After using primarily fighters for hundreds upon hundreds of hours of my main save, I had finally found an Explorer that I knew had to be my new main. Helped that a natural S-Class just kinda fell into my lap. Transferred all my tech and cargo over, but decided to ditch the positron and phase beam in favour of just a dual-weapon loadout with infraknife and rockets (my fav combo anyway).

After optimizing the layouts with the given SC slots, I was resigned to the overall damage potential being 20% that of my fighter, and the infraknife achieving only 50% of the DPS. I thought I’d give it a try anyway.

Holy shit.

In the next pirate freighter encounter, I finished off the freighter in half the time. I was still skeptical, so I took on a host of combat missions, including solo pirate missions from the Nexus, sentinel freighter battles, and various random encounters. The results were all the same – the Explorer eviscerated enemies with a terrifying efficiency and brutality that my maxed-out S-class fighters could only dream of.

I had read similar stories of such performances, but hadn’t experienced it first hand. But now I know and I can hardly go back to my fighters.

Now if they can only fix that bug so both of my outboard engines are lit up.

Now that the final optional milestone is unlocked and patch 4.52 unbroke the expedition, the Omega Expedition is the ultimate quicksilver farm until it ends. You can easily get 6000 quicksilver in an hour or less. I was able to finish in 45 minutes by doing the following steps to avoid unnecessary backtracking and moving around.

1. Immediately scan six plants to get the Exobotany milestone and install the scanner upgrade. Scan as many fauna as you can see and various plants and minerals (focus on whatever your scanner upgrade is giving you a bonus for). In total, you need ~135K units to start for microprocessors and eventually another 250K to 300K for wiring looms.
2. Find your ship and repair it, collecting necessary resources along the way. Take off and head to the nearest ice planet. The ice planets have more things to scan compared to the other planets. Scan as many fauna as you can to try and get the Life In All Its Forms milestone and the second scanner upgrade.
3. Build your base to finish the next milestone and refine some chromatic metal from the copper you received.
4. Somewhere between the starting planet and your base planet, repair all but one each of the broken starship and multitool slots to get the Scavenger milestone. You will need the nanites in a minute. The magnetic ferrite and silver are the easiest ones to skip fixing since they are the hardest/most time consuming to get.
5. Before heading to the space station, install the hyperdrive and build one warp cell. Doing this while at your base ensures you have enough resources without having to backtrack.
6. Head to the space station and buy the microprocessors to finish the hyperdrive. While you’re here, buy 3 C-class hyperdrive upgrades (buy, save, reload) with the nanites from the Scanveger milestone. These will give you enough range to make every warp except the last one in a single go.
7. Go to Rendezvous 1-4 and get both the normal and optional milestones, keeping in mind the amount of units you need for wiring looms as you’re scanning.
8. Somewhere between Rendezvous 1 and 4, you need to find a Traveler grave, get the Indium Drive plans, and install it. The earliest you can do this is on the Rendezvous 1 space station. If you pick the correct option when talking to the Traveler, you should get enough nanites to ask where their grave is (reload if you pick the wrong option). Alternately, if you go into the Anomaly with the milestone selected, you can ask Polo where to find a Traveler.
9. Travel to Rendezvous 5 and finish the last two milestones. At this point, you should have 6000 quicksilver. Technically, you could finish the full set of milestones to get another 4000 or so quicksilver, but if all you want is the quicksilver it is much faster to just start a new save and go again.
10. Go to the Anomaly and buy whatever you want from the quicksilver vendor. These items can then be claimed on any other save you want.

It’s just that I find this expedition really slow and boring compared to the previous ones, but I feel I have to do it or I will miss out on some really cool rewards.

I don’t think expeditions or their rewards should be time-limited. The rest of no man’s sky is about the freedom to do anything you want, but with expeditions…

I mean I want a robo dog, but I don’t want to milk every cow in the galaxy within the next dix weeks for fear of missing out.

This is just my personal opinion.

There is a time and place for such things in design that goes beyond just wasting people’s time.

Constructive uses for it are either:

a) Short term – make people stick around for a bit, a mandatory mini-break as whatever countdown is ticking down is doing its thing. The first settlement building does that with its <3 minute timer steps. You look around the settlement, take in the scenery, and all that jazz. Given how short it is it usually does not register als negative.

b) Long Term – build anticipation. THIS is where one hour and up timers clock in, but there’s just one massive flaw with the current settlement timers: nothing we have seen so for justfies any sort of anticipation. A market building that has zero mechanical functionality? A house for npcs? As a player I couldn’t give two shits about that. That’s just filler on the side to strech the way to the actually good stuff – which usually is “stuff that allows you to do things that you usually could not do in the game previously”.

There sure is quite some potential to what those “new possibility” buildings can be, from building your own portal to production facilities to (and this now is super wishful thinking for future upgrades) a space hangar for spacecraft building. THAT’s the sort of stuff I’d consider a few hours worth in building the anticipation, even if it is usually unnecessary to have the timer over a hour.

The ONLY other way where high countdowns would be ok would be “overnight projects”. You kick it off before going to bed, and next day you log on happy about your new thing. However, this needs to be stuff one actually looks forward to, instead of “generic random building #324 that increases some internal settlement stat randomy and does nothing for the player”.

Also, having zero interaction with said timer is absolutely stupid if you already set the timers that high. It’s my settlement, let me help by throwing extra resources at it or completing quests (“local wildlife/sentinels is interfering with construction, kill X to speed up process by Y%”)

Time gates have a place in game design, except HG seems to put them in there with the sole and only intent to waste player time. And no, it’s not contributing to the immersion – if it was established for years that you can build a darn LANDING PAD with the click of a button suddenly blocking everything for HOURS is not immersive, it’s just the game giving me the finger. Small timers of a few minutes are immersive. Anything above that is just someone trying to get on my nerves.

Less than 5kly from the galactic centre. Suit fully upgraded, S class fighter fully upgraded, 100 million units in the bank.

Found myself an unmapped world in a mapped system, figured I’d build a base there to mark it. SUUUUUPER toxic world, but NBD – I’ve built bases in worse places. Found an S class power hotspot right next to my landing zone too, but it’s deep underwater so I have to go diving. I’m down there getting my wiring sorted out when the pizza I’ve ordered for the kids shows up, so I pause the game and go get it. Dish it up for the kids, they disappear back up to their bedrooms to eat, and I sit back down to finish off my base….

Turns out I didn’t pause.

Turns out, I’m back at the menu screen.

Turns out, I get to start again.

FFUUUUUUUUUU