It’s update time, so I thought I’d post my “guide for noobs” on how this all works here on the subreddit.

There’s nowhere really to watch, necessarily, other than this subreddit and Sean’s Twitter (Twitter.com/NoMansSky).

It’s actually a bit obnoxious, to be honest. Here’s how it usually plays out:

Sean Murray will tweet a really vague, innocuous emoji or something. The tweet will be screenshotted and posted here a dozen or so times, usually with little to not accompanying context.

For the next ~3-4 days (depending on Sean’s mercy), this subreddit will be literally nothing but an endless stream of screenshots of his post, other posts guessing (usually all guessing the same 3-4 things), memeing his post, with the occasional actually interesting conversational thread thrown in here and there for flavor.

Then the update will actually drop – Sean will tweet it, there will be coverage of it on all the big gaming/tech sites, on all the No Man’s Sky social channels, etc. You won’t be able to miss it.

Then the next ~1-2 days will be people coming onto the subreddit to ask if the update dropped, when it’s going to drop, why hasn’t it dropped yet, is this game worth jumping into, etc.

It’s usually ~a week or two after a major update before this subreddit is tolerable again.

The mods do an admirable job trying to corral the crazy, but it’s just an impossible task.

TL;DR – keep an eye on Sean Murray’s Twitter account [it’s (at)NoMansSky]. If/when he tweets something cryptic, unsub from this subreddit but keep an eye on his account or your favorite tech/gaming site. ~2 weeks after the update hits, it’s safe to rejoin the subreddit.

So my brother got No Man’s Sky and encouraged me to get it so I can play with him. I’m more of an JRPG fan who plays a ton of single player, narrative-driven games that deep dives into character relationships (e.g. Xenoblade Chronicles, Nier, Persona).

I used to play FPS multiplayer games when I was younger but not really anymore. I never played an open sandbox game and the game’s visuals looked great. I love the sci-fi and space genre and the game was on Steam, sale so why not?

Unfortunately, I find the whole mining/crafting and base building pretty tedious, boring and a monotonous grind. Conversely, my brother loves it. He’s already spent 40+ hours on it. I’m only 9 hours so far.

I changed a lot of the settings to Free for Crafting, Purchases, Blueprints etc. because I hate grinding (even in RPGs and other games). But now, I’m not sure what to do now that I can just get everything for free.

The one thing I do like is the exploration. Seeing new planets. Traversing the different systems and taking in the visuals. Admiring the landscapes, fauna, animals, etc.

I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m bashing the game. I genuinely want to find a way I can experience this game in a way that’s fun for me and enjoy it with my brother or solo. But feel free to call me out too if you think this isn’t the game for me.

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I just researched and it seems that No Man’s Sky offers no rewards for killing other players. I just read that you can’t loot other player’s graves or get loot from their ships.

I just bought the game cause I was really, really hyped. I went to a featured base cause hey, it’s featured and it looks amazing!

I spend all my credits that I got from scrapping a couple A-Class ships I found into 150 navigational data (in order to find more ships to scrap) and a bunch of resources to build a base and upgrade my gear. I had no weapons other than the mining beam, and no shields.

I enter the base.

I see a player. I look at them. I prepare to do the hand waving emote. He kills me before I can do it. Chat says I died due to multi-tool combat.

No biggie, I can just grab my items from my grave.

The player searches for me at spawn. Kills me again. Then skedaddles out of there with their ship.

I grab my second grave. No items. I look for my first grave, the one that’s supposed to have my items in it. Not there. There’s random terrain there now. Did they add terrain in to de-spawn my grave? My entire inventory, gone.

Now I don’t even have 50 ferrite dust to repair my now broken multi-tool.

And according to a Google search, this player gained nothing from this.

Why does No Man’s Sky have PvP against everyone enabled by default without telling the players, with the possibility to lose your entire inventory, even though no one gains anything from it?

It just seems like No Man’s Sky is encouraging spawn-sniping and griefing for annoying-new-player’s sake. This is such a bizarre design decision!

I also play WoW and engage in world PvP, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, and even this game which does reward you from PvP has the following features:

1. Rewards for PvP. PvP isn’t guaranteed to be just in order to anger you.

2. Reward the winner, don’t delete the entire inventory of the loser.

3. PvP is disabled by default, and it’s an opt-in feature because not everyone likes PvP and when you are in PvP your player yells “For the Horde!”/”For the Alliance!” so that you very clearly know when PvP is on. You also get an in-game icon when PvP is on so that you know that hey, you could get attacked at any moment.

4. Since the game was built with PvP in mind, there are certain rules for when and how you can or can’t enable and disable PvP so that you can’t just disable it if you feel like you’re losing.

No Man’s Sky has none of these things, in fact has the opposite, and it just seems like they added PvP just cause, without giving much thought about the actual gameplay aspect and experience of PvP.

Isn’t it bizarre? Opt-out, inventory wipe, non-notified, un-asked for PvP.

As a new player, I shouldn’t have to google how to disable PvP, or whether or not the game has PvP, or whether or not you lose your items, and even worse, I shouldn’t have to discover the answer to these questions without even googling it, because it makes the game less enjoyable.