Keep on Space Truckin'

I completed the Path of the Atlas quest in No Man’s Sky. I’m actually pretty proud of that, since I’ve been working on that quest since I got the game two years ago. And I don't want to spoil anything, but the story in Path of the Atlas and the Artemis story line dove-tail really nicely. For an open-ended, procedurally generated game, I feel like I've gotten a good taste of the lore and the back story. And for a game where the story felt tacked on when it was released, I feel much more immersed into its world.

Now I'm heading to the Galactic Centre. Completing the Path of the Atlas did reveal all the black holes in the galaxy, but in doing so, it's revealed the sheer size of the galaxy. It's one thing to cognitively understand that there are billions of stars in the galaxy, it's another to keep zooming out and just seeing all these stars. I started out about 700,000 light years from the Centre; I'm now a little less than 640,000.

With the NEXT update, everyone has a chance to get a free freighter when they start. When you warp into a system, there’s a random chance that will be an ongoing space battle, where a freighter will be under attack by a number of small craft. If you attack and help defeat the small craft, then the freighter captain will invite you aboard, and offer to sell his ship to you. The first freighter is actually free, however. I don’t know if you can refuse the first free one and wait until you see one you like; I was so excited by the offer I snatched up the very first one.

I had never gotten a freighter in the earlier versions of the game. It seemed to me something you would get after you had built a base with a farm, and you needed a way to sell a lot of stuff in a different system. And they were expensive, 12 million credits or something like that. It felt to me like an endgame thing, and I never got near the endgame before.

Man, are they useful, though. Freighters run on the same warp cells as your space craft, but they're much more efficient. Where the space craft gets 1 jump per cell, the freighter gets five. So five warp cells will get you twenty-five jumps, and the freighter has slightly longer range as well. You can also jump to red, green, and blue stars in a freighter without a drive modification, allowing you to mine for some rare resources. Plus, you can warp to system in your space craft, and then summon your freighter to that system to join you instantly and, as far as I can tell, without fuel cost.

So my current grind is this: I start out by making five warp cells at my base in the Iudackar system. Then I use my teleporter to jump to whatever system my freighter is in. I fly from that station to my freighter, and load one warp cell into the freighter's hyperdrive. I then plot a course to the nearest black hole and warp there. Once at the system with the black hole, I hop into my space craft, and fly through it, coming out at a system on the other side. I then summon my freighter, plot out a course to the next black hole and repeat until I need more warp cells. Then I stop at the nearest space station, teleport back to my base, and make some more cells.

By doing this, I'm able to move about 75,000 light years in about two hours, give or take. Much better than the 1,000 light years an hour I was doing before. The real trick to it seems to be to find the closest black hole to the system that you warp into, to minimize the number of jumps needed to get from black hole to black hole. The big time and energy factor is actually hunting down copper on my base world, with each run getting me further and further afield to hunt down the resource nodes. I mentioned previously that I was thinking about completing the base building quests far enough that I could get an Exocraft. Instead, I've been using my ship to fly in different directions, and then land and walk around. It's working, but it feels clumsy. It feels like a job for a truck instead of a plane.

At this rate, I reckon it'll take me about 20 hours worth of play to get to the Centre. I could probably trim that down by upgrading my freighter to make it more efficient or jump farther, and maybe the resource gathering time by building an Exocraft. Either one will be good when I get bored with the jumping and need something new to occupy myself. But this is a good grind for me. I've got a goal to work towards, and pretty clear steps to get there. And so far, the ride is pretty fun.