Bread in Space

It was a good first day back. I loaded up my old save in Beyond, and everything was alright, for the most part. Before Beyond dropped, I had been building a little cabin on an island in a crater lake. Then I had gone out building little one-off bases throughout the system, mostly out of boredom.

When I loaded the old save, the first thing I did was summon my freighter, and make sure it was ok. The trade terminal was in the floor, the same as it had been in the freighter in my new Beyond save, but other than that, everything was fine. My storage rooms worked, and there was NipNip growing in the hydroponics tray.

I decided to go check out the Anomaly. In fact, that was the only new mission that had popped up, go see Nada and Polo and see what’s changed. Interestingly enough, Nada and Polo acted differently with me than they had with my new save character, the scrappy little Gek who likes to sit on couches. They both acted like I had done something they didn’t want to talk about and were going to pretend didn’t happen. I think it has to do with the Path of the Atlas. Nada seems much more anti-Atlas this time around.

I was able to pick up some of the new blueprints at the Anomaly, but needed more salvaged tech, so I decided to go back to the lake cabin and use it as a base of operations. I was able to portal directly to my base from the Anomaly. The Anomaly portal has a neat feature where it shows you one base from all the other players there, and all of your bases, and then last visited space stations. How does it determine your one base, though? I wonder what base of mine is presented as my one base.

The landing pad was gone. All three biodomes and the portal were powered down. The trading terminal was in the floor of it’s little room, as well. But everything was there. After sitting on my couch for a bit, I refueled the Nautalion and cruised to the shore. I built a Nomad station and started tooling around the countryside, looking for buried tech.

And while building bases and flying through space is fun and all, the real meat and potatoes of this game is wandering the surface of the different planets, looking for something. When you first land on a world, you scan everything, pay attention to everything. And then it slowly becomes familiar as you make your way through it. These are uncaring, naturalist landscapes that weren’t built by hand to make sure that your 3D avatar could navigate from point A to point B. The procedural algorithm doesn’t care if you can reach a ledge or not. In most games, if you see a resource in a remote location on a map, that’s usually a pretty solid clue that somehow, you can get there, to that spot. Not in No Man’s Sky.

I gathered a bunch of salvaged tech and went back to the lake house. I built a blueprint analyzer and bought almost all of the blueprints with the salvaged tech I’d found. I decided to try and power things up.

The top floor of the house had been a half deck with a set of stairs leading up to the landing pad. With that gone, I decided to enclose the half deck, and then put a roof on it and make a full deck on top of that. I built four solar panels, and then wired them down through the floor to two batteries on the floor below.

I learned a lot about the wiring by playing with it. First, it can easily go through walls. I used the new building camera mode, and flitted around the building, running wires in and out. It takes some work, but you can lay wires so that they look nice, and aren’t just all over the place.

The trick to laying wires is that you can “bend” them, in that, as you’re laying the wire, in comes out in a straight line from your starting point. You can hit the right trigger at any point, and it will bend the wire, making that new bend point the starting point. You keep laying and bending until you get the wire to it’s destination.

I had more than enough power to start up one of the biodomes and the portal, so I got the NipNip operation going again. The NipNip blueprint is readily available at the Anomaly, but the actual NipNip bud that you need to start the plant is currently only available from players, though maybe you could buy it from a Gek pilot. Anyway, good time to go all in on NipNip production.

I didn’t want the portal sucking up energy all the time, since you only need it when you want to use it, so I rigged up a proximity sensor to activate the portal only when someone is near. And it works great, except for the fact that proximity sensor has a really wide range, so it can basically detect that I’m in the house, in which case the portal is on the whole time I’m in the house. Which defeats the purpose. So, I think I’m going to add a button to turn it on, put the button between the proximity sensor and the portal, so the button only works if you’re there, and when you’re not there, the whole thing powers down.

I had a lot of issues with crashing today. I’d just randomly move and the game would crash, at one point as often as every twenty minutes. It seemed to be worse around my base, so I’m hoping it’s a memory leak that will be patched soon.

I finished up the night by playing the new nutrient processor. I started throwing different things in to see what we’d get. I made bread! First I made flour, then I found some yeast, combined them into a dough, and voila! Bread!

Here are the recipes that I’ve found so far:

• 1 Scaly Meat = 1 Processed Meat
• 1 Star Bulb = 1 Pilgrimberry
• 1 Pilgrimberry = 1 Pilgrim’s Tonic
• 1 Solanium = 1 Solartillo
• 1 Solartillo = 1 Steamed Vegetables
• 1 Frost Crystal = 1 Glass Grains
• 1 Glass Grains = 1 Refined Flour
• 1 Gamma Root = 1 Sievert Beans
• 1 Sievert Beans = 1 Steamed Vegetables
• 1 Chromatic Metal = 1 Silicon Egg
• 1 Faecium = 1 Wild Yeast
• 1 Wild Yeast + 1 Refined Flour = 1 Dough
• 1 Dough = 1 Bread