No Man's Sky

[Dweller_Benthos]

Well No Man's Sky doesn't technically have a game map. Since every planet is procedurally generated, there's no set map for anything. But since each system can have 6 or 8 planets, forget exactly, and each has a surface area that's pretty large (but not really "planet sized" but still pretty big) plus there's like 18 quintillion systems to visit across 255 galaxies, yeah, it's big lol.

I see the new PS5 VR gear is getting some rave reviews, as in it's better than any of the others. If I was at all into VR that would be the way to go. But that's something that requires another whole setup really plus there's only a few games I'd really want to play like that.

[Dweller_Benthos]

New update, Interceptor, we can finally get Sentinel ships I guess



https://www.nomanssky.com/interceptor-update/

[PZ]

I might be mistaken, but it sure seems like the game gets lots of added festures 

[Dweller_Benthos]

I was surprised at this one, there was a little hint the other day on twitter but I never pay much attention to that trash fire so I didn't even think about it. Apparently they now have two teams working on staggered updates, so a major and minor one every two months or something like that. I spent most of last night updating my mods, luckily the decompiler was also updated fast so I could get that done rather quickly. About all I did in the game was fight a couple of the new sentinels which are tougher for sure, since I don't play for a few days, usually the time builds up for where they attack my settlement and usually it's just a matter of standing there shooting them until they go away. But I actually had to do some maneuvering to get to the ones that heal the ones you're attacking, otherwise you can't kill them. So this weekend I'll spend more time in it and maybe get a sentinel ship and attack one of their freighters.

[PZ]

The best thing about PC gaming for me is the ability to mod, and it looks like you're enjoying the same thing in NMS 

[Dweller_Benthos]

A couple thousand downloads of my mod would suggest a few people agree with you, lol!

[PZ]

A couple thousand downloads of my mod would suggest a few people agree with you, lol!

WOW! 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah and mine isn't the only one that does what it does, there's a few others and I'm sure they all have similar or more downloads. It's a pretty common gripe in the game that my mod fixes, the amount of time it takes to scan stuff. It's one of the major activities in the game, and it just takes forever. Admittedly, it's not nearly as bad as it used to be, when it would take just over four seconds to scan something, then recently they reduced it to just over 2 seconds. My mod comes in two versions, one reduces scan to to 9/10 of second which is fast enough for you to not fall asleep while scanning like the default does, but not so fast that it seems, well, cheaty. The other one reduces scan time to 1/10 of a second which feels near instant in game and is for the real impatient people lol. I didn't want to reduce it to zero as I was afraid that would cause issues with the scan happening so fast the game can't keep up. As it is, and I never tested this extensively with and without the mod to see, is that the amount of money you get for each scan is supposed to be different depending on what you're scanning, animal, vegetable or mineral. So, rocks are low value, plants worth more and animals worth the most. But what gets reported on screen if you scan things too fast is not what it should be for what you're scanning. So if you scan a rock for 10,000 credits, then fast scan some plants and animals, which should be worth more, the on screen display stays at 10,000 that you got for the rock. I never bothered to check to see if the amount you actually get is more, as that would be hard to figure out, but that may be an issue. So either don't scan things one after the other or scan the animal first which might net you 100,000 or more and then scan plants and rocks and keep getting that 100,000 for those that you really shouldn't be getting lol. 

But anyway, I ran the new quest line to get my first sentinel ship and it was enjoyable. I need to explore around a bit more and find some more interesting ships, I've seen the ones people have posted and they are a lot more cool looking than mine is hehe.

[PZ]

It's great that you're still enjoying the game, D_B. Kinda makes sense though with all the updates and new stuff you get. 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah frequent updates do help keep the interest alive.

[Dweller_Benthos]

New update, Singularity, just released. This is hot on the tail of the latest update, Fractal, which was mostly support for MAC OS so there wasn't much different. This new update adds a new expedition to look further into the corrupted sentinels I guess, and adds a few things as well.

[PZ]

It's cool that NMS continues to update with added content 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Expeditions are usually pretty fun. For the most part. There's one aspect to this one that is a bit, well, stupid, and people are not happy. Usually you get a set of tasks to do, places to go, etc, and you progress by doing these and get rewards for them. The final rewards are things you can claim in any other save game, so stuff isn't restricted just to this save. So that's cool, but in this one they've set one of the progress markers as a "community event" where it looks like the progress is tied to everyone getting a certain task done, but people have looked at the save information and it's not based on that at all, it's strictly time based, and it will only get finished in five weeks, no matter how much people contribute to it. I can see why they did this, because there are save file editors where you can give yourself anything and just dump all them into the community event and it would get finished the first weekend. So it's timer based, which I could deal with if they were honest about it, but it's still a bit of a ding on the whole fun aspect of the expedition. So that's kind of a bummer. There's also the fact that the server that holds the information on what the progress is was down for a good amount of time over the weekend and you couldn't do anything because the game couldn't connect to see what the progress was.

But aside form that the rest is a fun thing to do and something in the game the keep interest up, and a lot of the time I do things that I probably wouldn't do otherwise, so that's a thing too.

[PZ]

 

I had no idea. I typically do not do anything online with gaming, so I do not see these kinds of things.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Well they must have caught wind of the player's annoyance, as when I checked Monday, the server was back up and the progress bar had advanced from less than 25% to over 60%, and last night when I was on, the progress was over 80%, so I think they read the room as it were and advanced the timer a bit.

Again, I can wee why they went to a timer system instead of an actual community progress counter as it's too easy to cheat and flood the system with items added with an editor. But not being clear about it and trying to sneak it in and make it still look like an actual community event was a bit underhanded I think. Or they should have come up with something better. No official word about it either, so that's just my take on how things went.