, and everything is Gek.

[grandpab]

Thanks for the answers guys, very helpful. How do I utilise the bug that lets me use a tower multiple times?

Unless it was fixed with todays patch, just continue using the same terminal. It'll ask you the same question every time, so just keep answering the correct answer and you'll get a new crashed ship location each time. Do it 10-15 times to have a bunch of ships marked on your map before you leave the terminal.

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It's just Gek towers, and we haven't actually heard whether it's a bug or a "feature". If it's a bug, it's odd that it's only Gek towers, and only three times.

I was using them many more times than 3. I never hit a limit. The only limit is the amount of ships available around to you. Eventually it'll start showing you ship locations that you've already found, so you need to fly far away to another location on the planet and use a different terminal.

[sinilaid]

has anyone found any patch notes?

[grandpab]

has anyone found any patch notes?

Nah nothing yet. I'm sure the first place it'll be posted will be here - http://www.no-mans-sky.com/news/

[DarkAmbient]

Thanks guys, I've currently got around 20 crashed ship icons my screen

Edit: actually it's a bit fewer than that, it seems to be giving me the same ship now so I guess it's time to go look for them.

Edit 2: first 5 ships all have one less slot than my current ship

[sinilaid]

I fell trough the map after the patch, reloaded and now it seems to run a lot better than pre patch