No Man's Sky

[Dweller_Benthos]

I had little time to play after I got off GTAV with you, so any progress in NMS will have to wait a bit.

[Art Blade]

time.. we need a lot more spare time..

[Art Blade]

OK so I fired up the NEXT for the first time. It looks so different from what I remember. It started in 3rd person and I didn't find the option to toggle it for some time, only when I entered a random building, I was told to switch on the space torch or some stuff, showing me the "D-Pad down" key. There is a lot of stuff when using it, a series of menus and sub-menus can be selected and in there was the toggle for the camera. Yeah, very intuitive. How about just one key to toggle?

Then there was a guy who was probably there before me because I had to choose how to start the game and decided to go for "with friends" but it's not possible to limit it to friends as far as I can tell, so I had to join random people "and friends" who weren't there. So he "entered" the system, alone but with mic on, and I could hear him talking to himself as well as the sounds his game made. Clever, he must have had a mic recording his speakers.

I didn't find a way to save my game, which is why I tried to find any place to land which was random and nearby, and I think a Gek was in there. So that's where I found out about the 1st/3rd person camera view. It did save there.

It was enough for me to wish to end it, and I did.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah, next time we are online together I'll invite you. You can start your own game and have it be invite only I think. What you might want to do it try a creative game just to get the idea of how things w0#k. The viewpoint controls to change from 1st to 3rd are really unintuitive, a lot of people complain about that and the controls in general. I'm waiting for the mod to update (need to check) that allows better keybinding for the keyboard. Some things are just done very strangely. It's like they forgot a keyboard has over 100 keys and just keep using the 9 keys around WASD over and over, and some of them are not changeable in the options. They are really under Sony's thumb as far as making it for Playstation and PC is an after thought.

But I think if we get together in a chat we can have a decent time. I just wish there was a way to be in the same starship, as they are all one seaters as far as I know, so no pilot / gunner combos, which would be sweet for space battles.

I've been playing the whole time in open sessions and never met anyone, weird that you got into a game with someone else right off the bat.

[Art Blade]

yep, it was in creative mode I started a new career and indeed, right away someone I could even see his player icon on the horizon (albeit it was off-planet) and hear the in-game voice chat that he was using. It put me off right away

I'm in for it when you're up for it, though

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah we can hook up some time. I've gotten a few of the mods I consider necessary and need to edit my config file to allow proper use of the keyboard, so hopefully that will get the game working the way I like it and can put some time into it.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Did a little exploring. The last planet in the system my main game started me in had nasty freezing blizzards all the time, plus aggressive sentinels because of gravitino balls. I didn't bother staying there much and took off and plotted a course to a new system. I don't know what they did to the map screen, but I had a tough time navigating it with either keyboard, mouse or controller. It didn't pan around and let you fly through the stars like it used to. So, I eventually picked a system to go to which was on the path back to the last system I left my freighter in. Landed at the station and sold some stuff and since the colors aren't so muted in this system, did some customization of my character:

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Looks weird enough and kind of Mad Max barbarian to be from a little backwater planet like Earth. You can be any of the races with many options for various body parts.

After that, decided to pose in front of the ship, giving the best thumbs up I'm capable of:

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Then I went off to explore a couple planets. After fighting off some pirates because apparently all the obsolete tech I have from my old game is pretty valuable, I landed on a planet and raided an abandoned building. They are still pretty much the same, but they usually have these egg nests outside now. If you collect the eggs, they are worth 95,000 each so they are pretty valuable, but the parents don't take kindly to you stealing their children and put up a fight. I found the best way is to get on something they can't reach and take shots at them.

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The scanner calls them something like "burrowing horror" because they hide underground until you disturb their nest.

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After that I found a factory and blew the door open and got attacked by sentinels. Just to see how they attack, I kept getting a higher and higher warning level until a walker showed up. Think one of those two-legged mechanical walking tanks from Star Wars, they are essentially a copy of those. I got in the ship and took off, using the new mod I had installed that allows you to hover and shot at it for about 5 minutes, and still didn't destroy it. I eventually got bored and flew away, and after getting out of sight, my wanted level went away after about 30-45 seconds.

[Art Blade]

you must feel pretty much at home there, with your FC5 Mars background.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah right, standing on top of things to get the high ground. Sound battle advice in any situation, lol.

So I found a planet that's suitable for building a base on. It's not immediately hostile, not toxic or radioactive, has decent weather, though there are superheated storms now and then, but they usually don't last too long. The sentinels are moderate, you have to do some amount of mining in order to attract their attention. But there are "sentient plants" that grow albumen pearls and the sentinels do not like it when you harvest those, as you get an immediate 3 star crime rating and have to get away fast. The pearls aren't worth all that much, so I doubt I'll be taking many, not worth the effort.

But the place looks cool and the animals are mostly friendly from what I've seen. There's one predator in the ocean so those are easy to avoid. It also natively grows one of the plants needed to make circuit boards, the star bulb, which has had a makeover, these used to be about half as tall as your character or so it felt. They are a bit bigger now:

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Then there's these crystal things, I think they are sodium, or carbon maybe? But they look cool.

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So far I can only build equipment, I think I need to build a computer then I can start building a base. Once I get something up and going, I'll claim all the stuff from my old base, build the pads for the land vehicles and really explore the place. I like the way the HUD now shows certain items when you scan, it's much more easy to use and you can tag an item so you don't have to keep scanning to have the icon in view. Not sure if you can tag multiple items or not.

One thing that's nice is it will show you where those annoying whip plants are so you can avoid them more easily.

[Art Blade]

Good old tentacles. Always good for a mild shock. Annoying buggers

[Dweller_Benthos]

The warning marker on the whip plants makes them easier to avoid or hunt down and destroy now. A definite improvement.

I finally started a base on the latest planet, just to get things settled and be able to have a place to teleport back to. I was setting up my base computer and refiner and died twice. Below is one of my grave markers next to the base computer.

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So, you're thinking, what could have possibly killed me? Toxic gas clouds? Nope, no toxic gas clouds on this planet. Well, maybe hostile wildlife? Nope, no hostile wildlife here either. Well, it must have been sentinels then? Nope, they don't care when you're building a base apparently.

No, what I died to, twice in about 5 minutes, was the fact that I have the right mouse button set to back out of hud menus like the build menu and quick menu. Well, that's all well and good, but the right click is also set to fire the secondary weapon on the mining tool. Just so happens that is the plasma grenade. Yep, I right clicked one too many times and shot a plasma grenade at my feet. Twice. I've now gotten into the habit of setting my secondary function on the mining tool to the personal shield, so that now if I right click one too many times, the shield comes on instead of launching a plasma grenade.

[LowPolyOWG]

Try bind the grenade/shield button to the middle mouse button?


Anyway, my friend went on a killing spree once, murdering noobs  The multiplayer here is a PvPvE only mode, so beware. I hope they will add separate PvE/PvP instances so new players are not instantly obliterated by well equipped players. Might aswell add a "Dark Zone"/pirate territory where you can loot rare materials and have the opportunity to kill other players and loot their goods.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Middle mouse button is already assigned to something else, they didn't make it easy when they set up the controls section of the options screen. Even though it's made for controller, I've seen posts form people on consoles complain about the control layouts. They just don't make sense in some cases. I guess on Playstation you have to set some global control scheme in order to override the in game controls. Or that might have been Xbox, but either way it's not something they put a lot of effort into. On PC, you have to find and edit an XML file if you want to change the controls that aren't on the config screen, which is a lot of them.

I have yet to see another player in the game, even though my settings are to allow people to join. Maybe I'm just not popular enough? 

[Art Blade]

maybe you already scared the sweet bejeebus out of them

[Dweller_Benthos]

Could be, I am a formidable player. Not.

I didn't play anything last night, one of my hard drives started throwing S.M.A.R.T. errors and said to backup and remove it as soon as possible. I have been having issues recording videos to it, but I thought that was my software or bitrate settings. Might have been the hard drive starting to die the last couple weeks. Anyway, I think I got most of the stuff transferred over to a new drive, just need to swap it out in the case for the old drive.

Funny thing, I think it took longer to copy over the game files I had on there than it would have to just download and install them again on the new drive. Ah well.