Despite being a Day One player, with several hundred hours on the game (and all expeditions) I never attempted a Permadeath run.

My first day one “clear” was on hard difficulty and, depite the game being very basic at the time, it was challenging and never unfair. I almost always played normal during the years.

I have to confess that the harder difficulty settings of Permadeath is a lot more fun. I don’t mind about the fear of losing the save (I died 7 jumps from the core because I fell down a cliff) both all the balance setting that Permadeath implies. It was about the fact that despite a normal game, the event density (and their variety) is higher even if the difficulty is not so much challenging.

Being chased if you have valuables in the ship is fun, encountering lots of bounties is fun (you can never be sure they will evade or come after you), there’s more variety in fauna attitude towards the player and so on. Having the system patrol ships or the freighter fleets doing something useful is fun. Almost every jump lets you have an event. I completely forgot, for example, that pirates may attempt ground raids. It was so rare in normal difficulty that I was suprised to have 3 raids in a very short game (about 15 jumps, including a black hole hop that brought me at about 4K LY from the core).

The only mildly frustrating element is the material scarcity and the inventory limits (but is mangeable if you know the game very well).

Maybe the only part that is unfair is the starting tutorial. It has the same dilated timing of the normal run but in PD you don’t have time to lose: usually the starting planet is just a deathtrap you struggle to survive due to resource scarcity or very harsh environment. When you regain player agency and can plan your next move carefully and choose the risks when going afterresources in the next planet, everything becomes fun again.

I’m the only one that was surprised by how the permadeath difficulty settings makes the game more enjoyable?

This post is not about cool starship/planet/freighter/etc. that I found. I just want to share something really terrifying that happened to me today. I’m not looking for advice, just want to share.

I was playing NMS for a long time (since 2017 or so). There is something charming in endless space with uncountable amount of planets to explore. Someday I discovered for myself permadeath mode. And then it all began: I know that 500+ hours of pure gameplay isn’t that much, but for a working person that don’t have much spare time it feels like (and it truly is) years to be able to achieve this. Fully upgraded S-class Resurgent freighter, full dock of different S-class spaceships (basically every type available I love to collect some useless junk to please my soul), S-class multitools, expedition rewards, only one achievement left to 100% the game and now it’s all gone.

How did that happen? It was absolutely my fault. I’m not gonna blame the game despite the fact it has plenty of bugs. I went afk for 5 minutes and when I returned all I saw was starting screen so I don’t know what killed me.

I don’t have backup or cloud safe. I play on PS4. And tbh it doesn’t matter. I knew that this will happen sooner or later and you cannot be prepared for this.

I absolutely wish to return to this magnificent and fascinating game. I believe that there is still endless possibilities and opportunities. But all lost progress seems just too heavy duty for me to handle now.

Be safe and make backups, but more importantly: have fun in your journeys, Travellers.