No Man's Sky

[mmosu]

Ha! Good one  :-X
Yes, plutonium seems to be more cost effective, and harvesting it doesn't attract as much sentinel attention as walking around vaporizing plants for carbon does (they really don't seem to like that  ::)). Destroying sentinels ups the "threat" level and calls in heavier artillery if you keep it up, but if you're near your ship you can just fly away and leave your troubles behind. Also, thamium seems even more efficient, but it's harder to find on the surface (of the planets I've been on at least). However, it seems like the best place to find thamium is from blowing up asteroids- so far they seem to be made of mostly either thamium or iron. Iron itself is useful to help in exploring planets, as you can use it to manufacture bypass chips, and bypass chips can be used to hack beacons for info on the locations of outposts and alien monuments.
Currently I'm on a moon that is tidally locked to it's planet. Since the planet always appears on the same side of the sky, and can be seen looming over the entire horizon, it's a useful tool for reorientation when I get turned around. Before I leave I plan to fly further over the horizon and see if I can find a place where the planet fills the whole sky (it's frickin' huge)

[Art Blade]

Thanks mmosu :)

to fragger: check out the link for some help regarding your problems. I think they're really busy and trying hard to help people with troubles.
http://www.no-mans-sky.com/news/

However, I just had a new download of some 18MB on steam but don't know yet what it was. I don't even know what version I'm on. What really worries me is some weird information on said link telling people to FIRST update to 1.03 and THEN play the game or delete the savegames so you can start fresh in order to get the new stuff into your game. They say that they won't do it like that again -- nice, but do I have to start over from scratch? Damn.

[mmosu]

I don't think so, that sounds like the patch that went up the day before release. I had to download and install that after installing the game but before launching. Of course, since I'm on console that might not generalize to you guys.

[fragger]

It's all good guys, I got it sorted. Updating my video card driver seems to have done the trick :-X

So yeah, I'm in. All I can say so far is man, this is fantastic. Bit of a learn at first, the game doesn't exactly hold your hand. Once I got some basic stuff figured out, I got stuck into exploring. The jet-pack is handy for getting around (once I learned not to let it run out of gas when I was up too high...) I got started on a hot and very rugged planet with some pretty bizarre-looking alien flora. I hand-fed this animal that was like a cross between a big cat and a lizard, and now he likes me (he has a little smiley face floating above his head and he follows me around when I'm near the ship).

I flew into space and there was a space station up there, which I landed in and did some trading. Flying around is a blast :-X Full control, no pre-programmed stuff (except for when you fly into a station). Flew all the way from orbit back down to the surface, then flew all around the landscape - total freedom of travel. There's stuff to be found everywhere and it all looks terrific.

Sleep-deprivation, here I come :-()

[mmosu]

Ha, yeah, pretty much!
Glad you're finally in fragger  :-X

[Art Blade]

Yay, fragger!  :-X :)

I flew into space and there was a space station up there, which I landed in and did some trading.
...
Sleep-deprivation, here I come :-()

Funny you should mention that trading. I did the same, albeit likely a bit more excessive than you guys  :-()

[smg id=8900 type=preview align=center caption="done some trading"]

I had some problems with the game I was on while posting previously, I couldn't for the life of me find the last bloody element to get the ship engine up and running and I really spent like three hours searching for that stuff on that fricking planet :D

Then I thought hell, let's try and just start over from scratch, making sure the new patch was included so I didn't have to worry all the time and forever about missing out on something by not starting over fresh.

I found the savegame location,

HD:\Users\yourname\AppData\Roaming\HelloGames\NMS\here some random gibberish folder

deleted the whole folder (after making a backup) and started anew.


On the new planet, I found all the stuff needed (diving through acid rain) within like 30 minutes  ??? ::) OK.. at least I am up and running despite losing a lot of progress. The new world was horrible, though. ACID RAIN ffs, it ate through my space suit within minutes so I had to run back and forth between my ship (to regenerate my acid protection) and the stuff to collect. Then I took off and found that space station.

In case you want to start over (or use a backup in case you want to experiment) make sure the cloud save is disabled before starting the game, else steam will slap your old save back onto your disk. When I was done with my current nice trading, I quit, enabled cloud saving and started up the game and quit again. That caused steam to fetch my current save and now all is good  :)

I didn't forget this time to rename and upload my planet and system  ^-^

[smg id=8901 type=preview align=center caption="and some naming"]

[fragger]

I've been playing all bloody day :-D I'm finding this game to be both relaxing and absorbing.

I had a false start... I had to tweak the graphics a bit to get a decent frame rate, and the game needed to be restarted for some of the changes to take effect. Since I hadn't yet done anything to trigger a save, when I went back in I started on a whole new planet. The first one was that hot, deserty planet I mentioned, but since restarting I'm on a snowy one with a lot of red rock, clear lakes, and very colourful flora like the plant life in Avatar. I haven't even left this planet yet, except to go into space, mine some asteroids and visit the space station a couple of times.

I've been naming the animals I've found. Among the names I have so far are an Octocrab and a Uniroceros :-() Some life forms are dangerous. I was poking around a big rock when this thing like a leathery tentacle shot out from behind it and whacked me one. It was actually a form of plant life, like a non-ambulatory trifid. I also got stalked by a creature like a big skinny velociraptor which followed me for a while until I gave it the slip by jet-packing over a steep-sided gully. But most of the animals I've encountered so far have been harmless. There are some weird and wonderful things out there, and it's interesting to watch their behaviour. I like how there are both adult and young animals, nice touch.

I've found seven of the thirteen life forms which inhabit this planet. It seems I'll have to explore to find the others. And I do mean explore - it's a whole frigging planet! The devs weren't kidding about the scale ???? And I thought Just Cause 2 was big... I've traded up to a heavier-duty multitool, expanded my suit's carrying capacity and upgraded my jetpack and stamina.

While I was in orbit there was a dirty big asteroid full of iridium. I blasted and then flew my way right through the middle of it, mining as I went 8) The game looks amazing, and the travelling around in the little starship is great fun. Pity your guy doesn't move a bit quicker on foot though. A walk is like a dawdle and a sprint is like a walk...  I've noticed that you can't crash your ship into the ground, there's a kind of avoidance system that prevents it from happening. It also means you can't fly into caves.

I'm staying out of trouble so far, not shooting up any animals or other ships. I don't think I'm geared up enough to get into a tussle with anybody yet - if I ever want to.

Really enjoying it so far, can't wait to get back into it :-X Got some screenies, I'll upload a few later.

[fragger]

Another thought that occurred to me while I was playing was that there will probably be a lot of people who won't like this game. I can see already that it's a game for cerebral players - it will be too slow and methodical for the instant gratification types, the ones who like to zap each other in games like Halo and Star Wars Battlefront. They'll never find one another, let alone be able to blast each other, in this one. I can hear the choruses of "Boring!!!" right now, even thought there's no shortage of stuff to do. Kind of like FC2.

There's nothing to stop you plugging the wildlife and attacking other ships of course, and I might even have a go at playing Luke Skywalker myself sometime down the track. But it's really not where the game is at. This is primarily for those who like to explore, who like to wheel and deal, who like to think, and who appreciate eye candy for its own sake. What I've seen so far does have an exotic and alien beauty to it.

I can't wait to see what else is out there, but I want to see how much I can wring out of this first planet. I've got a 53% complete showing on it. I think that's the percentage of native life forms you can find, seeing as how I've found seven out of thirteen which is sort of about 53%. It's not a percentage of the planet's surface explored, that's for damned sure. I haven't even scratched that :-()

[Art Blade]

sounds all too familiar and I think you hit the nail on the head with what you just posted, fragger.  What I find both interesting and amusing is that at least you and I had quite a few experiences that are virtually identical. :)

For instance, having to start over without actually intending to do so, graphics changes that required a restart of the game, starting over on a different planet.. I too saw animals with kid versions walking around in close proximity to one parent and, that surprised me the most, I too got whipped by some plant. It looked like an egg-shaped rock had one tentacle sticking out. It looked like an elephant's trunk and it was floppy and curled up somewhat but when I approached it without yet realising what it was, I was literally gobsmacked when it lunged at me and made my screen turn red a bit -- it hurt. ??? :)

So far the inverted controls are fine when using the controller UNLESS it comes to flying. The only thing that works as it should is up and down but the rest makes me go bonkers. As if everything was completely twisted. So, if I revert to non-inverted, Down is UP and vice versa, which is horrible regarding intuitive flying (or looking) but maybe that will help get the rest of the roll and pitch stuff to w@&k as I intend it to. Weird.

I like what you did, feed an animal. I saw in the description of one I "photographed" with the scanner what its diet was and I was briefly considering feeding it but I was too low on that specific diet resource to actually try. I might some time, however :)

There is something else, the space station. In my case it showed up after flying around some and it was about 10 minutes away at booster speed. Warping made me go into an animation like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon pumping up for a speed of light trip. Then I found myself fumbling with some galactic map and some random key got me back down to the space with planets and asteroids that I had been tumbling around in seconds ago. And I overshot the space station. Well, kind of expected that. But do we really, REALLY have to dodge a bazillion of asteroids (including bumping into and breaking through the odd ones) getting to that station? Is there no easier way? I found myself clamping my controller and dodging moving and stationary objects as if trying to break a record. For bloody TEN minutes real time. I used up quite a bit of yellow resources (no, not yellow snow) to repair my ship's shield that had amassed a nice bunch of dents and cracks due to collisions.

Oh and during my first attempt I had a little fight with those sentinel drones. They didn't like me to force open a reinforced steel door of some lab. First I killed two sentinels, then the elite force sentinels made an entry and tried to fry me in my suit. In the end I got killed once (causing in this game's symbol to be placed hovering over my dead body like a floating tomb stone and waypoint marker) but was able to retrieve my inventory by I think interacting with that tomb stone of mine. And I killed a few drones during that attempt. However, having had to start over, during this attempt I decided not to force my way into anything (at least for now) but to behave. If it's locked, it's locked. Maybe months from now I'd blow up the whole planet but that's not really in my nature. :-D

And yes.. brain-challenged players are already asking their money back. Because the game didn't start properly at the first go. And I came across some complaints regarding "boring" of sorts. Well yes.. that's not going to stop us, is it  :-()

[OWGKID]

Nice start Art :-X I watched my friend playing it and it looks like fun :) Considering the game's performance issues, I'll wait until I buy it.

[Art Blade]

thanks :)

I'm just glad that I don't have any performance issues. Actually, I didn't have any serious issues -- the few hiccups I mentioned before weren't really bad except perhaps that one bad start when I couldn't find one required collectible at all. That may have been a bug because apparently people run around for a bit and then take off which essentially is your first objective. I did just that after a new start.

Well.. I reached the maximum milestone regarding trade (Magnate) and I got some 2M units on my account plus I got a "Jirishim S97" star ship which I already bought off a trader for some 1.5M units.

What I don't know is: Buying a new ship, do you really just leave your "abandoned" (old) ship behind and.. will it stay there as a fallback or will it disintegrate? I would have loved to actually bloody SELL it. Now I am sitting in my new ship with my old cargo (and next to no fuel because I can pump fuel in but cannot pump any fuel out  :D -- any "new" ship comes with empty tanks any my fuel stayed in my "abandoned" ship :D ) and my old ship sits on a landing platform in the space station and apparently it is there just for the taking if anyone considers it better than their own current ship. Damn.

[Art Blade]

OK then, I can now answer my own question. If you buy a new ship, your old one will disintegrate. Not instantly but it will be gone when you reload your game.

[smg id=8902 type=preview align=center caption="home base"]

I went back to my base planet and I consider it "w@&k" going back for about 15 minutes real time flying through asteroid fields. On second thoughts, scratch "fields" as asteroids are just bloody everywhere. At least most of them are composed of stuff that you actually need to keep your life support and weapons up and running.

I need more inventory slots. I need a bigger ship.

[Art Blade]

Oh one thing I wanted to show to you guys.. while trading, I came across this ???

[smg id=8903 type=preview align=center caption="expensive stuff"]

Which reminds me. When you start your career, you are given a choice as to whether or not you want to pick up that red sphere, Atlas. The first time I declined, but having had to start over, I reconsidered and picked that red orb thing up.

What did you do?

[mmosu]

I picked it up. I figured whether the Atlas is benevolent or not, I could use some guidance. No idea what consequences that choice will have, but it's done so I'm not worried about it.
Fragger, in regards to your comment about walking speed, there's a jet pack trick going around the internet that people are using to speed up on-foot exploration. What you do is start sprinting, melee, and then immediately hit the jet pack boost and BAM! PHYSICS!! It seems that what ends up happening is that the vertical thrust of the boost gets cancelled and only the forward boost remains, propelling you forward on the ground. It takes some timing, and I haven't completely got the hang of it, but it appears very effective once you do. At this point I don't think it's clear if this ability is an exploit or an intended mechanic.

[mmosu]

Here's a good video explaining it a little better than I did:

https://youtu.be/qUitg1RhXlM

[Art Blade]

thanks for the tip :) And regarding the red orb, I had the same reasons.

[fragger]

Where was the red sphere? I must have missed that.

I got in my first space battle, but I didn't start it. I was flying to one of my planet's moons and a hostile ship jumped me. It was actually pretty fun, a twisting, turning hairball in space. I tried to outrun him by going into Pulse thrust, but he hit me and the drive disengaged, so I had to fight. I made him pay for it though as I had a couple of heavy-duty plasma cannon upgrades >:D

One thing I reckon the game could do with is a head-turn control of some sort when you're flying. If they could have modelled the flying controls more like the gyrocopter in FC4 it would have been superb. Since your ship can't hover and has to keep moving forward (even though you can speed up and slow down), it would come in handy to be able to look around while flying.

Art, I had a similar thing with breaking down reinforced doors and having to deal with the sentinels. They're tough little blighters, I had to keep jumping in my ship and flying away until they cooled down, then I'd come back and try the door again. In the end it was worth it - there was a terminal in there that gave me the formula for making my own antimatter, which is needed to get the hyperdrive working. You can buy the antimatter through a trading terminal but it's pretty dear. Mind you, you still need suspension fluid to make the AM - and unless there's a way to manufacture or produce that yourself, you have to buy it. It's not as expensive or scarce as the AM though.

I haven't met any traders yet that could sell me a ship, so I'm still stuck with my original one. I've met two alien races, the Gek and another one that starts with K. The Ks are the ones with robotic-looking heads, the Gek are kind of reptilian or frog-like. The Gek appear to be tied in closely with that Atlas business, and I get the impression that their race is extremely ancient. They are traders, but the Ks seem to be more ascetic, scientific types.

Animals can prey on one another, I've seen a carnivore run down a sort of gazelle-like creature. I swam around in a lake for a while but didn't see any animals in there - until a while later when there was another lake with a giant eel-type thing in it who it seems really wanted a bite out of me as he followed me around the shoreline. The description said something like, "Highly aggressive".

So the life forms certainly aren't all benign.

[Art Blade]

the red sphere was sitting in a pod next to your crashed first space ship

[mandru]

Even the most infinitesimal chance of running into a player -vs- player situation utterly kills this game for me.  >:((

I would have loved to get in on a game at ground level that all of us were once again excited about, enjoying, and sharing.  :(

That said I'm cheering on you hapless explorers who are willing to take the plunge.

I came across this list of tips that while not entirely comprehensive it seems to have many useful pointers and as far as I can tell tries to avoid spoilers.

http://imgur.com/gallery/pV9Yl

*** Sorry about the crude comment in the tip about zooming.  I pulled this off a site that has no language censorship and posters who adore crassness ***

Good luck and happy spacefaring.  :-X

[mmosu]

How are you guys getting those factory doors open? I don't seem to be able to damage them.  ????

[fragger]

I got a prompt that told me I had to use an upgrade for the multitool, the name of which escapes me for the moment, starts with a B. It's an alternative fire add-on, I'll get the name for you next time I'm in the game. Also, I think you have to target not the door itself but the big fat cylinder that's stuck on one side which I think is part of the locking mechanism. Maybe - all I know is I peppered everything on the door and that cylinder was the last thing I hit when the door finally blew open. Even so, I hit the whole door quite a number of times before it went.

[fragger]

mandru, I really don't think you'll have to worry about that ever happening, the odds against are - well, astronomical. But there is that infinitesimal chance, like you say.

Something to consider though is that the nature of the game won't appeal to those who play dirty. If they know there's only a one-in-a-zillion chance that they'll ever get to flame someone, and that will be the only single chance they'll ever get, they'll stay away in droves. It wouldn't be much fun camping out to snipe a respawner when there are 18 quintillion places in which a spawner might appear. So I think the only people who will be playing NMS will be folks like us who will, dare I say, take it seriously.

Incidentally, you can play offline, so if you're really bothered about encountering that one outrageously lucky troll, there's that. As far as I know, the single player game isn't like a cut-down version or anything.

But thanks for the good wishes mandru, and for the tips link :)

* * * * *

Okay, on to some general reporting and piccies for those who aren't playing, or aren't playing yet, but might be interested.

The world mechanics are quite remarkable in this. I don't know if the planets are "full-size" as it were, but they're still pretty darned big, and as play areas in a game, they're truly enormous. Maybe they vary throughout the game (some planets in our own solar system are pretty small too, as planets go). And every inch of their surfaces is accessible - you could fly your ship all the way around a world at low altitude, if you're so inclined. It's so cool to drop down from orbit and watch the terrain becoming more and more defined, until you're in among it. I can't tell if the planets actually rotate, but they do go through regular day/night cycles and they appear to have differing gravitational fields. There is all kinds of weather. I've been to three planets so far (I just had to get an inkling of what else was out there :-()) and they've all been radically different from one another. One was so hot, dusty and windy I called it "Dustbowl" (you do get to name a planet if you're the first one to visit it, which you very probably will be). Every so often a massive dust storm came along, and I needed to get into my ship or into a cave or shelter of some kind until it blew over or it would rapidly damage my suit. I'm currently on a very lush, very rainy, verdantly green world.

Only thing is that as far as I can tell at this early stage, whatever sort of terrain a planet has is just that. Earth has forests, deserts, savannas, jungles, snowfields - but each planet in NMS seems to have one predominant terrain type and that's it. It'll all be snowy, or all rocky, or all grassy, and there might be bodies of water amongst it, but not much else. That may not always be the case, it is early days for us.

One thing that's sorely missing is some sort of compass-type device. You can't really tell which way up a planet is, so to speak, so it's very easy to get disoriented and end up moving around aimlessly. There are indicators that always tell you where your ship is when you're on foot or where important things that you've found are, and at any time you can do a "scan" that will reveal where certain things like resources and structures are in relation to your position, but often I've had the experience of seeing something of interest from the air but then lose it again due to a lack of any direction-finding or place-marking tools. There are no maps of planets, but that's certainly understandable.

I'm very impressed with the living things. I have a belief that life elsewhere in the universe is probably, generally speaking, not much different to what it is here. There would no doubt be exceptions, but most warm-blooded animals, say, would probably have a lot in common with those on Earth - a head with two eyes, a nose and a mouth, and four limbs - because it's simply the most efficient configuration for such animals. The proportions may be different, but if a "design" works well on this planet, nature would probably adopt it universally. And this is what you see in the game - the animals generally aren't radically different from those on Earth, but different they certainly are. There are some wild and wonderful exceptions in the game, and a few that are implausible, but by and large they're quite conceivable, and they have behaviours. Same goes for the plant life. Some wouldn't look out of place here, but some are distinctly alien, and some are even dangerous.

There is plenty to do in the game, and if exploring is your thing, you'll be in gaming heaven :-() There is a back story of some sort concerning the alien races in the game, the early gleanings of which I'm only just beginning to discern. Should get interesting the more one uncovers of it.

Screenies. Had to take a few :-()

Here's one of the aforementioned dust storms, which I'm waiting out in my ship. There was actually a minor glitch here. That "New Discovery..." message on the right wouldn't go away like it was supposed to do. You'll see it in another screenie further down. It did go eventually, when I finally catalogued the next animal I found.

[smg id=8904 align=center width=600]

There are all kinds of ruins and monoliths and stuff on this planet, relics of the Gek civilization.

[smg id=8905 align=center width=600]

On final approach to a space station for a bit of off-world trading.

[smg id=8906 align=center width=600]

Another Gek relic. Interacting with things like this will reveal all sorts of useful stuff - techs, locations of places where you'll find valuable items, and so forth.

[smg id=8907 align=center width=600]

And this is a Gek, ekeing out a living in an abandoned settlement.

[smg id=8908 align=center width=600]

Strap in for Pulse Drive! This will get you from on/off planet, or from one planet to another, in a reasonable amount of time - provided both planets are in the same solar system, of course...

[smg id=8909 align=center width=600]

...because if you want to go interstellar, you'll need Hyperdrive. This effect is very 2001: A Space Odyssey. Travelling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy...

[smg id=8910 align=center width=600]

[mmosu]

Nice pics fragger  :-X. Do remember to sleep and eat at some point this weekend 

I'm on the final planet of my starting solar system - I has lots of wildlife and minerals (iridium, emeril and aluminum mainly), acid rain and no advanced life that I can find, well, at least none that is still around, as I have found some abandoned outposts. From here I'm going to backtrack and see if I can get one of those factory doors open on one of my previous planets, as I'm gonna need to leave this system soon.

Mandru, I'll echo what fragger already said. There have already been some intentional attempts by players to meet up, but no success. Apparently they were in the same place, but it was day for one and night for the other - different servers maybe? I'm really not sure why it didn't w@&k l, but point is it's tough even if you're trying to do it.

[Art Blade]

mandru, get the game.  :-D

mmosu, I aimed for something like a door handle that was glowing red. It did take a while for the door to blow open and in the meantime I had to kill those ever-present two sentinel drones and then reinforcement was announced that came waltzing in in form of some elite sentinel drones that however went off the warpath once I was inside the facility.

Oh and, don't attack large freighter ships that seem to be hovering in space as if abandoned. They're not  :-D I had a fleet of fighter ships take me out for my curiosity (and for blowing up reinforced steel containers on said ship)

fragger, nice story and pics :) Funny, I met some Gek in a similar facility that even looked the same. First I had to pay 10 units and then 20 (per interaction) and then 20 carbon for any more attempts. His first reaction was to give me some blueprint (ship engine related upgrade I think) and then he basically offered medical help as in restoring health or shields. There was that same type of trading computer device on the wall like in the space station I used to trade on.

I did as you did, fed some creature and it had the smiley over its head. It actually showed me valuables, I realised when there was a magnifying glass symbol where it was behind a knoll and when I got there, a lump of some rare mineral was on the ground for the taking. It did it several times with different things I could pick up. How cool is that :)

[smg id=8911 type=preview align=center caption="creature's gift"]

and the creature itself was just so cute. It was a young specimen. I found it funny and feeding it paid off  :-D

[smg id=8912 type=preview align=center caption="the Birdog"]

Another animal I found really funny I named after Rambo and Big Bird from Sesame Street. :-D

[smg id=8913 type=preview align=center caption="the Rambibo"]

[Art Blade]

fragger, the "K's" are called Korvax. :)