[No Man's Sky] Del & Falcon vs. BIOLOGICAL HORRORS

[Delthazar]

Alright, I just spent like an hour customizing my character in No Man's Sky, that being a thing we can do now, so that's a good sign. Can't wait to see the new (free!) options coming soon too. Man, I wonder if they'll ever do ship customization...

I didn't roll a new character though; I think I'll leave that for some other night and purpose. So it's cool seeing all the immediate differences with my old one. Like almost everything I was carrying, even, is suddenly different. They redid all the resources and stuff, added free slots, reworked technologies - on and on and on. The inventory screen even moves smoother now. And things finally stack properly. Holy hell.

Did you roll a new duder, Falc? If so, and if you have the preorder ship, does it spawn now with outdated tech? Heh. I've forgotten everything about the tutorial stages. I can't even remember which mode I put this character in. 2016 was a lifetime ago.

[Falcon Critical]

I haven't played since the 'Next' update, got distracted by Waypoints 4 1/2 hour stream of it instead. Not sure if I want to reroll or continue, my main raisin for potentially just rolling on from where I am is keeping up the Suikoden system naming

[Delthazar]

So if you happen to reload yer old character, you'll find yerself with a bunch of "obsolete technology" items - the remnants of pre-Next ability techs and stuff which have been totally remade - and each of those is worth a good chunk of change: 250k for a 5-stack. Depending on yer ship/suit/multitool and how much you invested into 'em, you'll probably have at least a million credits worth of those things. They can also be used as mats for some of the new, current tech installations.

It seems to also move your character to a starbase and reroll the planetary data for the system yer in, but it doesn't change names if you already discovered stuff, or add new planets or moons onto the previous count. You'll also get a do-over on quest choices when you leave the starbase, or at least for the "seek destiny"/"just chill and explore" part, anyway. I don't think it resets any actual progress.

Sounds like starting over will put you in a better/faster tutorial than the original? I'm less sure of that. But folks have mentioned rolling fresh and getting a free freighter within like six hours so that's definitely new, just maybe not new to Next specifically, not sure about that.

[Delthazar]

Gita Jackson with some tips.

https://kotaku.com/tips-for-playing-no- ... 1827871611

There's so much more new stuff on planets now and a lot of it is pretty unusual, which has really deepened the sense of chill casual exploration. At the same time there's some risk/reward involved 'cause obviously not everything you discover is gonna be 100% benign. I'm really cautious around those "humming eggs." I also found tons of peculiar deep purple orbs on a frozen world, all over the place in groups of six or seven, each one dropping minerals worth a ton of credits, but immediately attracting sentinels when harvested. Worth it. I could fund a freighter this way if I stay here long enough.

Uploading system/planet data (from yer menu, like after renaming, not just immediately on a scan) rewards nanite clusters now instead of just credits, and in solid amounts. Feels like something that might get rebalanced soon 'cause in a large or dense enough system you could rake in clusters super fast just by wandering around a while and then go buck wild on blueprint/upgrade purchases.

I had three players wander into my system last night which was kinda wild. Your HUD will tell you what they're doing too, right down to basic mineral and plant discoveries, and you'll always have compass icons for their locations and anything they build. I never saw 'em face-to-face though 'cause hey, a whole system with four planets, that's a big space.

It's bits like that which make me think this could be a closer comparison to Fallout 76's take on multiplayer survival/exploration than Sea of Thieves.

[Delthazar]

Holy shit.

https://twitter.com/NoMansSky/status/10 ... 2434629632

[Falcon Critical]

Ah, videogame water saves another virtual life!

You know someone's going to build out to space.

[Delthazar]

Craft yerself a terrain manipulator soon as yer able. You never know what you might find chasing after buried signals.

[Falcon Critical]

Did anyone burrow all the way through a planet yet? That seems like something ridiculous that would be attempted. Prob gonna jump in tomorrow night to check it out.

[Delthazar]

I wonder if that's even possible? Planetary scale is fairly massive, especially on foot, and running into enough underground caves with enough of the right resources to keep your manipulator juiced might be 100% down to luck. In Starbound you could dig to the core eventually. I wonder if NMS has something similar.

Might be way easier to build into space, actually. I really wanna see someone construct a space elevator with a station attached.

Be wary of a nasty save bug:

https://www.polygon.com/2018/7/26/17617 ... ogress-bug

Hotfix might already be up though.

Good vid.

https://youtu.be/B3T5gmch4VU

[Delthazar]

I bought the best scanner upgrade last night, which boosts analysis rewards by, uh, several thousand percent. It's for flora/fauna discoveries only, so you're not gonna get the big bonus for scanning rocks, but now I'm regularly pulling in about 25 to 50k per plant and animal which is super nice, especially when I happen to touch down in a really dense spot.

e: Sean Murray got really good at Twitter over the last couple years.

https://twitter.com/NoMansSky/status/10 ... 4980460545

[Falcon Critical]

Does that scanner upgrade also speed up scanning because oof. Also I have the weirdest bug? feature? where firing my cannons on my ship depletes my own shields, it's making space combat super tough.

[Delthazar]

Does that scanner upgrade also speed up scanning because oof. Also I have the weirdest bug? feature? where firing my cannons on my ship depletes my own shields, it's making space combat super tough.

Oh jeez that bug suuucks. But there could be an easy/expensive fix for that if yer willing to toss that weapon and install something else. Assuming it's just that weapon that's bugged and not all of them. For now you might have to rely on asteroid cover and/or kiting enemy fighters into range of freighter pickets.

The scanner upgrade doesn't speed up analysis, no. Maybe there's another upgrade for that? Hmm.

But anyway I hope you can solve yer weapons problem 'cause if not you might have a way tougher time getting yer freebie freighter and that thing is fantastic.

[Falcon Critical]

I can probably make enough money to upgrade (or downgrade) to a different ship anyway, that should sort it out lol.

[Falcon Critical]

PC Gamer: "This No Man's Sky planet has bad weather around the clock, but it's still one of my favorite places."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQjw7Blxjag

It's pretty relaxing to be honest.

[Delthazar]

At its best this game is straight-up meditative.

RPS has a good tips vid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1ITYj2jt8

That tip for new ships is excellent. Supposedly this is even easier once you have a freighter 'cause then you can just add the crashed ship to your collection without even bothering with the launch thruster and pulse driver repairs, and it'll be in the hangar when you get back (or after a jump, maybe). I haven't tested this myself though.

[Falcon Critical]

I figured out you can press enter to type to other players instead of talking, so we could have communicated. Found out when a rando dropped into my game, we ended up going mic hot and chatting for a while.

I might just run it offline though, it kind of disrupts the experience having to think about other people. Also if you watched the GB gameplay you can straight up troll people which seems troublesome when randos can just pop in.

I got the top tier scanner upgrade, so I'm making hella cash by scanning lifeforms. Completed both planets in the system I was in today, the all-find reward is hundreds of nanites so worth it for sure.

I built a basic base on the desert planet, since it was the only planet I've landed on since Next that didn't just try to kill me all the time. It does have super hot windstorms and cold nights, but that's the best I've had so far. I was amused when I was out at night and my frost protection was low, a sandstorm blew in and the frost protection recharged before the heat protection kicked in.

--edit--
That tip about upgrading the cargo section of your backpack is great, I didn't know about that!

[Delthazar]

Yup! It can get expensive fast though. I have about five of those high-capacity slots now and the price seems to jump at least 100k per slot. 'til yer rolling in dough, I might suggest figuring out your planetary shopping list of must-have resources you wanna stack up to 500 each in high capacity, then buying only that many cargo slots.

Speaking of money, I've seen a pretty good guide for making millions off certain crafted items, though the setup can be quite randomly lengthy 'cause you'll need to hunt down the blueprints first. But once that's over with it sounds like a breeze.

Spoiler :

1. Get Blueprints. Basically, the longest part of the process is hunting down signals for Manufacturing Facilities and solving their puzzles until you get the right blueprints. This could take minutes or hours depending on your luck. Feeding navigational data into your portable beacon thing and searching for Secure can work, as can asking for directions from aliens. The puzzles themselves are always pretty easy number sequence things I think.

2. Buy materials. Once you have the blueprint you want, go back to the system's space station and hang out in the bay until aliens start landing, then trade for that blueprint's crafting mats. Otherwise you'll have to add more steps to the process by crafting those mats yourself. You'll need some startup capital for this part, as some of these blueprints require pricey materials like Hot Ice, but it's a huge timesaver and it pays for itself in moments, and fresh trader aliens with the same inventories land about every three minutes, so you can keep doing this infinitely without zoning or jumping.

3. Craft 'n' sell. Once you have what you need, just put it all together and sell 'em off at the station's exchange. Folks have done this with Cryo Pumps and Fusion Accelerant, both worth about 4.5M per unit, but there are probably other high-end crafted products that work just as well via the same method.

5. Possible considerations. I'm not 100% sure if price variance is a thing you need to keep yer eye on or not, like maybe selling too many at once crashes the market, or maybe some systems buy these items at bad returns, so maybe you'll wanna take the sales slow at first. YMMV. But in theory this process is worth tens or hundreds of millions of credits, enough to solve money problems forever, or totally unbalance everything and ruin the game for you - who knows!

Also, I haven't tested this myself yet, plus there's always a chance it could get patched out, but supposedly the method is still in as of the July 27 patch.

[Falcon Critical]

Sounds a bit like the way I upgraded my ship in the base game, basically the prices in space stations were fixed as long as you were there, and there was either no markup/down or very little when you traded with the pilots who flew in, so find a station that has +50% on an expensive item, then talk to every ship who comes in and buy them out of that item, selling for 50% profit.

That stuff isn't super interesting to me right now though, I have a 25 slot ship (and no freighters) and that feels fine for what I'm looking to get out of the game. The only minerals I keep take up 8 slots:

Carbon / Condensed Carbon
Ferrite Dust / Pure Ferrite
Sodium / Sodium Nitrate
Copper / Chromatic Metal

Technically I could cut that down and remove Copper and Sodium Nitrate because I don't really use them, it's just tidier to keep them together. Beyond that I carry a stack of oxygen tanks and ion batteries for charging my gear (far more efficient than base materials). My backpack is currently 27 slots and it only costs me like 40k to add another, I guess because most of the upgrades I did on planet back when that was easy.

[Delthazar]

Oh, freighters have the NMS equivalent of Brotherhood real-time passive quests, plus some rooms and interfaces you can only build on freighters, so it's worth getting one just for that stuff alone, I think.

[Delthazar]

https://twitter.com/RolandOberheim/stat ... 3412442114

...now that planetary features are represented properly at all distances it should totally be possible to build stuff that's visible from space if you've got the time and materials and inclination.

[Falcon Critical]

Wowzers, people are so good at these large scale art pieces in videogames. I am not confident I could even get a decent sized spiral done without it being a mess.

[Delthazar]

Protip: when you find an ancient ruin, maybe start digging. There's often a lot more there than what you can see...

Protip: scanning NPC ships will apparently get you their price and tech data without having to talk to the captain.

Protip: the procgen for starships seems to change per system, rather than regenerating itself occasionally while within just one system. So jump around for a while if you're not seeing a design you like. This probably also applies to freighters.

Here's a good deep-dive on NMS' various performance issues. I'm more concerned about scripting errors and save corruption but it's still a good read.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digi ... nce-issues

In my case it's been mostly fine since I turned off a few settings but there's always a point towards the end of long sessions when it suddenly tanks and becomes a choppy mess and I'm not sure why. A memory leak, maybe.

[Falcon Critical]

I found an ancient ruin, dug and found two ancient keys but wasn't sure why. I left the planet and looked them up when I was at the space station, realised that I needed to stay in the ruin to unlock a chest so I just sold them because I was pretty sure I wouldn't find he ruin again. Turned around and the ruin was marked on the planet. Oof.

[Delthazar]

Also those keys are generic, so you can stockpile them and use them at other ruins later. Buried treasure chests seem to always take three keys each, and their contents are definitely worthwhile. My first dig got me some jewels worth a couple million and my second dig got me some kinda plant or seeds worth 250k or so, but those might also have some use as a rare farming material, too.

[Falcon Critical]

I watched Jeff's latest stream on NMS, some interesting stuff there like how to get the glass recipe. It is interesting seeing him kind of having fun but sighing a lot at the same time.