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What’s the problem?

Professor Cynical, a well-known NMS Youtuber, has recently released guides on how to grief in NMS. He’s doing this for ad revenue, and ignoring the chorus of civilized space voices – from the Galactic Hub, to UN42, to Ultimate Feud Company, to Interstellar Index – telling him that this video is a terrible idea.

This video is causing smaller civilizations to go completely private, hiding their locations from the public for fear of being griefed. Events which people worked for months on are being postponed, for fears that the event bases will be ruined due to this video. That sucks, and is against the spirit of the NMS community.

The Galactic Hub, however, will not be taking any such measures: I’ve gotten many malicious bases removed and a handful base griefers permanently banned from NMS. If anyone plays stupid games in our space, I’ll insure they win the appropriate stupid prizes.

If you are subscribed to his channel, the Galactic Hub would strongly encourage you to unsubscribe, so the community’s displeasure with his actions can be made clear.

Frequently Asked Questions / Clarification

• Isn’t he just telling people how to protect against griefers?

You can make a video saying “If there’s a griefing base on your base, click this button to report it” without also providing a step-by-step guide on how to actually grief someone.

In the past, Professor Cynical has also been responsible for instructing people on how to get your Minotaur into the Anomaly to kill people on Permadeath. There’s an established history to suggest he does not care about NMS or the community – he only cares about profiting off of the community.

• But what about his video specifically covering how to protect your base?

His second video claims to provide a method for “defending” your base. If he had actually spoken to any members of the community, instead of ignoring them while trying to profit off of them, anyone in civilized space could’ve told him this method doesn’t work.

He suggests putting bases around the outer boundaries of your base. Besides the fact that this is incredibly tedious, it betrays his poor understanding of multiplayer mechanics. Every player is only allowed to have 1 base per planet, unless you’re in a group / squad with people. Most griefers will not join your group before attempting to grief your base. Thus, his purported “defense” is entirely useless. He provided a step-by-step guide on how to grief, and a non-functional method to defend against that griefing.

• Isn’t this a good way to bring the problem to Hello Games’ attention?

No. Despite Professor Cynical presenting this as new information, this is a feature – not a bug – which has been used in cooperative projects in No Man’s Sky for at least 4 years.

However, people have occasionally used it for griefing on-and-off over those 4 years. Both myself and Hello Games were once featured in a Kotaku article covering controversy surrounding a repeat-offending base griefer. (Hello Games banned the griefer permanently.) Hello Games is clearly already aware of this feature, and the ways in which it’s sometimes misused – if they were willing or able to fix it, they presumably already would have done so.

In the last few years, HG has also been much better about responding to in-game base reports. There have even been cases where HG has removed a base in fewer than 24 hours.

We don’t want it ‘fixed’, because it’s used for good much more often than it’s used for bad. However, uploading it in the context of a step-by-step guide on how to “steal bases” increases the chances that it’s used for malicious purposes.

This is not “raising awareness” for anything. Everyone is already aware – except, potentially, the trolls which his videos are designed to cater to.

• Did anyone try asking him nicely first?

Yes. Representatives from many civilizations, including the famously-kind-and-tolerant Lillihop from NMSCafe / UN42, tried reaching out to him first. People tried, first nicely then firmly, to explain to him how his actions would cause harm.

He ignored everyone, blocking major community leaders from his channel despite them being generally civil in their opposition, and refusing to engage in any discussion about the topic.

According to him, his videos on Youtube are “real life efforts” and “many late nights of editing”. On the other hand, the bases he put at risk for a few cents in ad revenue – which people spend hours and hours on to create, which many people agree are (at least sometimes) a form of art, which people create for free just for the joy and for sharing – are just “pixels on a screen”. According to Professor Cynical, we’re all just “obsessed” for taking issue with his guide on ruining bases.

He then went on to complain about how people are trying to “cancel him” and “destroy his hard work”… in response to a video where he provided step-by-step instructions on how to destroy peoples’ hard work (bases).

If you ask me, that’s not called “cancel culture”, that’s called “the consequences of your actions.”

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?