No Man's Sky

[Art Blade]

D_B being calm as a coma
Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login

[Dweller_Benthos]

Don't worry, he's friendly!

That was after we found out that building bases near each other when the other person isn't online can cause .... surprising effects. Like the ground showing for one player and not the other, so it's a little wonky. We decided to scrap that planet completely and go to a new system and only build when we are both there to keep the issues to a minimum, hopefully.

Me waiting while Art buys upgrades from the merchant and figures out how to install them.

Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login


Art and I relax on a trade platform.

Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login

[Art Blade]

well, gentle reader, I'm the one in an orange suit in case you were wondering.

[Art Blade]

Some stuff that I hadn't seen before:

I remember how long ago they advertised the game mentioning fleets. Three years later, it's the first time I came across one. Happened to be Dweller's fleet

D_B's fleet
Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login

And I always found it fascinating when he posted weird stuff as I hadn't come across any of that. Now I have

My weird stuff.
Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login

Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login

Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login

Guests are not allowed to view images in posts, please Register or Login

[fragger]

Those screenies of alien planets and life forms, or whatever they're supposed to be... It's gotten too weird-looking for my taste. Don't like it at all. Some of that stuff looks ridiculous, even for NMS.

Regarding fleets, they were always there I remember seeing fleets in the game right from the beginning, unless we're talking about fleets owned by players. I posted screenshots of fleets on the old site ages ago.

Can't play solo at all anymore? What about if you play offline? If not, then that's definitely a deal-killer for me.

In view of all this, I won't ever be going back to NMS.

[Art Blade]

Hehe, they're weird but rare. As far as I can tell, the weird stuff only occurs in "uncharted" systems the planets of which don't belong to any known race, and even there the weird stuff isn't common. So it's a nice change of stuff you see, otherwise it would always be stuff like cows with butterfly wings and so on.

You're right, there have always been fleets and of course I've seen those. But indeed, we're talking about player-owned fleets which is why the title of the pic is "D_B's fleet" and my surprise was that he popped up with his capital ship and all those frigates around it popped up at the same time, they are under D_B's command.

Let's say, it's usually a solo game.. unless someone picks "join random game" and you might be just a random pick and see those orbs. Your options would be either "allow others to join your game" which allows orbs in. It is annoying, indeed. Or it would be "join a friend"/"join random game." IF someone joins your game, like that orb player who walled me up because I didn't check the settings that only friends might do stuff, then there is a potential of going nuts: If you flee by quitting your game, you'll have one savegame that on starting up again, will put you right back into the same position you left off (makes sense) but that player is allowed to stay in that system and might STILL be there (happened to me) so.. I denied all options for him to interact with me and eventually he left.

No idea about offline, it has always been an online game (remember uploading discovered stuff like planet names, animals, plants..?)

[fragger]

You can play offline, I used to do that all the time (after a couple of instances where I lost my connection, all my progress, and my temper ) You can still "upload" stuff you've discovered (that is, you'll still get the in-game credits for them, and you can still rename things) but maybe they just don't get uploaded to the cloud or online database or whatever, I don't know. Don't really care. My discoveries stayed valid and consistent in my own personal game, and that was all I cared about. Didn't give a stuff about the online universe.

I just tried launching the game in offline mode, and you can still play that way. Just make sure you're not logged onto Steam. When you launch the game, a Steam dialog appears with two choices: "Go Online" or "Start in Offline Mode". Choose the latter and you're in. To test, I landed on a planet, scanned for a new location, found one, flew there, got out and claimed it, then "uploaded" it and received the credits.

After getting miffed by those connection (and progress) losses, that was how I used to play all the time. Whether anything I discovered actually got registered (or whatever you'd call it) in the online game, I didn't know - and I didn't care. As long as I got the in-game money for discoveries, that was all I cared about

[Art Blade]

ah, alright, cool

Now that you tested that, you may be pleased to know what D_B told me who usually plays in "normal" mode (as opposed to me playing in "creative" mode) He told me that generally speaking, you're going to make money a lot easier and faster. There are many ways to make money, too. And more importantly, those ships aren't as ridiculously expensive anymore. Which especially is true regarding the first capital ship: after the third "jump" with warp drive, you're supposed to see a fleet with a capital ship, receive a distress call, fight off a few pirates and then get offered that freighter for free.

What might be even more interesting for you is my own experience in "creative" mode: That's where there are NO sentinels and NO pirates bothering you anymore But that mode might be too easy for you, you neither need money nor resources. Perfect for me, as I only want to fly around, grab new ships, and explore. That's why I'm playing at all

However, thanks to the save game editor, I occasionally play on normal mode especially when I want to join D_B's game. Those are two independent and different careers, there's a save for creative and another for normal mode. Total five independent save slots, by the way.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah speaking of the online stuff, a while back there was an update either in Windows 7 or the game or both. Whatever it was blocked all online stuff for me in the game for about two weeks until I fixed it. Thing was, I couldn't get the latest community quest mission, and I like those in general, so I looked around and found the fix. It had something to do with the internet protocol in windows 7, it didn't effect windows 10. Don't know about windows 8. But after digging quite deep and asking on Reddit, I found the fix on the Microsoft site which was a simple registry patch to assign the correct protocol to the correct channel or something.

So, you don't even need to start steam in offline mode, just have windows 7 and the wrong connection update. None of the things I found during that time were uploaded as the indicator on the discoveries screen was always "Searching for signal" or something like that. I didn't look into it right away as that sometimes goes offline anyway, but after two weeks or so, I thought there must be something up and went looking.

As far as other players joining your game and messing up your stuff, that has never happened to me in all the time I've played. The only other players I've seen except for Art when we directly connected to each other was during the community missions where everyone is on the same planet and appears as glowing orbs to each other. Beyond that, I've never seen another player join my game, which is why I was a bit surprised when Art said another player was on his game and messing with his builds, it is quite unlikely you'll ever see another player, unless creative games are different, there being not as many so there's more a chance of another creative player joining you, I don't know.

Art, did you pick up any base building decorations while on those "glitched" planets? Some of them are pretty cool looking.

[PZ]

Yeah, MS and virtually all phone companies do their passive aggressive thing to stick it to users of prior OS versions. On an aside, if you don't update, or upgrade your hardware you'll eventually discover that anything new will not run. 

[Art Blade]

Art, did you pick up any base building decorations while on those "glitched" planets? Some of them are pretty cool looking.

Nope, I don't know how to find those. However, since I did a community daily quest, I just bought all the community activity rewards from the anomaly that can be bought there with quicksilver. There's a ton of funny stuff to be had.

[fragger]

Thanks for the info, guys. Btw, I'm running W10, so everything should be hunky-dory as far as running the game goes - if I were to run it again for real. I only played for a couple of minutes yesterday to see if offline mode still worked. I also didn't wait for the game to be updated while I was online with Steam, so I can't say if anything would change in that regard if I let it update.

I remember now what it was that put me off the last time I tried playing (which wasn't that long ago) - I kept getting hammered by pirates right after my first hyperjump. I got the impression that I was just unlucky and that pirate attacks no longer happen with the ridiculous frequency that they did originally. It was ticking me off because I hadn't had any chance to upgrade any of my ship's shields or weapons and I kept getting destroyed.

I was also a tad overwhelmed by all the stuff that had become available for buying/selling in the Galactic Market (or whatever it's called). There was a shipload of arcane things and techno-doodads with all sorts of tongue-twisty names, and in true NMS form, absolutely nothing to explain what the heck they all were, what they did, whether you needed them for anything, or if they were just some kind of trading commodities. I suffered a kind of novelty overload

[Art Blade]

yeah, yeah, old dogs..

But seriously, regarding pirates.. you weren't using an old savegame (from before patching the game) by any chance, were you? I'm asking because I did that and I got hammered, too. I had more pirates in my system than planets in the universe, or so it felt. D_B recommended I started a new career and indeed, that helped. When I was flying around with D_B the other day in normal mode, we did tease some sentinels and escalated that to a full-blown ground battle with walkers and whatnot, but that was on purpose. We didn't encounter any pirates but then again, we didn't play long on normal mode together.

Art, did you pick up any base building decorations while on those "glitched" planets? Some of them are pretty cool looking.

I think I did without knowing. I found stuff on those planets marked with a "?" and I had to use my controller's (B) button to pick up that stuff which is unusual because normally it's the (X) button. And indeed, in my decoration menu, there are exactly those things now. Will they be available after selling the inventory items which are like trade commodities?

[fragger]

No, I didn't load an old save, I started completely fresh.

[Art Blade]

OK.

This game's coding or, how buggy it is, is so pissing me off EVERY time D_B and I played together, something unexpected happened that shouldn't have happened, wasn't supposed to happen. Base building stuff (yet again) that doesn't w0#k once we join, ships that were supposed to be in the hangar of the capital ship disappeared completely and who knows what else we weren't aware of.

In D_B's words, "it doesn't build confidence," and indeed, it worries me. I'm afraid that we're losing progress as the least and that we're losing a career as the worst possible result of all those bugs. It's apparently better to play solo and in case we join, make a backup before and reload that backup afterwards.