So I just got done with Expedition 5 the other day and while past expeditions took me ~4 to 4.5 hours total to complete the milestones….this one took triple the amount of time to complete at over 12 hours…but for the wrong reasons.

The first few milestones that took me a lot of time was finding the different eggs and the different milk. It took a LOT of time to hop back from system to system to find everything, even had to resort to coming here to this sub to backtrack to certain systems and whatnot, since I realized I didn’t get enough of some of the egg and milk types (I’ll admit, my bad). And to top it off, when I did finally finish this section, the base decals and posters weren’t showing up for me after I redeemed them on my main save, which gave me a bit of a scare that I went through all that cooking for nothing. But thankfully, this bug has been fixed as of the latest build pushed out today. (Thanks HG! :D)

But the eggs and the milk were absolutely nothing compared to the milestone I hated the most:

Getting the Explorers Guild Ranking up to level 16.

I absolutely hated this part for a few different reasons. First of all; you are often at the mercy of the RNG of each system’s mission boards. And this wouldn’t have been a huge deal if you only had to get the rank up to like 5. But 16? (Yes, I know why it’s 16 but still…) It took me so, so long to find system with Explorers guild missions I could actually do, since I’d often get missions that required too high of a rank to accept. So I was taking absolutely anything I could find.

And here’s the second part why I didn’t like this Explorers Guild Ranking milestone. Because of this grind and RNG based luck; it’s advised to stack certain mission types for them that you can do on any planet all at once. One of the fastest and easiest missions you get early on is; killing animals on the planet. Which I feel goes against the whole purpose of the Exobiology Expedition. And since that was the last milestone I had to complete, most of the final part of the Exobiology Expedition for me is…killing off all the animals. It felt so out of place.

And I fully understand that’s a personal choice on my end whether to pick up that mission type from the board, but due to how hard is was to find these explorers guild ranking missions in various systems, and how advised it is to stack mission types like that, it kinda felt I had no choice but to do it if I wanted to get this done as soon as possible.

So yeah, if anyone at HG is reading this; If you’re gonna do faction standing milestones again on future Expeditions, please don’t make it 16. Make it like 5 or something. Or if you want to do 16, make that for one of the 3 Alien races instead, so we at least know which systems to hop to from the map, and don’t have to play Star System Roulette with the map.

Sorry for the long post/rant. Just wanted to give my feedback in the hopes that it may improve what we see next time. 🙂

TLDR: Overall, Expedition 5 was very mixed for me. The majority of it was a lot of fun, but one or two milestones of it were painful to get.

Stuff constantly disappearing. When I move something in a room, the entire room itself is deleted leaving all my objects floating in the air, leaving me to find more materials to rebuild the room everytime I want to move a god damn plant to a different location.

My door to my landing pad just decided to vanish. Then my landing pad vanished, leaving my ship floating in the air.

I’m so tired of losing stuff I spent time and materials creating. Its making me want to either just stop playing or ignore the base building entirely because I feel like I’m wasting my time. Why build something if its just gonna vanish 5 minutes after?

I just realized that. Basically, I just noticed how I wasn’t even playing the main quest – I’m here building my base, growing my settlement. Upgrading stuff, having new plans of a thing I wanna build… Friends come and go from my world to theirs, meaning that I sometimes play with friends, sometimes alone. It’s one of these games I can just hop in, relax, and leave whenever I can. It’s a soothing game, that I’m playing as (almost entirely) sandbox.

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It’s a feeling I had for minecraft ten years ago. Enjoying the sandbox, building stuff and going on adventures, with friends hoping on and off the server. I sometimes restarted minecraft, but never found this feeling back nowadays. And here I am, fifty hours in my No Man’s Sky main save (not counting expeditions) and I just realized that this is how I’m playing the game. With that good old feeling.

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It’s a nice game.