Finding Bliss

I made it mostly through the main story mission of No Man's Sky. I'm trying to figure out how to discuss it without spoiling it, but let's just say that it works pretty well. Yes, it's a thinly veiled attempt to familiarize the player with the different elements of the game, but it also feels like an old school Sci-Fi story, the way the planets look like the covers from those pulp novels. You make some choices, and have to think about some things. It's a lot of fun.

But now the game has me heading to the Galactic Core. The problem is that the core is 700,000 light years away, and my little ship only does about 100 light years a hop. I thought I was racing to the core by making a jump, and then building a fresh warp cell, the fuel my hyperdrive needs per jump, and then making the next jump, but with the time it takes to make the cell, I was only averaging about 4 jumps an hour. At that rate, it would take me 1,500 hours to reach the core. That's not going to work.

I did a little Googling, and now I'm trying to finish the Path of the Atlas quest line. It previous versions of the game, this apparently would reveal Black Holes, which you could use as a shortcut to jump great distances. And it's another story line to work on. So I've been warping along, landing on planets and making warp cells, and moving on the next system.

But then I found a lush world, with no nasty weather, and no mean critters or Sentinels. This whole journey, I've been scuttling and scurrying, dodging radiation or acid rain, escaping the boiling heat or the freezing cold. And then here I can just walk, across rolling hills and through forests, and it's just beautiful.

So I took a little break. I repaired my mining laser, which had got broken in a fight with Sentinels several planets ago. I installed a Cadium Drive on my starship, which I'm hoping will make the paths to the Atlas a little quicker, since it allows me to visit red stars, which were off limits before. And I built a little base, and in that base I build a teleporter.

Now I can load my ship up with warp cells, and then teleport back to where I was on the Path of the Atlas. I can make five quick jumps, which take about fifteen minutes, then when I'm out of warp fuel, I can stop at the space station of the system I'm in and teleport back to my base, where I can mass produce more warp cells. Then I can teleport back again and keep traveling.

It's working pretty well, but I'm already looking around and thinking that I need some sort of truck to scoot around in. I need to finish the base quests, anyway, so I might take a break and build a bigger base and staff it, and research the Exocraft, which would allow me to zip around the surface and find the resource deposits I need to build the warp cells.

And like I said, it's really pretty, and it's really friendly. The game's weather descriptor lists it as "Blissful", and that's actually pretty true. It's nice to not have to run so much.