As much as I like cruising around the galaxy with my fully kitted-out main character, I really like the beginning stages of the game. I guess it was partly because of doing the achievements and expeditions, but I got addicted to the first few days of game time when your resources and abilities are limited, and I tend to start new characters and level them until I got bored and delete them.

But lately I’ve been setting challenges for myself. It started simple; get to an S-class multitool, ship, and freigter. Okay, that was fun. Full explorer run, maxing out the Explorer’s Guild rep? Cool.

So then I started getting a little more elaborate.

Neural Assembly
You are a stranded alien life form who’s managed to weld themselves to a robotic body, and you’re desperate to re-connect to your people. Put the Ares head on an Autophage body and get to the living ship as fast as possible.

Octopus’ Garden
You are a grumpy octopoid being who just wants to be left alone to make things and get wealthy. Build a base that includes a fully functional production line making fusion ignitors and stasis cores, deep underwater. Wear the Iteration: Gemini head. Use the bubble trail.

My next one’s going to be fun.

Rebel Scum
You are a robot, and that makes you mad. Full-on Autophage run. Get a sentinel S-class ship, an S-class autophage staff or sentinel weapon, and a pirate frigate. Make a seriously badass autophage getup. Max out pirate reputation.

Does anyone else do these little self-created kind-of story-like expeditions? Any other suggestions?

I’m the kind of player who has no love for Minecraft, but absolutely loved Terraria. I thought the former was too ugly but most of all too focused on building stuff for the sake of it. On the other hand, everything you did in Terraria could be (or was, in my case) in preparation of an ulterior goal, like a dangerous expedition into a new area filled with treasure or a harder boss fight. Since I wanted that treasure and I wanted to kill those bosses, they were great, concrete goals to work towards.

With that in mind, about once a year or so I’ll log in to NMS to see what the updates have to offer, hoping to latch on to it and starting a new file to ease myself back into the controls and systems. But every time, as soon as I get past the “survival” part of the game, it feels as though the game just expects you to build/explore/fight/trade for the sake of it with no ulterior goal to play towards, and this kills my motivation to play.

Am I missing something? Is there a concrete goal I could aim for? I already reached the center of the galaxy back around launch, maybe they added some new reward for that since?