Octopus Overlords

killbot737 wrote:I have not seen a crashed ship yet. I expect it's random but how do you all keep coming across so many?

Lorini wrote:Anyone else having horrific lag?

Max Peck wrote:

killbot737 wrote:I have not seen a crashed ship yet. I expect it's random but how do you all keep coming across so many?

Hack a signal scanner and search for a Transmission waypoint. If you get an Observatory (IIRC), then if you solve a simple puzzle you can get a waypoint for an emergency beacon, which will lead you to a wreck site with the beacon and (usually, but not always) a derelict ship.

One thing to be aware of is that when you transfer to a new ship, the hyperdrive will not contain a warp cell, so you really shouldn't do it until you finish the tutorial and have all of the crafting blueprints necessary to make your own warp cells. Trust me, getting your hands on antimatter if you can't craft it is a huge pain in the butt. Not that I found out the hard way, or anything...

Zaxxon wrote:

Lorini wrote:Anyone else having horrific lag?

Depending on the cause, you can try the beta patch. This also fixes the alt-tab hang. Game properties in Steam, enter code 3xperimental.

Max Peck wrote:

killbot737 wrote:I have not seen a crashed ship yet. I expect it's random but how do you all keep coming across so many?

Hack a signal scanner and search for a Transmission waypoint. If you get an Observatory (IIRC), then if you solve a simple puzzle you can get a waypoint for an emergency beacon, which will lead you to a wreck site with the beacon and (usually, but not always) a derelict ship.

coopasonic wrote:

Max Peck wrote:

killbot737 wrote:I have not seen a crashed ship yet. I expect it's random but how do you all keep coming across so many?

Hack a signal scanner and search for a Transmission waypoint. If you get an Observatory (IIRC), then if you solve a simple puzzle you can get a waypoint for an emergency beacon, which will lead you to a wreck site with the beacon and (usually, but not always) a derelict ship.

Transmission Tower is what you are looking for and it will *always* lead to a crashed ship. Technically once there wasn't a crashed ship for me, but the other ~30 times there was so I suspect that was a bug.

Cylus Maxii wrote:You can find crashed ships by solving the transmission towers. If no alien lives there, the game seems to let you do the puzzle several times. That way you can just mark five wrecks and fly around until one is an upgrade. Then just fix the pulse and takeoff drives and move on to the next. I went from 24 to 30 in six exchanges within the same system. I didn't fix the hyperdrive until the very last.

Lorini wrote:Anyone else having horrific lag?

There’s going to be a lot of hate for this game, and I wonder if (outside of the obvious need for bug fixes and a stable PC build) it comes down to how games are played:

In a “normal” game, danger is thrown at you constantly by the game, and your play is a reaction to the dangers presented. I sneak and snipe in Skyrim because the game wants to throw wave after wave of baddies after me. I play cautious, I hoarde resources, I grind my stats, all in reaction to the ever-present danger I feel. The rewards thus come from surviving challenges I know were designed to test me.

In No Man’s Sky, you can play the game for hours and not be in any danger. But, you can bring danger to you through your own actions (harvesting sac venoms, straying too far away from the ship on a dangerously toxic planet). This is basically the inverse of the Normal Game Model. If you play cautiously in the traditional sense (hoarding, grinding, sneaking, sniping), the experience will seem boring, no-stakes, and shallow. The game isn’t playing with you the way you’re used to being played with.

No Man’s Sky isn’t challenging you intentionally; sometimes it tests you reactively by sending some pirates after you or sentinels after you steal something or kill an animal or something. Sometimes the tests are unintentional: storms randomly happen and on certain planets you can be in real danger if you are too far from your ship. Sometimes, there are no challenges. If you are expecting strict intentionality, you are in for a shock.

The universe of NMS is indifferent to your preferences, the god that created it is (mostly) hands-off. A world like Dark Souls III, lovingly crafted just to kill you the player, feels different because it is burdened with terrible purpose. You are that universe’s savior or antichrist, sent to destroy all you see before you, with clear goals. NMS has a goal, but you have to supply the motivation. If you can’t motivate yourself to play the game as presented, you can think it’s defective.

But it’s not defective. It’s just engaging in a different style of play. Games like this haven’t been remotely mainstream for decades. This is like Collosal Cave Adventure or Starflight. Games like NMS haven’t been popular for decades, and a different game playing paradigm became more prominent in the meantime. For me, a gamer who fell out of love with games more and more after 1992 or so, with the death of games like Starflight, this is like a gift. I love this game because it meshes with how I like to play in real life. But I definitely can see where it doesn’t mesh with others.

I think the design philosophy of No Man’s Sky can be summed up in how storms are handled. If you’re on a planet already taxing your exosuit, and a storm hits, your life support drains away FAST. So you go to your ship or hide in a cave to keep your filtration systems intact.

And then you wait.

A storm can take three or four minutes to pass. And you’re sitting there in your ship, listening to the rain hit the windscreen, watching the shadows of the flying creatures as they circle above you, watching the grass sway in the wind gusts, contemplating your next move.

There’s no rest button, no fast-forward, no concessions to modern gameplay. You sit, and you wait. Maybe you pore over your tech blueprints or strategize, or maybe you just watch the world go by. But what you’re doing right then? That’s the game too. It’s not waiting for the game to happen. THIS IS ALSO THE GAME.

Can you imagine modern games doing that? I can see where it’d be baffling to a lot of players.

Yes. I know that in my experience, despite the memories of Starflight, the past 20+ years of games have conditioned me to expect more handholding.

I launched NMS for the first time. Title screen, and then immediately dropped on a planet with a nonfunctioning ship. There’s no cinematic of where I came from, there’s no wall of text telling me where to go, there’s just me and my ship and a toxic world burning both my life support and filtration systems. I mine some isotopes and start repairing a few pieces, and suddenly two Sentinels attack. I find some grazing alien creatures and they scatter. Eventually I repair my ship and lift off, and ... there’s the rest of this planet, orders of magnitude larger than Skyrim or Red Dead Redemption or Fallout, and there are seventeen quintillion, nine hundred ninety-nine quadrillion, nine hundred ninety-nine trillion, nine hundred ninety-nine billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine more planets out there.

The idea of “completionist” isn’t there. It can’t be there. As a player I was reluctant to leave my first planet because I didn’t find everything on it, until I reminded myself of the above scope.

This is one of those situations where humans are bad at visualizing big numbers. Billion, trillion, it’s all the same to our primate brains. But when I moved on to the next planet, and I thought about the people complaining that they wanted multiplayer, I thought about this:

Imagine all six billion people on the world are playing No Man’s Sky. They’re playing it all at the same time. Each one of those six billion people would have three billion planets all to themselves. If everyone were randomly distributed, you could play it for thousands of lifetimes and never see another player. The NMS universe is vast, incomprehensibly vast, amazingly vast.

And it’s just the kind of game I’ve wanted for so long.

I think the design philosophy of No Man’s Sky can be summed up in how storms are handled. If you’re on a planet already taxing your exosuit, and a storm hits, your life support drains away FAST. So you go to your ship or hide in a cave to keep your filtration systems intact.

And then you wait.

A storm can take three or four minutes to pass. And you’re sitting there in your ship, listening to the rain hit the windscreen, watching the shadows of the flying creatures as they circle above you, watching the grass sway in the wind gusts, contemplating your next move.

There’s no rest button, no fast-forward, no concessions to modern gameplay. You sit, and you wait. Maybe you pore over your tech blueprints or strategize, or maybe you just watch the world go by. But what you’re doing right then? That’s the game too. It’s not waiting for the game to happen. THIS IS ALSO THE GAME.

Can you imagine modern games doing that? I can see where it’d be baffling to a lot of players.

Unagi wrote:Is there some Gek word I will never learn? Something I won't unlock?

coopasonic wrote:nvidia just posted they have new drivers for this.

Sepiche wrote:I've pretty much avoided all spoilers with just a quick look at one point to see how the different paths unfold.

coopasonic wrote:

Sepiche wrote:I've pretty much avoided all spoilers with just a quick look at one point to see how the different paths unfold.

There are different paths? I thought it was Atlas Path or sandbox. I haven't seen any mention of anything else... maybe it branches in the future?

Smoove_B wrote:

Unagi wrote:Is there some Gek word I will never learn? Something I won't unlock?

I'm not sure it's entirely possible to learn all the words - I mean, unless you have a decade to just find objects to help you. What's really happening (I think) is that with every added word it gets a bit easier to try and puzzle out what various aliens are asking you to do. This increases your chances of a reward (and minimizes the chance of missing out a being penalized). Last night I apparently agreed to enter into a marriage with an alien at some point in the future. Clearly I need to translate more words.

Sepiche wrote:

coopasonic wrote:

Sepiche wrote:I've pretty much avoided all spoilers with just a quick look at one point to see how the different paths unfold.

There are different paths? I thought it was Atlas Path or sandbox. I haven't seen any mention of anything else... maybe it branches in the future?

Yeah I think they could easily add more in the future, but I was referring to following the Atlas Path vs. just heading to the core yourself.

The Three Paths – there are now new, unique “paths” you can follow throughout the game. You must start the game on a fresh save, with the patch, as early choices have significant impact on what you see later in the game, and the overall experience.

Max Peck wrote:

The Three Paths – there are now new, unique “paths” you can follow throughout the game. You must start the game on a fresh save, with the patch, as early choices have significant impact on what you see later in the game, and the overall experience.

Sepiche wrote:

coopasonic wrote:

Sepiche wrote:I've pretty much avoided all spoilers with just a quick look at one point to see how the different paths unfold.

There are different paths? I thought it was Atlas Path or sandbox. I haven't seen any mention of anything else... maybe it branches in the future?

Yeah I think they could easily add more in the future, but I was referring to following the Atlas Path vs. just heading to the core yourself.

Unagi wrote:On my 2nd planet - there is a Depot (or something) that has one of it's doors spawned Into the side of a mountain. No other way in, and I can see the very top of the door, but can't click it, etc -

Should I be worried about that? Should I just blow by it and never look back?

Is there some Gek word I will never learn? Something I won't unlock?

Smoove_B wrote:Here's a perfect example of the kind of thing that keeps it fresh after 18 hours of play. Up until this point, I'd only ever see Emeril (rare, sells well on the market) in crystal form (i.e. small batches), randomly scattered about. Finding bunches of 50 units here and there was a big deal. Well, a planet I just landed on had giant PILLARS of Emeril - like 10 stories tall. I made half a million units selling about 1500 of them. Not bad work for just standing next to a giant tower of money. Now I'm wondering if I'm going to see different configurations of the other elements. So far the basics (Zinc, Platinum, Thamium, Carbon, Iron) are all pretty much the same - and I think that's by design. But definitely keep an eye out for the mineral growths on the planet's surface while you're flying around. Well worth the time.

Newcastle wrote:So i finished off my first system. Well felt comfortable leaving. Kind of neat. Had enough warp juice to hop over to the next system. And got a "beacon" signal to head somewhere. Hope, hope its for the atlas story line. This new system has these electronic aliens. So...coolness get to start over exploring these planets.

Also managed to save up about 2.7M and bought a new 26 slot ship for about 2.1M. When i got to this new systems spaceport, i saw a cool ship cruise in...checked it out...35 slotter for 12M. Need to start saving up for, or hotwiring it. Whatever works right?