No Man's Sky

[fragger]

According to the Wiki, in addition to the maximum 48 regular Exosuit slots, you can also have up to 12 Tech slots and up to 25 high-capacity slots.

When you open your Exosuit display, on the right you will see a triangle of icons, one for the regular slots, one for "Cargo" slots (high-capacity) and one for "Tech" slots (at the top of the triangle). Tip: when you're in one of your suit-slot displays, "Q" and "E" (by default) will cycle through the three suit-slot displays, so you don't have to click on the icons on the right to access them.

You can't put anything but upgrades in the Tech slots. I was thinking it would be a good place for things like Jetpack upgrades, since you can't put those next to the Jetpack itself for the adjacency bonus. Might as well put them in the Tech slots.

I discovered that you can put single items in a high-capacity slot, such as a Vy'keen Dagger or a Shielding Shard. In fact, you can have up to 5 of things like that per slot (as long as they're all the same thing, natch).

Heh, I too have been using my sole high-capacity slot for those blasted Nanites

[Art Blade]

today I checked the nexus for mods and damn, most of what I've seen hasn't been updated since about a year ago. It looks as if the modding scene died with the game and they missed out on its resurrection.

[fragger]

I guess they've found more interesting games to mod, or ones that don't dramatically change with each new update

It's becoming increasingly apparent that the way to make real money in NMS is through base-building. That exploit we used to use to make money in a station by dealing in Dynamic Resonators appears to have been eliminated. I tried for a while but no traders were were doing the "buying high" thing. So I think the devs have closed off that avenue of income.

I looked at some clips on YouTube and many people are using base improvements to make big bucks. I saw one guy who had built a large indoor hydroponics farm. He harvested all the plants, used them to craft about a dozen Suspension Fluids, then sold them all through a Galactic Trade terminal which he had set up right there in the hothouse. He did this twice, until he'd used up all the plants, pulling down about 1.2 million in just a few minutes. Presumably the plants grow back (don't know how long that takes) so you could do that over and over, I guess.

Having a base and hiring an alien to w0#k on research (or something like that) will supposedly yield a lot more upgrade blueprints, according to the Wiki, but it's not super clear on the details. Getting to that stage is the trick. Base components are themselves expensive, and whether I can persevere with the game long enough to get to that stage I don't know. It seems a long way off at this point.

I've finally jumped into a new system and indeed, the blueprint vendor in the new station (Gek) has a totally different array of upgrades available. There are more ship upgrades available now, including an "Economic Scanner" which is supposed to aid you in establishing lucrative trade routes between systems/planets. I don't have that yet so I have no idea how it works.

Incidentally, I disabled the Steam overlay and have been playing offline, which seems to have helped the frame rate issue a little. It's still not great - maybe about a 5-10% increase in performance, guessing. Better than nothing, I suppose.

[Art Blade]

I keep reading here and try to make sense of your and D_B's experiences. So far, I understand that the game has changed quite a bit but almost nothing of the new stuff sounds as if the game was now any better. To the contrary, it is more suitable to keep me away from it. So far, I can only imagine to return if and when there are tons of mods that essentially annihilate the whole economical part. I think I'd return with god mode, unlimited money and resources available so that building a base and a hydroponic greenhouse would be essentially unnecessary or at best, some sort of pastime. Like, proof of concept, and that's that.

[fragger]

So far, I understand that the game has changed quite a bit but almost nothing of the new stuff sounds as if the game was now any better.

That's pretty much it, mate. They keep adding lots of new stuff, but it doesn't really address the core issue the game has, and has always had - a lack of any sort of decisive goal. It seems to me that it's a case of making more money to get more stuff which will enable you to make more money to get more stuff, and round and round it goes. There are missions you can do, but apparently I haven't met whatever the criteria are to do missions. Whenever I interact with the "mission agent" on the station, I keep getting a message that tells me I'm not ready to do missions yet, or there are none yet, or something along those lines.

I don't know if I'll stick with it much longer, actually. I start to tire of planets having the same terrain all over. Nothing has changed there. The planets might be all different, but usually only in colour schemes and atmospheres, and whatever terrain you find on a given planet will extend to the entire surface of that planet, as always. There is no diversity of landforms on a given planet itself. The life forms get dull after a while too. You start to recognize all the various elements that have been randomly stuck together to make a creature. You have your dinosaur-like features, your insectoid features, your avian features and your mammalian features, arranged into various unlikely combinations of same. And then of course there is the family of comical bouncing blobby things, but see one jumping bean-bag full of spuds and you've seen them all. Occasionally there'll be something arresting, but even then it'll often be ridiculous and improbable. There is a species on one planet in my game which looks like a flying trunkless elephant, yellow in colour and with horse-type legs, but the wings keeping it aloft are ludicrously small, like an Indian elephant using its own ears to fly with, Dumbo-fashion. It looks quite nonsensical and silly.

And plant life is the same. There are only so many variations possible of giant mushrooms, fleshy fern things, bulb-like plants and land anemones. I saw one type of plant that resembled a bouquet of oversized penises, which didn't do a lot for me, I can tell you Those curled-up, poised-to-strike Trifid-like plants that whack you one if you get too close seem to be on at least one planet in every system too.

There is a play option in the game's new start menu, "Creative Mode", that allows you to play with unlimited health and resources, and zero building costs (much like you described, Art) but I haven't tried it.

[Art Blade]

first off, you made me laugh aloud, then I know exactly what you are talking about, so nothing has changed, indeed.

And thanks for the reminder, I completely forgot about the creative mode because you two weren't using it. Yes, that's going to be my mode, if I ever get back to it. You know what? D_ B and I already own it, Space Engineers. That's pretty much the same stuff, and I've ever since been playing in creative mode. The only difference: It has been under development, constantly, with frequent updates, but we bought it as pre-release and more or less "recently" it went beta. And we're not angry or pissed off, we just stay away knowing that it's an ongoing development and at least I keep returning once in a while to see the progress with my own eyes. I think it's cooler than NMS perhaps because it isn't so ridiculous and because you can indeed create stuff, somewhat like LEGO but more like Fischertechnik ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischertechnik ) -- engineering stuff. No weird Gek and whatnot stuff

[Dweller_Benthos]

I tried out creative mode to test some base building stuff out, like how things fit together and such. I want a landing platform for my ship, but I haven't found out how you get that yet in normal mode. I need to get back to the game a bit as I've been doing other things lately. I still need to get to a Gek system to hire my farmer and then I guess that's how you get money as fragger mentions. I still find enough interesting stuff in the game to keep me playing now and then, but still, it feels like it's not finished, and maybe in late alpha stage for an early access game.

As for mods, the few I want are updated. I only used a couple, an now that low flight is included I don't need that one. The clean display mod is a simple texture replace so that's always updated usually. The only other one is the fast actions so you don't have to hold the mouse button down and it's been updated pretty regularly as well.

[Art Blade]

I would really like to have the save game editor back.

[fragger]

The low-flight mode seems to have been completely eliminated. You can now hit the ground as well as terrain such as hills and cliffs, which I have a tendency to do on a slow frame-rate planet, especially when descending from space. I half expect to hear a Bitchin' Betty message screaming, "Pull up! Pull up!" You can even hit the trees now, or the big ones anyway, and structures. Hitting anything at speed will do a bit of Shield damage, but only a little. So it is kind of fun to weave among the cliffs and valleys on planets which have them. I'm yet to see if I can fly through a natural arch, only because I haven't come across any planets which have those in this game. There were some spectacular ones on a planet in my old game, and I know I couldn't fly through those because I tried. I'd just get automatically shunted over the top of them.

[Art Blade]

so now, instead of a Bitchin' Betty, it's a Bouncing Betty

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yep, I ran into a rather tall animal once. He looked at me and walked off.

[Art Blade]

Either he was herbivore or he thought you looked like a plant.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I'll have to check, but I don't think they are aggressive until you get out of the ship.

[Art Blade]

that's.. the perfect time to double check on your aftershave.

[fragger]

I think you're right, D_B. They don't try to get at you when you're in your ship. They will if you're on top of your ship though, if they're big enough to reach you. I learned that the hard way