Not a suggestion or anything, more of an idea since this is one of those games where you make your own fun (I have also seen people do this on Youtube etc.), so I’ve been playing around with two saves and figured I’d share and throw in my two cents. So whoever might fancy trying this out, have fun.

Currently I have two, both are Permadeath. For me both are really fun, they can get intense at times and it’s been a wild ride for me so far.

Outlaw
Now,… both JasonPlays and SurvivalBob on Youtube did this (plus some others, think they called it a Fugitive run), but I kinda did my own rules, since the concept they played didn’t really feel outlaw-ish to me (felt more like you’re a wanted secret agent). So I made some changes:

– permadeath game mode, all difficulty maxed out, pvp and network is on
– radiant pillar is a no go, ship crashed and is beyond repair, also you are covering your tracks, for now everyone thinks you’re dead
– only outlaw stations are allowed
– preferred planets for landing are barren/abandoned ones, dissonant ones and ones with aggressive sentinels (this is to kind of simulate you’re a wanted man, space police will shoot you on sight, there is a warrant out for your expiration), however if the mission takes you to some other planet, it’s fine (for example the outlaw missions from the outlaw space stations)
– you can’t build a permanent base in a non-outlaw system, if you make one, you need to destroy it before leaving the system, remember you’re burning evidence you were ever there in the first place, unless this is a starting planet (this is where your radiant pillar was last known to be, so it is kind of expected some other trace of you will be found)
– trade posts are allowed, but only once per system (once you make a transaction the red eye is on you)
– there is no direct goal, like reach the center of the galaxy but if you need a closure, this is just fine and dandy
– no freighters

Exploration Expedition
This one really has a sense of taking a road trip in a mini-van for me. It is simple, I probably won’t make it since the goal is pretty big, but it’s about the trip not the destination. Also, this one doesn’t have a specific start, in fact you might need some things in order for this one to work.

– permadeath game mode, all difficulty maxed out, pvp and network is on
– you need all portal glyphs for this one
– only one ship is allowed, this is your mini-van for me it was a small shuttle, hence the metaphor
– you can salvage ships and sell them, but that is it, scrap them for parts or earn some cash, but the idea is you only own one single ship (this actually turned much more fun that I expected it to be, you have to plan and prepare for jumps between galaxies, decide what tech you’re going to dismantle and put into cargo, what resources you might need at the other end and so on)

– the rules for reaching a center: you start with all single glyph, this gets you to some 5000ly from the center, you travel their with warp, (remember they glyphs of the last planet before jump though) each time you reach a new galaxy, after you get your ship up and running again you must use the portal coordinates of the last planet from the previous galaxy, and the rest is manual warp until you reach the center again. Sometimes this gets you to the center, sometimes a bit further away.

The goal is to go through 255 galaxies and get back to Euclid, meet strange shit along the way, maybe document it. Think of it like your own Franklin expedition or something, that was the idea behind it.

After doing the most recent expedition i returned to my most favourite past time: looking through every little smitch of lore to find out more about the upcomming storybeats.

I went around looking for some words from the autophages and doing their bigging when i came across one of those severed heads you can fix up. zjey said something about…forgotten moons of Korvax Prime? i was confusedm, not remmebering moons ever being mentionend.
I kept going, read more texts, learned words, translated more. I learned the word “moon” eventually, bringing me back to the text i read before and eventually i found it: one head spoke of the “scrapyard moons” and it hit me like a truck. The autophages rebuild themselves from the scraps and trash of the Korvax. Maybe they lived on it, being a somewhat seperate faction…shunned by her kin.
It explained why they all looked like…well build from trash. It almost made me tear up, especially thinking of how sad Nada seemed when thinking of them or the voidmother.

They were left by their maker, shunned by their kin and probably can’t even leave the planets they are on now (as it seems they have zero space pressence)

I hope I’m not interpreting all of this wrong but for now this is my understanding of it.
Its simply a tragedy.