No Man's Sky Redux

It's been nice to be back in No Man's Sky. After spending the previous week constantly looking over my shoulder in Los Santos, this weekend has been pretty tranquil and chill. It took a little bit to remember how things work, but now we're clicking right along.

I started a new game, and started following the story mission. I made it through the Artemis chapter, but decided not to start the Apollo chapter. The Apollo chapter is focused on base-building, and I decided I wanted to try and follow The Path of The Atlas. So I jumped into the cockpit and warped to a new system.

The Path of The Atlas consists of visiting Atlas Stations scattered through the galaxy. When you visit the Atlas Station, a giant glowing red ball talks to you in a language you can't understand. Your character reflects on this and the journey so far, and then you have a choice to continue on the path or stop. If you continue, you receive a blueprint for an Atlas Seed and then the coordinates for the next station, which is usually several jumps away.

So then it's a matter of grinding out Warp Cells to fuel your hyperdrive. You turn Carbon into Suspension Fluid; Suspension Fluid into Electron Vapor; Electron Vapor into Antimatter; Antimatter into Warp Cells. Thanks to an Atlas Pass v1, I was able to find a lot of these already made in canisters at different sites, so usually it ends up being a hunt for the different elements needed at each stage, mostly Thamium 9 to convert the Antimatter to the Warp Cell.

It's a fun, if cursory way to explore the galaxy. Previously, I tried hard to fully explore each planet I landed on, taking my time to work through a system before moving on to the next one. This time, I warped in, got what I needed for my next Warp Cell, and warped out. And it was working pretty well. I had tried to follow The Path of The Atlas before, but got hit by a bug where Atlas would speak but no text would display, and I wouldn't be able to proceed. But this time, I didn't have a problem with that.

The problem I did run into was not being high enough rank to proceed. No Man's Sky ranks you according to different factors, like aliens met, alien language words learned, credits earned, etc. Each one of the categories has checkpoints called milestones. After you get so many milestones, you earn a rank. This time when I spoke with The Atlas, I wasn't high enough rank. I needed four more milestones to proceed.

So, I hung out in the system and explored. I went to a nearby system and poked around there, and then went to a second system and explored it for a bit. I only need one more milestone to proceed now, and was working on learning words of aliens languages, when I came over a rise, and found a player base.

I was not expecting to find this. From my experience before, you need to construct a beacon, and then have it find the location of a habitable base for you, and I just assumed that the game generated the base when you did that. In all the time that I've spent walking around on the surface of world in No Man's Sky, I've never just stumbled across a base before.

So I claimed it, even though it's on a radioactive planet. I was pleased to learn that you can start the base-building quests outside of the Apollo story arc. I've already built onto the base, and hired The Overseer, who gives you the quests to get the blueprints to build the different sections of the base. I need to go out and gather Platinum so that I can build a Science Station.

I feel like I'm kind of a crossroads. I'm really close to unlocking the next Path of The Atlas, but I've also just started building my first base. For right now, I'm going to keep working on the base, and hopefully I'll unlock that next milestone soon. When that happens, I think I'll probably move on, and then stop and work on a new base when we get held up at the next Path of The Atlas.

I'm really excited for the NEXT update this Tuesday. The game is already much more stable than when I played last fall -- I haven't run into any major glitches, like the afore-mentioned Path of the Atlas bug. Previously, conventional wisdom dictated starting a new save with each update,  since your previous saves might have bugs still in them. I started this new game with that in mind, that I'd probably be starting fresh with NEXT. But the chatter on Reddit indicates that's not true this time around, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do. You do have five save slots per account, so I can try to keep playing this save, and see how it goes.

And I'm excited about getting into the end game activities this time around. I stopped on a freighter, and just on a whim checked to see how much it would be to purchase it. 128 million credits. I had 63 thousand in my pocket. It would take a lot of grinding to get there, but I love a good grind.