No Man's Sky

[Smoove_B]

The alleged "Star Trek" update.

[Alefroth]

No Man's Sky reaches 4.0

Hello Games states it is a solid foundation for the future. Now available on Switch.

https://www.nomanssky.com/waypoint-upda ... 248610.192

[jztemple2]

I played this for a couple of dozen hours when it first came out but lost interest. I've started up again and I'm enjoying it now, but I do have a few questions. I'll start with what must be a simple one; I'm trying to explore all the planets of a system, but I'm not finding any easy way to set waypoints on a planet I've never been to except for getting into space and looking around and trying to find a planet that doesn't show up as explored. I know how to look on the Discoveries page and see which planets are out there, my issue is actually trying to get to them. Is there a way to set a waypoint on them?

[jztemple2]

New update, Echoes: Introducing Update 4.4. The game is 50% off on Steam until September 4th.

Meet a secret society of robotic aliens in update 4.4, ECHOES! Furthering the narrative introduced in INTERCEPTOR, explore the mysteries of the Autophage, perform their rituals, learn their language, and assemble your own ceremonial staff. In deep space, confront huge outlaw dreadnoughts, sweep through their trenches and destroy vulnerable components in new tactical space combat – and much more!

[jztemple2]

[Blackhawk]

Custom. Ships.

'bout time!

[Max Peck]

Another update with a new expedition.

[Grifman]

Another update, and this looks amazing:

https://www.nomanssky.com/worlds-part-i-update/



And there is a Part 2 coming.

[Max Peck]

Yet another major upgrade incoming... Today, apparently.

Edit: Bammed by Grifman!

Worlds Part I: Introducing Update 5.0

Update 5.0, WORLDS, transforms the universe into a richer, wilder, more varied and immersive place. Featuring huge leaps in water and cloud visuals, increased planetary diversity, new gameplay features, and more.

Feature list:

• Bug hunt expedition: The Liquidators
• Discovery renaming
• Dramatic new worlds
• New volumetric clouds
• Customise solar ships
• Detailed shadows
• High definition water
• Otherworldly life
• Full wind simulation
• Dynamic water
• Liquidator combat mech
• Sub-zero worlds
• Desert diversity
• Sky colours
• Insect armour set
• Engine enhancements
• New interaction labels
• Beetle diversity
• Dramatic storms
• Twitch Drops (July 18-22)
• Walker battles
• Chitin flight pack
• Water colour variety
• Strange nutrients
• Living buildings
• Aquatic landing jets
• Skylight base parts
• Atmospheric variety
• Vile insect queens
• Quality of life
• New gestures
• Spectacular underwater bases
• DLSS3
• Vile brood nexus mission
• Noxious worlds
• Colossal insect trophies
• Hungering tendril encounters
• Irradiated landscapes
• Insectoid headwear
• Minotaur flamethrower
• Burnt worlds
• Night sky variety
• Blossoming megaflora

I wonder how many sequels we'd have seen by now if this was from a conventional developer...

[Unagi]

I've had like 4 false starts in this game.

I don't know what hits me after like an hour or 3, but I always take a break and then fail to go back to it. I feel like there is an enormous game, right up my alley, that is sitting at my front door, and I keep meaning to invite it in.

Am I correct in my understanding that it's a solo enough game that I'm not 'endlessly behind' everyone - as I may not really even see anyone that I don't invite in, right?

[Max Peck]

Am I correct in my understanding that it's a solo enough game that I'm not 'endlessly behind' everyone - as I may not really even see anyone that I don't invite in, right?

Pretty much. I know that it is multiplayer in some way, but I've always played it as a solo game.

I haven't fired it up in ages, but I plan to try to complete this new expedition. The last one I did was the expedition that unlocked the Normandy 2 from Mass Effect, so it's been a hot minute.

[coopasonic]

When the game first came out you could play through the whole thing without ever seeing another person and there was the slimmest chance you would enter a system that someone else had entered once. After the first year or so the quest lines changed so you'd go to a sort of central hub repeatedly where you would always find a bunch of other people doing their thing. This didn't need to have any impact on your game. You could ignore them completely. On the other hand, if you stood around long enough they were likely to hand you resources worth like 10,000-100,000 times your current net worth. That was a few years ago now so I don't know for sure if that is still a thing.

[Unagi]

And with each (most) of these new releases is an "Expedition".

Are those things I can still "solo" today?

[Victoria Raverna]

When the game first came out you could play through the whole thing without ever seeing another person and there was the slimmest chance you would enter a system that someone else had entered once. After the first year or so the quest lines changed so you'd go to a sort of central hub repeatedly where you would always find a bunch of other people doing their thing. This didn't need to have any impact on your game. You could ignore them completely. On the other hand, if you stood around long enough they were likely to hand you resources worth like 10,000-100,000 times your current net worth. That was a few years ago now so I don't know for sure if that is still a thing.

Actually that was not correct. When the game first came out, you couldn't see another person. It was impossible. You can both be at the same location and you still couldn't see each other. The ability to meet each other was not in the game. It was a promised feature that didn't work with the release version.

[Max Peck]

The Twitch drops campaign started today at 0900 EDT. As I understand it, there are different rewards each day for the next 5 days, and it requires that you "watch" a participating stream for a total of 3 hours each day to collect all the rewards for that day. There is no requirement to interact with the stream, so simply leaving a stream open in a browser tab with the audio muted should do the trick.

[Blackhawk]

simply leaving a stream open in a browser tab with the audio muted should do the trick.

Active browser tab. I've had spotty results having it in the background. It doesn't have to be focused, though, so you can open it in a second window, and have that window in the background - you just can't have other tabs in the same browser window active over it. Oh, and you can turn down the resolution to 160 to keep it from using meaningful bandwidth.

[naednek]

xbox game pass doesn't have the update yet

[Alefroth]

Am I correct in my understanding that it's a solo enough game that I'm not 'endlessly behind' everyone - as I may not really even see anyone that I don't invite in, right?

Pretty much. I know that it is multiplayer in some way, but I've always played it as a solo game.

I haven't fired it up in ages, but I plan to try to complete this new expedition. The last one I did was the expedition that unlocked the Normandy 2 from Mass Effect, so it's been a hot minute.

Can you do an expedition at any point in your game, or is it more of an endgame thing?

[Max Peck]

Am I correct in my understanding that it's a solo enough game that I'm not 'endlessly behind' everyone - as I may not really even see anyone that I don't invite in, right?

Pretty much. I know that it is multiplayer in some way, but I've always played it as a solo game.

I haven't fired it up in ages, but I plan to try to complete this new expedition. The last one I did was the expedition that unlocked the Normandy 2 from Mass Effect, so it's been a hot minute.

Can you do an expedition at any point in your game, or is it more of an endgame thing?

IIRC, you do expeditions from a new start rather than from an existing saved game.

[Alefroth]

Am I correct in my understanding that it's a solo enough game that I'm not 'endlessly behind' everyone - as I may not really even see anyone that I don't invite in, right?

Pretty much. I know that it is multiplayer in some way, but I've always played it as a solo game.

I haven't fired it up in ages, but I plan to try to complete this new expedition. The last one I did was the expedition that unlocked the Normandy 2 from Mass Effect, so it's been a hot minute.

Can you do an expedition at any point in your game, or is it more of an endgame thing?

IIRC, you do expeditions from a new start rather than from an existing saved game.

Oh cool. That would be good.

[Skinypupy]

This new update looks cool. Guess it's about time for my annual "Get 8-10 hours into No Mans Sky then lose interest" run again. I always feel like I can never quite stay interested in this game long enough to get to the really cool stuff.

One thing I have been wondering though is how the financial model works for all these free updates. Hello Games has done a truly remarkable job in consistently improving NMS since launch, but how do they afford to keep that going? As far as I can tell, they only have three games: No Man's Sky, The Last Campfire (never head of it), and Joe Danger (an iOS game released in 2015). I can't imagine that there's a huge number of new sales for NMS sky at this point and there's not microtransactions, so how do they make money?

[Unagi]

This new update looks cool. Guess it's about time for my annual "Get 8-10 hours into No Mans Sky then lose interest" run again. I always feel like I can never quite stay interested in this game long enough to get to the really cool stuff.

That's me.

[Max Peck]

I can't imagine that there's a huge number of new sales for NMS sky at this point and there's not microtransactions, so how do they make money?

NMS is currently the #6 best-selling game on Steam.

Apparently, since they are a UK company you can view their filings here. The most recent full accounts filing covers the year ending 31 Oct 2022 and seems (IANAA) to show them with a tidy operating profit of about £40M for that year. That might have been a particularly good year given that it covers the launch of the Nintendo Switch port of NMS.

[Alefroth]

This new update looks cool. Guess it's about time for my annual "Get 8-10 hours into No Mans Sky then lose interest" run again. I always feel like I can never quite stay interested in this game long enough to get to the really cool stuff.

That's me.

And me. My last run was my furthest.

[jztemple2]

This new update looks cool. Guess it's about time for my annual "Get 8-10 hours into No Mans Sky then lose interest" run again. I always feel like I can never quite stay interested in this game long enough to get to the really cool stuff.

That's me.

And me. My last run was my furthest.

Me too. For some reason this game just doesn't click with me after the initial gameplay experience. But I'll still go back and try it again

[coopasonic]

This new update looks cool. Guess it's about time for my annual "Get 8-10 hours into No Mans Sky then lose interest" run again. I always feel like I can never quite stay interested in this game long enough to get to the really cool stuff.

That's me.

And me. My last run was my furthest.

Me too. For some reason this game just doesn't click with me after the initial gameplay experience. But I'll still go back and try it again

Me too... I only got 265 hours in with 3 more or less complete playthroughs...

[Max Peck]

Am I correct in my understanding that it's a solo enough game that I'm not 'endlessly behind' everyone - as I may not really even see anyone that I don't invite in, right?

Pretty much. I know that it is multiplayer in some way, but I've always played it as a solo game.

I haven't fired it up in ages, but I plan to try to complete this new expedition. The last one I did was the expedition that unlocked the Normandy 2 from Mass Effect, so it's been a hot minute.

Can you do an expedition at any point in your game, or is it more of an endgame thing?

IIRC, you do expeditions from a new start rather than from an existing saved game.

Oh cool. That would be good.

I saw some chatter today on Twitch that it's now possible to join an expedition with an existing character.

[Alefroth]

Guess now we just have to wait for it to start.

[Max Peck]

True dat. It puzzles me that they announced the expedition but haven't said when it will actually start.

[Grifman]

I can't imagine that there's a huge number of new sales for NMS sky at this point and there's not microtransactions, so how do they make money?

NMS is currently the #6 best-selling game on Steam.

Apparently, since they are a UK company you can view their filings here. The most recent full accounts filing covers the year ending 31 Oct 2022 and seems (IANAA) to show them with a tidy operating profit of about £40M for that year. That might have been a particularly good year given that it covers the launch of the Nintendo Switch port of NMS.

Just as importantly, they have sold 10 million copies of NMS as of the end of 2022 (and undoubtedly more since then). In further looking at their financials, they are sitting on a cash pool of over $100 million dollars. Given that HG is a rather small company, that is a huge amount of cash, and can easily fund further development. In addition, as has been noted elsewhere, every time they release an update of NMS, sales go up and it becomes one of the top selling games on Steam. The updates are in many ways, self funding.

It should also be noted that a lot of this updates includes features from their new upcoming game that they decided to add retroactively to NMS.

[coopasonic]

I started a new save last week. Steam says I’ve put 25 hours in since then. This is my first attempt since 2021.

Up to this point it has been very familiar. Space station layouts have changes. Some changes to the economy and the ability to uptier ships and multi tools. I just hit my first really new to me thing, settlements. I’m enjoying it, even if it is awfully familiar.

[Blackhawk]

I started again yesterday. It's been a while for me, too, a couple of years at least. I've only gotten past the early stages once.

I've gotten terrible locations so far. My starting planet was brutal, and the starting system had nothing worth visiting. Since then it's been multiple systems with nothing but dead/scorched/frozen planets. It's just bad luck so far.

I know that there have been some major complaints about some apparent bugs in the world generation. Many people who had built on beautiful landscapes and put months or years into bases logged in to find themselves on barren wastelands, their base still in place, but the entire planet changed. One of my son's bases, on the other hand, used to be on a boring planet. When he logged in, it was a black-and-white exotic planet.

Examples I found. Same location before and after the update:



A nice, beautiful base on a beautiful (although not to my tastes...) planet before:



And after...

Spoiler:

Oddly enough, those trees (the ones that look like they have an ear of corn on top) seem to appear in many, many of the changed planets. I saw one person mention that they were seeing those trees on planet after planet.

Hopefully they can fix it.

[Madmarcus]

I logged into my old main save and had a similar planet switch. My base isn't as good but my nice purple grass turned to a more yellow green and the planet now has mega sized bugs roaming around. I like that save so I'll probably keep going but I'm waiting until the expedition is out.

[Max Peck]

Oddly enough, those trees (the ones that look like they have an ear of corn on top) seem to appear in many, many of the changed planets. I saw one person mention that they were seeing those trees on planet after planet.

Hopefully they can fix it.

They're on it:

Steam users are able to opt-in to the Experimental Branch, where we have pushed a patch to address some problems. We'll be rolling out these fixes to other platforms as soon as possible.

To play in Experimental, right-click on No Man's Sky from the Steam library page and select "Properties". Among the available tabs will be the "BETAS" tab. Enter "3xperimental" in the textbox and press "CHECK CODE", then select it from the dropdown menu.

The patch notes are as follows:

Experimental Branch 21/07

• Fixed an issue that could cause the player to become invisible when using the jetpack and Multi-Tool at the same time.

Experimental Branch 20/07

• Fixed an issue that caused the player to be positioned 50m off the ground when riding some synthetic lifeforms.
• Fixed an issue that caused all the trees on some lush planets to become giant corn stalks.
• Fixed an issue that caused some planets to become infested, resulting in a loss of any settlements on that world, and in minor terrain shifts. The infested status of planets has been restored to how it was pre-Worlds. Newly infested planets will become un-infested, and previously infested planets will be restored as such.
• Fixed an issue that caused foliage rendering to become corrupted.
• Fixed a number of minor text issues.
• Fixed an issue that caused the shop interface to fail to display correct in VR.
• Fixed a crashed related to planetary rendering.
• Fixed a rare rendering crash.
• Fixed a rendering hang.

As always, thank you to all players who use Experimental and take the time to report any issues you encounter.

Please note there is the possibility that experimental builds may introduce new issues that haven't been caught in test. We'd like to recommend that all players back up their save files, by making a local copy of the st_[userid] folder found here on PC: %appdata%\HelloGames\NMS\ and here on mac: ~/Library/Application Support/HelloGames/NMS/

[Max Peck]

The expedition is now active. It appears that they were waiting until the patch was out on all the consoles before starting it.

[Unagi]

The expedition is now active. It appears that they were waiting until the patch was out on all the consoles before starting it.

Is that to limit online Spoilers or because there is an in-game multiplayer competitive element to expeditions?

[Max Peck]

Other than bragging rights if you speed-run them, I'm not aware of any competitive aspect to the expeditions.

[Hrdina]

Yesterday I played NMS for the first time.

I played maybe half an hour, which was long enough to shoot some rocks and plants, and to find a crashed ship.

[Max Peck]

I finished Phase 1 of the expedition last night and am currently working on Phase 2, although it should be noted that the milestones for any phase can be completed in any order. For example, although I'm still in the system associated with Phase 2, I completed one of the Phase 3 milestones this morning.

The multiplayer aspect of the game is more noticeable than usual since the expedition channels everyone through the same systems for key milestones. I've been seeing a lot of other players while running around and doing stuff. There's also a cooperative multiplayer component, with a set of community goals -- basically any fighting you do on behalf of the Liquidators counts toward a genocide counter that will unlock some additional rewards on top of what you get for completing your own milestones.

[Alefroth]

Sounds fun. I'm going to try to jump in today with a new game. I was getting back into a previous game and just had the encounter where you can get a freighter.