During the covid lockdown I’d play a ton of NMS with my father. Living overseas it was a great way to connect. We built these crazy settlements and massive towers. I had about 150 hours in the game. He had well over 3000 hours, was a billionaire infinite times over, every ship, carriers with farms of every crop in the game as far as the eye could see. He had about 400 bases, all decked out in the pimpest shit in the game, and probably the biggest water base I’ve ever seen in NMS as well. Guy was 78 and gamed hard.

He passed away few months ago and it hit me pretty hard. I completely forgot about NMS as we hadn’t played for a while together. He told me in a casual conversation previously that he had deleted his NMS account completely becasue he wanted a new challenge. I was a little disappointed he had done it because it meant the bases we built together would suddenly be half built, but I understood.

A week ago I logged in just to check if it was all gone and it was. Just open fields and trees. Still looked beautiful so I accepted it.

Off the cuff I decided to look at the first base I had built. My dad had also built a base nearby but I had forgotten about it.

I landed in an acid storm. I had forgotten the buttons and my suit wasn’t ready for it and was dieing quick. Just as I was about to die I spotted a hologram of a buggy. But I didnt own a buggy at this base.

I turned the corner and there was his first base. I ran inside just before I died. For whatever reason his first base was still there and it saved my ass just in time. Still full of all his statues and gardens and exotic ships.

I sat on the couch upstairs. As I stared out the window, the acid rain stopped and the sun came out.

Definitely one of my favorite moments in gaming.

Hi, this has been a nuisance for me for such a long time. I kept hoping a future update would implement a system that would make the nuisance go away, but here we are, years later, and it’s still a terrible oversight. I have no idea if Hello Games reads this forum still, but if they do, please consider this!

Not having a system in place to select your active star ship while on board of a space station is a plainly bad design flaw. The game has many ways to obtain crashed ships now, through the Minotaur’s scanner, the Nautilon’s scanner or simply through the old communication towers. You can easily collect up to ten of them in, say, half an hour of playing. It’s really not that hard! I sometimes go on a hunt for downed ships, see if I can find anything cool, but usually end up with a bunch of ships that I’d like to see scrapped.

So, say you want to destroy said ships at the Starship Outfitting station inside a space station, you have to: drop your freighter in front of the station, board your freighter, hop in the ship you want to have destroyed, make sure its engines are fixed, get off your freighter, fly it over to the space station, destroy it, return to your other ship and repeat this for any other ship you’d like to turn in. And that’s if you’re lucky, because sometimes you can’t even board the ship on your freighter, because it’s not on display in your hangar. If that is the case you need to go to a planet, summon it, fix the engines and then fly back to the station.

I would really like to see an option on the Starship Outfitter station where I can select my active ship. This would be absolutely ideal for scrapping ships. However, if adding that option to that particular station is not an option for some reason, I firmly believe we need to be able to select our active ship somewhere else. Perhaps on the Station Core station in the back of the space station, the one where you can do an override or repair your standing. Or maybe Hello Games can implement another station somewhere.

Please do this, Hello Games! I implore you! Thank you for reading!

So this game is primarily about exploration and discovery so flying through space and landing on different planets is the core gameplay loop. I had a few suggestions to make that gameplay a little more spicy without overhauling anything.

1. Animations: Little details like your guy actually climbing into the ship instead of teleporting into it, or fiddling with the ships instrument cluster when you thrust forward or switch weapons, or recharge shields or activate pulse drive etc. Think of the way your hands move in elite.

2. Immersive menus: The way elite dangerous does them, you look at a panel and interact, that pulls up the specific menu you were looking for. Wanna open the galaxy map? Look at one of your ships many panels and it opens up a holographic galaxy map like the Idroid in MGSV, so it’s still useable, but a tad more immersive. Same thing can be done with hailing messages, or byte beats even switching to third person. I believe the term Is diagetic menus?

3. Physical ships. So, instead of installing ship mods, or repairing your ship in a menu, you enter a sort of build mode go to the specific part of your ship that needs to be modified or repaired and make your additions. No more dragging things into an inventory slot. Actually get out and attach modules where you want them. They can even have their own hitboxes so they can get damaged and you’d have to fix them through that build mode and not an inventory menu.

I think that’s all I could come up with. What do you guys think? Any other immersive tweaks?