Hello! Wow, that post blew up! I had never imagined that my little journal about my space travels and how they were helping me in life would get so much attention. Writing has always been a challenge for me, despite my love of it, and I am glad that posting my writing here is something that y’all enjoy. To everybody that read or commented on Part 1, thank you so much. Your open ears and your kind words truly mean so much to me, and it has given me a lot of motivation to see this through! (Also, my first silver, ever! Wow – thank you so much!) There’s a lot more that I feel that I could say here, but in the interest of getting to the actual journal part of this post, I’ll just say that I am truly grateful for your support, and I’m incredibly glad that my stories have touched so many people’s lives. Seriously, this community rocks. If you are a new reader, you can find part one here.

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Today, I went adventuring. After a brief nap in my ship, I left to investigate the hills around the crash site. After a few minutes of climbing around and taking in the scenery, a radioactive storm suddenly came up on the horizon. With my hazard protection quickly depleting, I looked around frantically for a means of protection, and my eyes quickly settled upon an opening in a nearby hill. As I walked inside, and my hazard protection began to stabilize, I saw a wide cave extending downward in front of me. I had watched a few guides during my break at work today, and quickly crafted an analysis visor. After some quick scanning, I realized that a lot of the rock formations in the cave were made of cobalt! (And other minerals). Knowing that they were valuable from watching a guide, I decided that tonight, I was going to strike it rich.

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It was challenging, at first, to mine with such intensity. I knew around how much money I wanted to have from mining, but the tedium of the thing soon began to set in. As many of you know, I am playing this game as a way to help overcome my prior addictions, and once the game became all about mindlessly pointing the mining laser, my mind began to wander. I really did want to power through this feeling, both because I knew that getting a lot of money would really make the early game a lot more fun, and also to prove to myself that I could exercise a modicum of self-control. I turned on some Twitch in the background, and that helped a lot. I actually ended up getting distracted by the stream a bit, and lost track of time, so I ended up mining way past my goal. Whoops! I also found some things called “Vortex Cubes” – not sure what they do, but they look like one of them would make a pretty cool lamp.

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After my spelunking had concluded, I decided that it was high time for me to repair my ship. I set out in the direction that the map beacon was indicating, and immediately got distracted by something else. I found a crashed pod on the side of a hill, then from there, I found a tower, waaaay off in the distance. My curiosity was peaked, so I headed out in the direction of the tower, to see what it had to offer. It ended up taking a bit longer to walk there than I had anticipated, but it was really cool to see it grow in the distance. I managed to scale it with the help of my trusty jetpack, and accessed some old logs at the terminal on the top. Unfortunately, it seems that my real-life foreign language skills translate into the game, and I was left staring at letters on the screen. I’ll have to make a note and come back to this later.

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Finally, I jumped down and headed over to the beacon that I had found, scanning creatures and plants along the way, and reading facts about them in the pause menu. Apparently, the tentacled creature from yesterday actually doesn’t have any bones, which makes me wonder how it stands up, Truly, nature is beyond human comprehension. I soon arrived at the little settlement, consisting of two tiny houses, right next to each other. I accessed the terminal in one building to win some money via the stock transfer (is this legal?), and found a hermetic seal in the other one. After repairing my pulse engine, I decided to call it a night, as I have an early morning tomorrow. Thank you so much for reading and sticking around! Hopefully this is as enjoyable for you as it is for me – next time, we’re getting off planet, so help me god. I don’t know if I’ll have time to play tomorrow, since I’m gonna go visit some old friends, but we’ll see. Pics below.

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Spelunking!

Like the companion cube, but slightly more….. trapezoidal.

Caught this dinosaur sleeping in the sand

Apparently, this is a rock? Wild

Waaaay off in the distance is a crashed pod, near the bottom of the valley

The tower, but from really far away

A half marathon, maybe more

This alien technology looks really cool, holy cow

I want one

Saw a freighter on the way back to my ship. I hear that you can fly one?

Seriously, this is the most riled up this community has been since launch, and not even a week later everyone’s concerns have been addressed, even those of the minority who thought we’d have no hope now have solutions to the difficulty problem with save locking. We don’t deserve you hello games.

Firstly I’ve have got to admit I have a long history with Elite, played the original in 84, spent about four years playing Frontier: Elite II on the Amiga and currently playing Elite Dangerous on a Series X.

I briefly played the PS4 version of NMS for an hour and got a refund.

Anyway, I’ve been playing the Switch version mode in TV mode and handheld mode, everything’s been generally good! Super impressed with the performance, I’m over 100 hours in and have experienced minor issues with a couple of softlocks and lag on a few occasions (in areas of lots things being drawn to the screen at once).

I’ve got everything down in terms of game logic and progess, although things are a bit confusing at the start, but follow the tutorial (story) for a while and you soon get to grips with the absolute mountain of content this game has been updated with since release (all free).

I find the interaction with the npc characters and the delivery of the story quite refreshing, interesting concept and very broad considering this is a huge procedurally generated game world.

Graphics are fairly solid, if a bit low poly and “okay” textures, draw distance is a bit limited but there’s a lot going on here so there’s gotta be sacrifices for performance.

Sound effects are good and the soundtrack is suited to the games setting, it nicey adapts to whats going on the screen… a lot the tunes are pretty chill, feels almost like minecraft sometimes.

Referencing the old school, I would give this 92%

Edit: I have no idea of how well I’m doing but I’ve got plenty of money and a few basic farms running. A nice exotic S class ship and my frigates are running missions. I quickly became confident enough to ignore the quests and just focused on exploring and making money. Like minecraft in a way, i grind, build and gather resources.