Cool, thanks–I think it’s on my brother’s Steam list, so I’ll give it a try.
I haven’t played NMS in awhile, I might want to start a new save game when I do go back.
An update hit Steam this morning. Also noticed this in Steam’s news feed:
A link in that article led me to the most dismal planet in the game.
I switched to normal mode after just a couple of hours in survival. The added difficulty seems to be entirely in turning the various grinding dials up several notches and that doesn’t make things more fun for me.
Anyway, I’ve found a nice enough planet for a home base and have begun establishing myself. I got a new ship and multitool and am now trying to get enough upgrade modules to tackle the various “attack the sentinels” quests that my specialists have given me.
I really do enjoy the game, though it runs poorly on my machine. Apparently that’s a known issue with my graphics card so there’s not much I can do about it but wait some code optimization.
I have a character from before the first (Foundation) NMS update that I still play. I also have a new character that I created after NEXT launched.
My old character has more then 2 billion in cash, a large class A freighter, a 48 slot class C fighter that you can’t even get in the game anymore, a frigate I’ve just sent on its first mission, 3 different class S exotics (I don’t have the squid), and a tonne of materials stored in my ten storage units and all my ships’ and freighter’s cargo holds.
My new character has jack squat; the base multitool, starter ship with (I believe) 13 slots, and a wooden shack I just built for him on a planet with intermittent heat storms. Funny thing is I am playing and enjoying my new character more than my old one. The primary reason I am keeping my old character is because there is currently no way to transfer his stuff to my new one, and I just don’t want to lose it all in case Hello adds functionality to send inventory to another of your characters as EVE Online does.
It’s taken a few days for me to get used to plutonium, thamium9, and zinc no longer being in the game, as well as the new requirements to make everything function. I still don’t understand why platinum (if it is even called platinum anymore) gives you ten seconds of jetpack flight. As others have stated, NMS is pretty much a new game at this point, especially when compared to the 2016 launch.
It seems to me there are many more planets with bodies of water now than before NEXT. On the downside, in my opinion, I haven’t visited a system yet that doesn’t have a ringed planet. Ringed planets are cool and all, but because of their ubiquity they’re just not special.
I wonder if the recent patch addressed issues with the starting point. My second game was started in Normal and it took me four tries to start on a planet that wasn’t actively trying to kill me (RAD and/or TOX over 50). The fourth one has extremely cold nights but that’s all.
I think some galactic disaster turned most of the moons into rings, because it seems like moons are much rarer, now.
We just can’t have nice things.
I’ve put a lot more time into it than I expected, so 30ish bucks well spent for me.
Much of the time wasn’t fun time however. I spent a lot of time trying to work around bugs myself, then searching the web for potential solutions, cross referencing them against the update to see if it was still relevant etc. I did eventually get most of them solved* enough to keep going.
The inventory management is becoming truly onerous. I rebuild my entire base at a new location to try to get my exovehicle pads and, starship spawn to all be in transfer range of my gardens and refiners and storage cubes. Considering it has only been a week or so of play I also have a staggeringly large and confusing collection of bases claimed and teleports built among 4 or 5 systems as I tried and errored my way to around how to efficiently manage material logistics from mining to my base.
I had someone wander into my system, which I didn’t realize at firt. I saw some note that Captain Yadda Yadda Blah Blah had entered the system, but was in the middle of a mighty war against a quest bug and payed the message no attention. Unfortunately that attempt to circumvent the bug happened to be a hail mary that involved trying to kill a Sentinel Walker, and I got murderilated. The other captain then posted “LOL” which is when I realized it was a real person. I then also realized that I have no idea how Multiplayer works in the game, and the “reload manual save” option is gone when some one else in in system. So I panicked( I’ve played EVE ;)) and logged out for several hours.
- The bug I can’t work around is preventing me from trying the freighter system. After I received the* SS Absurdly Convenient Plot Device* I had one bug after another which they seem to be patching, and currently have the issue of never getting the fuel recipe to make fuel to go on expedition.
I did find an interestingly hellish world, that had literally 0 foot visibility at through yellow smoke, a scan note of something like "Planet wide supercell extreme nuclear storm. I landed by braille, jumped out, and my hazard protection dropped halfway before I took a step, then the other half as I hit the button to get back in the craft. I don’t think I need a base there.
Sounds like this but with severe radiation.
Don’t be so sure. In earlier iterations Polo & friend required you to get basically every milestone to 10 by the end of the game to complete their storyline. I don’t know if that’s still true, but if it is (or you want the milestones for whatever other reason), there’s one about spending time on extreme worlds. It takes HOURS of time in extreme conditions to get ranks in this Milestone.
So here’s the trick, unless they’ve fixed it: Being in your base on an extreme world counts as being in the extreme conditions. So I set up my bases on hostile sentinel planets (no longer recommended, because of the changes to sentinel behavior – you’ll never be able to go to space again without an armada chasing you) or super-extreme worlds in other ways, and get the milestone while farming and processing.
Just make sure you land with enough resources to build a teleport pad!
I’m already getting a little itchy with my current base. It’s nice and all, but it’s on a pretty middling world. I want to either find an ultra-paradise or else build my base in a cavern on an extreme world somewhere.
A neat moment for me:
I was exploring one of those worlds that looks like it was terraformed by robots - all metal plating and floating magnets and stuff. I was mining a patch of something or another and fell into a subterranean area beneath it and THIS part of the world was filled with bio-luminescent life. The contrast between the two biomes was extraordinarily cool.
I dug down toward some buried artifacts and ended up in a cave. Can’t find my hole again so I dug out toward a Copper deposit. Only it’s now night, which is dangerously cold, so I retreated back into the exit I just created.
Standing there in the tunnel’s opening, I see all these tiny red balls floating every which way! No idea what they are but they disappear upon exiting the tunnel.
A huge floating island! Appears to have broken off from a nearby overhang.
The second system I visited in this save features a ringed planet with two moons, one of which is Blissful. Blue sky with fluffy pale pink clouds passing in front of the ringed planet and thick orange grass all the way to the horizon!
That’s a good idea. If you have a base from before NEXT, it’s been archived and there’s a mission to rebuild it anywhere. Any active missions given by base NPCs are likely bugged, though.
That’s what happened to my original save; I opened a ticket.
Went back to my second game for now, found a Verdant planet. Entire place appears to be an archipelago, prone to superheated rainstorms (155° C). Landed during one of them and could barely see a thing!
I typically take my time looking for the “perfect” planet, meaning one with large unbroken expanses of lush and mildly windswept grasses, temperate climate, copious flora, an average amount of fauna, and no storms. In Eissentam, before NEXT, such planets were a dime a dozen. Now, they’re more difficult to find, especially one with no storms at all. I am, however, determined to find my ideal world before rebuilding.
I’ve put an official hold on all base-building missions for the time being and am using my home planet as a source of exploration supplies until I also find my ideal planet. I’m not sure what I want - I read that building underground is problematic because excavated terrain tends to respawn inside of structures, so Operation: Dwarf Fortress is out. It seems like every time I find a promising location it either has murderous sentinels or constant storms.
But I’ve discovered the scanner upgrade trick and so every planet I land on nets me about a million if it has fauna. I’ll continue hopping from world to world, earning cash for frigates and digging up technology modules. By the time I find a good planet I’ll have unlocked enough components to make a really good go at building a base. I’m thinking about using a crashed freighter site, since they have lots of flat terrain between the pieces.