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?

I’m not usually one to write down my grievances with video games, but the release of 4.0 was so disappointing I feel I need to get up on my soapbox and give my opinion, especially since others are telling those of us against the 4.0 update that how we feel is an overreaction.

I installed NMS when it was added to game pass, and since then I’ve gotten 500+ hours under my belt as an interloper. I’ve learned the ins and outs of this game. I’ve hunted for my perfect ship, spent hours reloading for an elusive S-Class freighter, and figured out adjacency bonuses to really unlock my gear’s full potential. Every update I’ve played has had me singing praise for NMS, and 4.0 sounded like it would be no different. It promised a streamlined UI, higher level caps, and major QoL changes. After playing it I feel lied to. 4.0 did not feel like the step forward it was supposed to be. Instead, it was more like three big steps back.

The new inventory system completely ruined the gear I spent so long finding, leveling, and perfecting. Over 2/3 of my tech upgrades were removed from my gear, upgrades I spent hours hunting for down in the depths of derelict freighters and across the galaxies space stations were rendered completely useless. I’ve seen people saying that we didn’t need our maxed out gear, and that this change wasn’t a big deal, and maybe they’re partly right. We didn’t need maxed gear, but we wanted it, so we put in the extra time and effort to level up our gear and perfect it and make it ours. Now it’s all gone, and the time and effort we spent is wasted.

To add insult to injury, the new UI makes it harder to try and salvage what I can from my equipment. It feels like a total downgrade from the legacy UI. The inventory tabs were cleaner, felt much better to use, and moving stuff around in them was efficient and easy. The new one-page inventory feels claustrophobic, and the page scrolls too fast on console to move anything around effectively. It’s been a pain in the ass to try and fix my stuff with this new “streamlined” UI, and I’m wishing I could switch it back.

This update broke my heart. I’ve loved playing this game, exploring its vast galaxies on my quest through the cosmos and leaving my small mark on the wonderful worlds I’ve visited, but I feel like I cant play the game in its current state. I sincerely hope Hello Games will do what they can to try and fix this, and in the future think about both new and old players when making updates.

As a final word, if you aren’t happy with 4.0, please don’t use it as an excuse to be rude to or harass the NMS devs. If you are messaging them, remember that they are real people with real feelings. With that being said, I’m done here.

Phoenix out.