No Man's Sky is a game, made by Hello Games. It was first released back in 2016, but has had *many* updates since then, changing the game almost beyond recognition. All these updates have been free for anyone who has the base game. It's now available on [[PlayStation]], [[Xbox]], [[Switch]], [[macOS]], [[Steam Deck]] and PC. I started playing in 2020, and as of 2023, I'd mostly stopped. But I played so much, for so long, that I still think of it as my main game. Somewhere over 1,500 hours, in total, and I've played on all platforms it's available on, to varying extents, with Mac being my platform of choice for it these days. On my [[MacBook Pro M2 Max]] it runs very nicely with everything on ultra. And I still go back to it whenever there's an update, to have a look at the new stuff. ## What Is It? It's not the easiest game to explain, because it touches on a few different genres. Early on, it's a survival game, but depending on your difficulty settings, it soon becomes fairly difficult to die unless you're really trying. It's a space game, and it's a sandbox. There are lots of things you can do, but only a fairly limited story, which is mostly told in bits of text attached to various little quests. But after a while, you run out of stories and guidance, and it's up to you to find things you want to do. Explore, build bases, build ships, seek out ships or planets you like. Make your own goals. In stylistic terms, No Man's Sky is largely themed around old sci-fi from the 1950s and 60s, especially the paperback book covers. Bright and colourful, full of life, and exciting, not the more realistic style of big empty rocks in space. Some people do hate that lack of realism, but there are reasons (or excuses?) for it we'll get to in the section about the story and lore. No spoilers up here. ## The History No Man's Sky has quite a history, which has been told by quite a few people better than I could. But the short version is that it launched in a pretty poor state. Back in 2016, it was one of the most hyped games of all time, with a huge marketing machine behind it, largely pushed by Sony, and people were expecting all the things the lead developer Sean Murray had talked about in years of interviews. And it really didn't deliver. What it did manage to do, even back then, was a seamless exploring experience. You were on a planet. You had a look around, but saw another planet up in the sky. You got in your ship, took off, flew through space to the other planet, down through the atmosphere, landed, and got out. Now you were exploring another planet, without seeing a loading screen. And that *was* pretty impressive, but a lot more had been promised and expected. And the developers just went quiet. Most people assumed they'd taken the huge amounts of money they'd made, and run off, leaving them with a disappointing game. But they hadn't, they just knew they had lost all their trust, so there was no point in claiming to be working on fixing things, they had to *actually* fix things. So they started fixing things, and adding in missing features. And dropped an update. It didn't add *much* of what was promised, but it showed people they were working on it. And the updates kept coming. And still are. Nine years later at the time of writing, and they're still adding big updates, well over 30 major updates so far, all just added to the base game, with no paid DLC and no microtransactions. And people now wonder how they can possibly keep doing this, for so long, without charging any money. But the thing is, each time there's a new update, more people buy the game. With the most recent update, Voyagers, it reached number 4 in the Steam sales charts. A nine-year-old game. A lot of what they're adding now is also code that's going into their upcoming game, Light No Fire, so they're getting new sales for NMS, along with testing of features they're coding up for LNF. ## Expeditions These are special time-limited events, where you have a set of objectives to do to complete a series of stages. Most objectives can be done in any order, but often there's some sort of lock - sometimes some objectives are 'encrypted' until you complete a specific one, and sometimes they involve something you won't get until you've got to a certain point. I've done most of them, and have enjoyed most of them. Gave up entirely on one, partly because it started to feel like a chore, and mainly because I was quite obsessed with [[Timberborn]] at the time. And a couple more hit when I just wasn't playing, so I skipped them entirely. General tips for them: - Turn off PVP. It's in the network settings. Do it as soon as you start. For some reason, it's on by default, and because people often forget to turn it off, some players like to grief. In normal gameplay, happening on a griefer is unlikely, but in an expedition, it's far more common. Still not *likely*, but don't take the risk. Maybe even turn off multiplayer entirely. It's nice to have the feeling of doing the expedition with other players around, but things can sometimes get a bit crashy and unstable. - Related, very occasionally you'll find a base blocking something you need to access, set up by someone who just wants to be an asshole. Some people are like that. If it happens, just get close to the base, and look in the quick menu for the option to report the base. Once you report it, it disappears. - You don't have to do the things in order, and sometimes there will be fairly easy ones in later stages with rewards that will be really helpful. But in general, just doing them in order is fine. If you're bad at combat, as I am, just put off any sentinel fights until you've had chance to get more upgrades. Some can take a fair bit of doing if you wait until they come up naturally, but if you've looked ahead and know in advance that you'll need to, for example, talk to 16 life forms, that's very easy to do as you go. - Starting as soon as the expedition is available isn't the best idea if you want to make it easy, or you're new to the game. After a few days, people have usually made helpful bases for resources you'll need, left comm balls to mark important locations, and there will be YouTube videos with how-to guides and tips. Special mention to Xaine's World, who usually has the most comprehensive and well researched guides, but that does mean they're not usually the first to be available. He often puts out an early guide, though, with more general tips. - The exception to this is that there have been a couple of expeditions that required you to find a system nobody else had discovered yet, which actually got harder as time went by. - Since a few updates ago, expeditions can be started from within your main save, or another save, which also lets you stash some upgrades and materials at the Anomaly to pick up in the expedition. This can be a huge help, but again, it's even more useful if you wait a little to let other people work out what's best to bring along. You won't usually be able to access this stuff straight away, because access to the Anomaly isn't usually available until after you first warp to a new system. I usually stash away a heap of the usual basics, like oxygen, carbon, ferrite dust, sodium, etc. After that, stuff to sell for units, and runaway mould to refine into nanites can be a big help. A lot of nanites will let you get lots of upgrades, which can make everything else easy, and there's often a stage that needs to to earn nanites. - Difficulty settings are usually limited, but if you just want to play through the expedition as easily as you can, go into them and see what it will let you turn down. It varies with different expeditions, but usually you can make things easier than the defaults. Even if you usually like a challenge, you might just want to get through an expedition quickly and get your rewards. ## Difficulty Settings No Man's Sky has a lot of control over the difficulty, and you should play how you want to play. Some people love a challenge, and play on Survival or even Permadeath. I play for fun, I tweak custom settings to keep things nice and easy, with minimal combat. Unless you've specifically locked the settings, or you're in Permadeath, most settings can be changed any time. So if you find a ship you really want to buy, but you can't afford it, it's quite possible to change the settings to make purchases free, buy the ship, then change it back. I've done this for building Corvette ships, after spending a while gathering parts. I did want to experience how gathering the parts work, but once I'd done that, I just wanted to build freely, not limited to the parts I'd happened to find. I've also played with combat minimal and easy, but with prices set to be high, so I'd have to 'work' for things more. I enjoyed that for a while, but it ended up feeling like more of a grind. ## The Story / The Lore *Insert MatPat "Looooooorrre".* No Man's Sky does have a story, but the storytelling is quite basic. No cut scenes, no voice acting. You meet a character, they say things, but it's just text on the screen. Some of that 'ludonarrative dissonance' where the text tells you the character is doing something they clearly aren't. But any failings in how the story is told and shown to you don't necessarily mean the *story* is bad. It's a matter of opinion, obviously, but I really like the story. The down side, though, is that only so much of it is actually told to you in the opening quests. After that, you can piece together a lot more by picking up bits of lore from all sorts of different places. But it's so disjointed, that putting it together to understand what the story actually is, isn't easy. Gathering all those bits of lore in the first place would take hundreds of hours of gameplay, depending on how much you're specifically seeking them out, and know where to look. And even if you've done all that, some parts are a bit unclear, hinted at rather than said straight out. **Here Be Spoilers** OK, if you've got to this point and you're still reading, you probably want spoilers. Either you know the game's story and just want to read about it, or you don't know, but don't care about revealing it through gameplay. I don't entirely blame you - once you've got through the early story revelations, piecing the rest of it together isn't actually much fun. And I should say, I'm in no way an expert, just that I've played a lot, and read a lot. ### 16 // 16 // 16 Right from the start, the number 16 keeps coming up. It's a bit creepy. Early in the story, you have to go and ask at the space station, asking three NPCs about the number 16. Those three are scared, and will never speak to you again. After following the quests further on, you get the revelation that the world you're in isn't real. It's a simulation. You're simulated. All the NPCs are simulated. The entire universe is simulated. And the computer running the simulation is failing. It has 16 minutes of runtime before it all comes crashing down. The end of the universe you're in. If you saved Artemis by putting them in Nada's simulation, you're now in the same situation, on a bigger scale. And so was Artemis before they died. If you decided death was better than living in a simulation, well, not sure what to tell you. That's where you're at. But the simulation runs way faster than real time, so those 16 minutes could be a very long time. Other characters remember the number 16 from long ago, so it seems likely 16 minutes in whatever real world the simulation is running in, could be a very long time here inside it. ### The Atlas The Atlas is that computer. It runs the simulation. Some of the NPCs worship the Atlas, as their God. Others consider it to be nothing of the sort. But as your entire world is running inside it, seeing it as this universe's God doesn't seem *too* inaccurate. And for some reason, the Atlas is willing to talk to you, if somewhat briefly. Maybe it's because you are... ### The Traveller There isn't just one simulated world running on the Atlas. There are many. And each one has a witness, to view it and experience it from the inside. The Traveller. The job of The Traveller is to explore their universe, seeing it from within, in a way the Atlas can't from the outside. And each simulated universe has one Traveller. Each one is separate, with no crossover, no way for any one Traveller to meet any other. Until... ### The Boundaries Fall The corruption the Atlas is experiencing cause the boundaries between worlds to fail. Travellers meet each other. A few of them live together in... ### The Anomaly A space station, but with no fixed location. It exists outside the simulated world. Inside the Atlas still, but somehow outside, where it can't see. Invisible to all but Travellers. Bringing them together. In game terms, it's the multiplayer hub. In the lore, it's built by Nada and Polo (mainly Polo, really, Nada doesn't seem to have much idea how it actually works), as a way to stay safe from the Sentinels and the Atlas. Like many parts of the story, it's not exactly clear *why* they're in hiding, but it seems they were part of a previous iteration of a universe, and were supposed to have been wiped out. So they made a place for Travellers, where they could be safe and protected, and *together*. But we're not just a Traveller. We are... ### An Anomaly We see the term very early on. It's never entirely explained in a simple way. But the other Travellers we see as ghosts, or on The Anomaly, look different. You may also notice that in the Appearance Modifier, Anomaly is a separate race to Traveller. And however much we modify how we *appear*, we *are* an Anomaly. But we are an anomaly *among* Travellers. Still one of them, just *different*. But we don't find out what's so anomalous about us until some late game lore that's quite hidden away. The Atlas is being abandoned. Its creator has to move on, to create another simulation machine, more advanced than the Atlas. They can't stay to maintain the Atlas, but they can leave it running, to keep going for as long as it can. The Atlas makes one last request. Can it scan the creator's mind? The creator agrees, not asking why. Maybe just assumes the Atlas wants a copy of them for company. The Atlas scans its creator's mind, and inserts a copy of them into the simulation as a traveller. That's us. Each player character is a copy of the Atlas' creator, taking the role of the Traveller. That's why we're different to the other Travellers, and why we're an Anomaly. ### Telemon When we create a friendly Sentinel, it recognises us, and calls us Telemon. But that's not us. Why does the Sentinal think we're Telemon? Who is Telemon? Telemon was the Atlas' security subroutine. But when the Atlas puts us into the simulation as a Traveller, it wants to help us survive, so it inserts the Telemon code into our Exosuit. It's the voice we hear, the suggestions we see telling us how to stay alive, nagging us to charge out life support and find sodium. Telemon is part of our Exosuit, and the Sentinel doesn't see the difference between us and our suit. ### The Gek and War If you follow the base expansion storyline, you learn some pretty unpleasant stuff about the Gek. They're all nice and friendly, and just want to trade with you. But that's a bit at odds with some of the bits of lore you find about them going all Ozymandias, and talking of dominating the universe. So what happened? Long ago, the early Gek, known as the First Spawn, were obsessed with war and conquering other races. They nearly hunted the Vy'keen to extinction. They saw the Korvax as nothing more than slaves, or a source of rare metals, forcing them to work, or melting them down. They destroyed their home world, Korvax Prime. Eventually, the Korvax found a way to fight back, by using nanites in the Gek spawning pools, to reprogram them, changing their character, and redirecting their obsession to trade. Removed their design to dominate the universe, leaving them just wanting to trade and make units. And it worked. The Gek we have now are nice, friendly, keen to do business with us. But it was too late for the Korvax home planet, Korvax Prime. But it goes by other names... ### Atlantid, Void Mother, Korvax Prime Korvax Prime was more than just a planet. It was sentient. An intelligent computer as a home planet. Part of the Korvax Convergence. And it was destroyed. But it survived. Somehow, it moved its sentience to somewhere outside the simulation. And now, Void Mother is breaking through, into our simulation. When you find a 'Dissonant' system, there will be at least one planet with purple crystals and corrupt Sentinels. Mine those crystals, and you'll get Atlantidium. There are also rumours in the bits of lore on these planets that maybe Void Mother knows a way to get around the corruption that's killing the Atlas.