No Man's Sky

[fragger]

Thanks for the info, D_B You have some terrific screenies there mate, beautifully composed. You have an eye

I confess I haven't played any of NMS for a while now. I reached a point where getting anywhere noteworthy seemed like such a long way off that I lost interest. Maybe I'll pick it up again in future, but I'm back into XCOM and Civ V for the time being. Those ones never get old for me.

[Dweller_Benthos]

I'm mostly playing out of the curiosity, and I do want to see where the quest line goes, and eventually go through a portal. But is it "fun" ?  I really can't say, I mean I wouldn't be playing if I wasn't at least enjoying it a little. But, really, if something else comes along that I want to play more, this will get left in the "when I don't have anything else to play" pile.

[Art Blade]

 

I agree with fragger about "you have an eye." I mean, I agree with what he meant by that but I'd dare say D_B got even two of 'em.

[fragger]

Yes, I'm pretty sure D_B is equipped with binocular vision

[Art Blade]

can't say anything about his vision. He might keep those eyeballs lying around on his bedside cabinet.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Reminds me of that bit in one of the Addam's Family movies, talking about the new baby:

"Awww... look, he has your father's eyes"
"Get those out of his mouth"

Yes, I have two eyes, but they're both a bit wonky, need corrections, and now, even with the contact lenses, I need reading glasses on top of them. Insert generic getting old comment here.

So, I've been having a bit of fun. I'll get to that in a bit. Yes, you heard that right, fun.

If you don't recall, previously, when there was a storm while you were on the ground, once you hopped in your ship and took off, the storm would disappear once you were in the air. No longer true. Here I am flying through one.

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You can see from my display, I'm 50u above the ground on that last one, almost no visibility. And here's one of the creatures in the storm.

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This planet is pretty much stormy all the time, so here's one of the big guys next to my ship.

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Also, another new feature, when flying in space, and you have a waypoint you're heading towards, if you point your ship at it, and hit the pulse engine, it will follow that that waypoint as much as possible, and navigate towards it until the planet make you drop out of pulse, then you can fly manual the rest of the way. Makes going to a marker much easier.

On one of my trips around the system, I approached a planet and noticed a crashed freighter right below me so I landed on it. I got a new quest when I accessed the data recorder to find the cargo. I'd never had this before, and I think you only start to get them once you have the terrain deformer tool. You have to find six storage containers and basically loot them. You scan and get the icons on your hud and follow them to the crates, some of which are buried pretty deep. Once you dig them out, you get money from them. You can see the first one I dug out just to the left of the data module.

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The low flight lets you get as close to the ground as you want, but you can't go underwater, here I am flying against the ocean surface.

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Following the quest line for the ground transportation (can't think of the name in game right now) the second type you get is this hover thing. It didn't seem much different from the dune buggy in features or abilities, so unless something else comes along you can upgrade it with, not sure what it's advantage is.

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The latest on the base, I've been adding modules each time I get a new worker. So the last one is the farmer and he has the two modules on the second floor. I plan on having some more crops growing, and once I get the abilities to grow what's needed, I can make circuit boards which sell for over a million a piece.

You can see the two ground vehicles on their pads in the lower right, and my ship in the upper left. If you look top center, you'll see those big cube things. Those are my storage modules. You'd think at that size, you could store a ton of stuff in there, but no, each has five slots. They hold a large amount of one item, but for that size, you'd want maybe 10 slots? Inventory management is a bit easier now, as you can swap things between inventories even off planet, which is nice. But when crafting something, unless you have the needed parts on your person, you can't craft the thing you want. It doesn't look in all your other inventories for the needed materials. Maybe there's a mod for that, I'll have to look. But, you can look at all your inventories and transfer what you need, but I consider that a wasted step.

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And I said above, I'm having fun. Yep, you heard me right, fun. The dune buggy when upgraded is a blast to drive. I should have followed this quest line earlier. With the jet booster upgrade, it's quite easy to go up pretty much anything. Traveling along the ground is a blast now, and makes finding what you need much easier. I was hopping out and grabbing various materials that I need for later quests on my way to where I was going.

This planet has a tons of deep river canyons that I like to try jumping over. I haven't succeeded yet, but here's a view from the cliff

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And a video of the attempt.



I have a longer video of some driving and cliff jumping, with me attacking a supply depot to get the materials I need to make more stuff, but I didn't have time to upload it today. I'll upload it tomorrow and post it then.

[Art Blade]

erm.. 3rd person view.. 

Was it always 3rd person? I thought I played 1st. I never thought I'd see you play 3rd.

[Art Blade]

I checked those pics again, D_B, because they were composed so nicely. Good job, all of that.. I think a +1 is in order

[Dweller_Benthos]

Thanks Art. Driving ground vehicles is automatically 3rd person view, which I don't mind so much, but if there was an option, I might go for 1st person.

Speaking of, here's that other video, another failed canyon jump, then attacking a depot for the materials needed to build another vehicle:



And here's that vehicle, the Colossus, and it is big, as you can see

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It drives like a tank, and is slow, so the opposite of the Roamer. I don't think I'll take it anywhere, but just use it as a storage unit, as it has a decent amount of slots and they hold a pretty good amount.

I've finished the "Exocraft" quest line for the ground vehicles, and have all the upgrades for each of the three. A couple of the quests were a bit odd, and I think they didn't plan for the various options too well. They were both for the speed upgrades, and they were timed. The first one gave you an hour to complete, and you had to find a data terminal and download the info there. The quest says to make sure you've built the rocket boosters so you can get there in the time limit. Well, that would be all well and good, if the destination was on the same planet. Since it wasn't I couldn't well drive there, even with the boosters, so I flew there in the ship. Same for the second speed upgrade, only this time you only have 5 minutes to get there, and again, they made a point of saying to be sure to build the upgrade first, so you can get there in time. And again, it was off-world, so I flew there. Maybe not as dramatic, but easy enough to complete.

I also finished the farmer quest line, and that was pretty easy as well. Most of them were in the form of, "Here's how to grow a plant, now plant one and harvest it" the idea being you would wait for the plant to grow, then give the harvest to the farmer as proof that you grew it. Well, I had already raided the same things off other worlds so I had enough to make the planter and plant the seeds there, then I could immediately turn in the quest with the rest of the stuff I already had. So picking up everything you find is sometimes not a bad idea.

Now I have the over seer quest to do, which is the circuit boards that I've been wanting to make all along for the money you can get selling them. After that I'll see how it goes and maybe follow the other main quest for a bit.

[PZ]

... Driving ground vehicles is automatically 3rd person view, which I don't mind so much...

[Art Blade]

^ 

D_B, in that video those drones dropped some sort of cylindrical vessel. When I collected those, I used to get blueprints and stuff but I didn't see you picking them up.

[Dweller_Benthos]

You only get nanites from the sentinel drops now, so I didn't bother filming that bit.

I finished the base building quest lines and received a bunch of blueprints for building stuff in my base, like the landing pad which I've wanted from day one. Thing is, from what I read on reddit, if you build a landing pad, then all sorts of characters will drop by as if it's a trade post. And if you park your ship there, all the other ships will start circling your base looking for a place to land. So once I get the materials, I'll build a couple landing pads. Having people land there is a decent source of materials and a place to sell stuff.

So, after having finished the base quests, I decided to reverse course and go back to the systems I followed on my journey to where I am now. After figuring out the wonky galactic map which I still have trouble selecting what I want (just put the cursor on the screen already) I jumped back one system. Landed on a planet and saw these jellyfish looking things. They aren't alive, I don't think, and a source of radnox which I have no ide what it is used for.

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Came across this guy as well, he is a big one, a true dinosaur looking dude.

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On the way into the system, I got a distress call from a freighter and thought what the heck, let's take these guys on. They weren't as tough as the pirates I've fought before and I got rid of them pretty quick. Went to talk to the freighter captain and got the reward of a few thousand space bucks. The freighter is a really nice one, and I think it's my new goal to buy it.

Just to give you an idea of the size of these things, here's my ship after exiting the landing bay.

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The mounted guns on this thing are bigger than my ship. So, I flew off a ways to show the entire thing.

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Yep, I'm gonna buy this one day. Just need to get the money together.

The price?

315 Million.

[Art Blade]

pffffff!

Nice pics and interesting information. Cheers

[fragger]

I'm impressed that you've persevered with the game long enough to discover and relate these things D_B, and I appreciate the time and effort you've put in to do so and report it to us Cheers

I've pretty much given up again, but that was largely on account of the frame rate issue I have with the game, which tends to discourage me.

315 million for the big freighter? Whoa It took me ages to scrape together a couple of million by the end of my last session, mostly by the grind of mining and filling my ship and suit with Gold and flogging it - and that took time. A couple of those big domes of Gold can collectively take a good half-hour of lasering to get through and the total would bring in about 600,000 credits' worth, so I decided that the time spent standing in one spot sweeping the mining laser back and forth - real, actual time, like, gone out of my life forever - wasn't worth the payoff. Not to mention the fact that it made for a rather tedious form of gaming.

I realize there are far more effective ways to make money in NMS than mining stuff and selling it, but it's the getting to the point where you can start doing so that kind of scares me off a bit. Still, I may dip into it again at some point.

Excellent pics again, +1 from me too

[Dweller_Benthos]

Thanks guys. Yeah, I'm actually enjoying the game again, go figure. I was looking forward to playing last night. Some (and note I said some) of the initial excitement from launch day is back. There's still the wonky controls, the weirdo menus and such to deal with, but there's a game under there after all.

No pics today as I did nothing noteworthy last night. Since I figured out that all my previous planets visited no longer exist, really, I've decided to go back along my original route, visit those systems again and see what the planets look like now.

Some more info that might make you feel more like coming back to the game. Tired of walking? The Roamer dune buggy is the best, as I've said before, and fun to ride around in, running over critters who don't get out of the way fast enough.

After driving around a bit, don't feel like driving back to your ship? Just recall it to your position, it costs nothing. As long as you are on the same planet, you can recall it any time. Same goes for your buggy, if you wander too far away and don't want to walk back, just recall it, hop in and drive off. You can also use this around the base if you land in a spot that's not convenient (and haven't built a landing pad yet, cough) you can just recall it and place it exactly where you want it.

I've also mentioned the inventory. It's not perfect yet, but getting there, and being able to transfer items from your personal inventory to your storage cubes back at your base, even if you're in another star system, makes that chore a bit easier.

Your personal storage has the new cargo slots which you can buy at the drop pods, and they hold a lot more than the normal slots, so that's a big help. the drop pods still have that bug though, where it will gladly let you buy a normal storage slot for a suit that's already maxed out on storage in the normal section. So that's something to be careful of.

The only thing that really hasn't been upgraded is the multi-tool. There are so many new things you can get for it, that there's no room in a tool with all 24 slots to have a couple of them installed plus all their upgrades. Be nice if they added an option to get more upgrade slots for the tool.

Plus now there's the classes for the tool and ships, I haven't jumped into this yet, as I'm still using the ones I had from the start. The C class is the lowest, then there's A and S classes too, forget if there's a B class or not. But each class has a bonus to various attributes like power use or damage it can do.

Oh, and that beautiful freighter I wanted? It's gone. When I loaded the game, a new fleet of ships appeared and they were a different style. So I will have to be looking for that style again once I have the money to buy one.